Road sense

CONSUMING INTEREST LESLIE ADRIAN

On any wet Thursday in the tourist season London can be depended upon to grind to a bait. At such times we get the kind of instant shock realisation of the traffic prospects in big cities that the 'grea•t smog' of 1952 delivered on behalf of clean air addicts. Last week London, on one of the main 'desire lines,' roughly east-west taking in Oxford Street, jammed up on a Friday as well, just about twenty-four hours after the Minister of Trans- port's press conference on yet another report,

Cars for Cities. '

This glossy guinea's worth, with its companion on the Better Use of Roads in Towns, brings the number of official publications on road usage, parking and the car nuisance generally to seven in .four years. There have been more unofficial 'reports' and acres of newspaper articles, but all we have so far accomplished is a forest of parking meters, an army of wardens, and city centres and suburbs that have become vast open-air car parks.

I would like to think that Gabriel Roth's forthcoming Penguin Special Paying for Roads (5s) is the last word on the subject, but I don't see how it can be. Like the three-year-old Smeed report, that came hard on the heels of the beautiful Buchanan picture book, Roth contends that the only way to get a grip on both the traffic congestion problem and the parking menace that hardens metropolitan arteries is money. Make the road-user pay heavily for moving or standing still on the 'public' highway and he will restrict his use to really essential occasions if he is hard up, and go on doing as he pleases if he is rich.

That such an attack on road congestiou would reduce it cannot be doubted. Equally it will be opposed with all their might by the motoring organisations, who apparently are unwilling to see that the way to stop people using cars is to make it difficult or expensive or both. The motor manufacturers are not going to be bursting with enthusiasm either, and traces of their quite reasonable fears are to be detected in Cars for Cities, which says that the restric- tion of the use 'of conventional cars in con- gested parts of cities' as part of a system to give access to single-seater cars 'would be quite unacceptable.' This report centres upon a special design of Citycar that would use less road space and carry one to four people and might one day be powered electrically, thus reducing both noise and fumes. Allied to this is a sug- gestion about overhead carriageways, the segre- gation of standard Citycars from conventional cars and so on, leading to the firm but inevitable conclusion that 'town driving may become less personal, more disciplined and more subject to social responsibility.' Why not 'must'?

The hard truth seems to be that there is too much inertia in the system for anybody, govern- ment, local authority or traffic control com- mittee, to be able to slow it down or make it change direction. By now we have enough information to know that on-street parking must stop, even for 'frontagers' (residents—both reports are equipped with glossaries), as more people with cars inhabit fewer 'fronts.' But we also know that garage space cannot be provided, so the remedy is to get rid of the cars. Being a democracy we cannot simply say that one person may own a car because he needs it and another may not. Nor can we stop prosperous families owning two, three or seven cars (a neighbouring family in my part of inner London has five and one garage).

The second report takes up the Smeed line and suggests road pricing, and Gabriel Roth gives us all the possibilities of making it work.

Recent comments by economic and political writers have referred to 'on-vehicle' metering by means of a 'black box.' Roth describes this

in detail. An electronic device is fixed to the numberplate of a car that can register impulses

from buried cables every time the car goes over one. In highly congested streets the cables are closer together than in comparatively free- flowing streets. Every pulse registered reduces the life of the meter, which finally expires, signalling its death by changing colour. The motorist then has to buy a new one for, per- haps, f10. So the more he uses his car, the more he pays. The more he invades cities, the more he pays.

The beauty (or nastiness) of this system is that it puts the main cost burden on the road-user, an idea that goes against the grain with every- body but the non-motorist, and he is the majority interest in this country. Metering could also be graded to take account of the size of a

car (just as air ferries charge by length), which might encourage the real villains, the car com-

muters, to share rides. At present nearly 70 per cent of London's traffic in private cars consists of lone drivers, lost in thought and their own self-interest. As Cars for Cities comments, the car is cheaper for personal transport than public vehicles, except for the community as a whole. But do car owners really count the present cost?

I estimate that keeping a car in inner London, using it only at weekends, will cost, for a

standard saloon, £250-f300 a year excluding fuel. But with public transport automatically reduced to ludicrous proportions at the week- end, and generally rather bad anyway, what alternatives are there?