MO TORING
What do you do with the minutes you save?
By GORDON WILKINS NY day now, newspaper headlines will be announcing " Ice Causes Traffic Chaos " or " Roads Blocked by Snow. Coaches Marooned in Drifts." Trucks laden with goods for export will be stranded, while the AA'and RAC advise motorists to walk. Ever since the motor vehicle was invented, we have been trying to slow it down, and when the climate brings it to a complete standstill, there is a widespread sense of relief.
This feeling is not shared by foreigners, who have been rather more successful than ourselves in absorbing the motor vehicle into the pattern of everyday life. I was reminded of the difference in outlook by a letter which arrived a few days ago from Professor Kamm, one of the foremost authorities on the streamlining of motor cars. He now lives in the United States, but last winter he spent some time trying one of his experimental cars in Germany during the worst of the weather. He says : " The fins enabled me to drive on the autobahn at speeds of 60 to 70 m.p.h. safely where the other cars were restricted to about 20, and had continuously to fight the swerving tendency." He goes on to mention that a young engineer friend of his has developed a method of stopping cars and trucks on ice and snow which will bring them safely to a standstill in a shorter distance than normal brakes will on a dry road. 1 know an automobile engineer in Stuttgart who goes skiing nearly every week-end during the winter. He leaves after lunch on Saturday (the works is open on Saturday morning) and he drives 200 or 250 miles to his favourite ski runs. Come hail, rain, ice or snow, he usually reckons to cover the distance in four to five hours. He spends Sunday skiing and drives back on Sunday night. It is no coincidence that the cars- for which he is responsible are gaining an international reputation for safe handling on slippery surfaces.
Over here, any interest in fast travel over ice and snow is largely confined to the specialists who compete in the Monte Carlo Rally. Even in good weather conditions there is only one improvised track where our manufacturers can test their cars at high speeds, and much development work still has to be carried out overseas.
The Germans were preparing in 1939 to attack the world land speed record, not on a salt lake in America, but on a public road near Dessau; the target was 400 m.p.h. That attitude of mind persists. The Federal Republic of Western Germany alone has 1,320 miles of autobahn in service, and plans exist for doubling that mileage. Work is at present in progress under a ten-year plan which provides for the con- struction of 545 miles of autobahn and the widening or recon- struction of 5,200 miles of federal roads.
Standing at the Allied check point on the autobahn at Helmstedt,. you can watch the endless stream of giant trucks with twin trailers roaring to and from Berlin at 40-45 m.p.h. For years now this fleet of trucks has kept West Berlin alive, taking in food, equipment and raw materials, bringing out manufactured goods. How much more difficult and costly it would have been if they had been forced to operate under British traffic conditions.
When I return to England after being abroad for a time, I always have the impression that the country is suffering from arteriosclerosis. There are, to be sure, signs of economic recovery, and much talk of increased production, but the per- petual anguished discussion about costs, wages and prices reveals an uneasy conviction that something is wrong some- where: It is only very recently that there has been any wide- spread support for the idea that slow communications have something to do with it.
Speed is still an improper subject for polite discussion. The Prime Minister is reported to have travelled from the Guildhall to Westmixter at 70 m.p.h. with all side turnings guarded by police, but next day the newspaper which carried the report published a denial in the middle of its front page. " Pressed for time though he often is, Sir Winston Churchill insists on a sedate and uniform progress wherever he goes." Sir Winston has it) the past been one of the leading practitioners in diverting road taxes to other uses, and so has contributed his quota to the all-party creeping paralysis which now afflicts us, but I still prefer to think of him maintaining a sedate and uniform seventy.
After driving off the cross-channel ferry and motoring up from Dover to London, one is always tempted to put the car away in despair. Driving in the Le Mans 24-hour race is really no more exhausting than driving from London to Glasgow and it does not feel any more dangerous. But the railway is a doubtful alternative. The train from London to Cheltenham, which I use occasionally, runs quite swiftly as far as Swindon, especially if it is drawn by the new gas turbine locomotive, but the railway seem to be afraid of allowing their smooth screaming monster to descend into the dark and ancient valleys on the way to Stroud. They therefore exchange it for an elderly steam locomotive which finally brings us in after a total lapse of three hours for the hundred and twenty-one miles. After nightfall, the whole giddy tempo goes to pieces, and we are lucky to do it in four hours.
Journeys by motor coach are even worse. Hours of jogging slowly along, punctuated by tedious efforts to kill time, sipping tea out of cracked cups in shabby snack bars. A journey of two hundred miles is spun out into a tiring day-long ordeal. Every- one knows that Britain's roads were not made for speed, but after following a Greyhound coach at 50 m.p.h. over the rough dirt roads of the Rocky Mountains one feels that it is time they were. The faces, there is now a vested interest in sloth. Checks by Government observers have shown that the speed limit for heavy goods vehicles is consistently ignored, but the trade unions have so far thwarted all efforts to raise the speed limit from 20 to 30 m.p.h. No government dare press the point, for they would be advocating something which could easily be misrepresented as an attack on public safety.
Life might continue happily at this old-world tempo, were it not for the fact that we have to live by selling goods in competition with people who move very much faster. In France, Italy, Germany, and in North America, coaches and heavy goods vehicles travel at anything up to twice the speed• of ours.
No discussion on travelling speeds goes on for long before someone smiles in a superior way and asks, " What do you do with the minutes you save ? " Unfortunately it is no longer a question of minutes, but of hours and days. An Italian of my acquaintance operates two businesses, one in Turin and one in Milan, and he divides his time between the two, spending alternate days in Milan and Turin. He covers the 90 miles between the centres of the two cities, driving his family saloon, in 1+ hours. If you try to cover the similar distance between Coventry and London, you will do well to make it in 2+ hours, and you will have consumed much energy and petrol which could have been put to more productive use.
Sometimes I try to defeat the traffic congestion by driving in the middle of the night, but that is a habit which brings its own special problems. One night, I was running ,towards London via the Oxford by-pass at about 3.30 a.m. en route for Dover, where I was to catch the morning boat to France. As I turned the corner by the old market hall in High Wycombe, an unbelievable sight greeted me. Eight policemen were solemnly forming a cordon across the road under the patchy glow from the street lamps. Red lights flashed and I stopped. It appeared that instructions to stop me had been telephoned from Oxford. I was clearly under suspicion if not under arrest, so we adjourned to the police station. The car was only a sports two-seater, and it was obvious that I was carrying no ladder, no oxy-acetylene torch, no mink coats and no family silver. Some quick mental arithmetic indicated an average speed which might have raised a few eyebrows, but there was no suggestion of dangerous driving or exceeding speed limits. Why then had I been stopped ? Apparently the Oxford police had observed my passage and decided that " anyone travelling as fast as that in the middle of the night is probably up to no good." Everyone was most polite, and I departed with relief for France. Fortunately our car manufacturers have not allowed them- selves to be unduly restricted by local conditions, as the results of international races and rallies have demonstrated. Some of our touring cars are capable of magnificent performances. Even before the war a Lagonda carried me over 90 miles in an hour through ordinary traffic on an autobahn, and in the spring of this year a Jensen carried four of us with luggage 75 miles in 61 minutes in Italy, while the achievements of the Continental Bentley have already gained international fame. When we get some modern roads, people will begin to appreciate that you don't have to go to bed and pull the sheets over your head as soon as the ice and snow arrive.
The aircraft industry deals with the weather very energetically. Kenneth Horne in his commercial, as distinct from his comical, capacity has just been showing me the " gold-plated " wind- screens which will be used on our new jet fighters to defeat ice formation. The gold film is only a few millionths of an inch thick, and is quite transparent, but when an electric current is passed through it, the outer surface of the Triplex glass is warmed very effectively. That is the kind of imaginative approach which will eventu- ally keep the road traffic moving even during the winter. In opening the London Motor Show, the Duke of Edinburgh called for a Comet of the Roads. At present the environment is dead against it, but I'm sure the industry will be happy to oblige.
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