The formidable volume of London street traffic was strikingly illustrated
in Sir John Wolfe Barry's inaugural address delivered before the Society of Arts on Wednesday evening. He estimated that sixty millions had been spent on the construction and extension of railways within the Metro-. politan area since 1858, and put the daily influx and effiux by railway alone between the suburbs and Central London at nine hundred and fifty thousand persons. To gain some notion of the amount of street traffic in urban London he had had obser- vations made, and found that the number of vehicles and passengers passing a given spot in four thoroughfares at a busy hour were as follows :—Cheapside : vehicles, 992; pedestrians, 6,358. The Strand : vehicles, 1,228; pedestrians, 5,660. Piccadilly : vehicles, 1,497; pedestrians, 3,910. Totten- ham Court Road : vehicles, 661; pedestrians, 5,586. The police worked marvels in controlling the traffic, but it was becoming daily more and more unmanageable. To remedy the difficulty he contended that wide arterial improvements in the streets themselves were likely to be far more effective than additional railways, overground or underground. The latter only tended to add to the congestion of the streets. A scheme of new main thoroughfares of adequate width for present and future traffic should be laid down, and this should be realised as time and finance would permit. The lecture was an excellent analysis of the causes of the present congestion, but we should have liked to hear an estimate of the cost of the proposed alterations.
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