The Arts
City of Man
By TERENCE BENDIXSON As a result of the news- papers emphasising the flashiest drawings in the Buchanan Report, those showing life in a layer- cake metropolis, there is a tendency for Traffic in Towns to be thought of as a head-in-the-clouds document. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Report's real analogies are with the horrific disclosures of the First Fac- tory Inspectors' Report of 1839 and with Edwin Chadwick's Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population in 1842. Just as these nineteenth-century reports were the first signs of society attempting to control the effects of industrial change so Buchanan is one of the first realistic examinations of the sort of towns and cities the second machine age is likely to produce. Like them it exposes a social dis- grace and by outlining a method of research shows that the problems can be managed.
The Report is in no doubt that the motor-car is a highly desirable invention. What it seeks is to reconcile its noise, smell and dangers with civilised city life. To do this, political, social and economic factors are considered and a formula worked out that has the enviable quality of being adaptable to towns of varying size and differing amounts of historically significant architecture. The only constant is environmental quality, which although yet to be quantified as so much quietness, safety and freedom from stench will become, Professor Buchanan believes, as readily accepted a part of future city life as pure piped water supply is now.
The Report is significant also for bridging the age-old administrative gulf between buildings that generate traffic and roads that carry it, a division that is symbolised in the Government by the separate existence of the Ministry of Trans- port and the Ministry of Housing. Professor Buchanan obviously hopes that the publication of a report on land use by the Ministry of Transport is a valuable precedent.
What remains now is to start putting into action the formula outlined in the Report. Mr. Marples has said in Parliament that he accepts the crucial idea of the primary road network. This has the double function of distributing traffic and of freeing the neighbourhoods it skirts from all vehicles except those destined to them. In the case of London, for which the LCC has done the necessary area transportation study, it will be possible to start planning a primary net- work as soon as the data can be analysed and traffic projections made. The key question to be decided is how much capacity these roads should carry. The Buchanan Report states definitively
that it would be impossible in a huge and densely built city such as London to provide space for
all the vehicles desiring to use the roads at peak periods. To do so would leave no room for the city. Parking meters and other restraints will inevitably have to be used to hold traffic down below congestion level and public transport will take up the balance. Yet the roadworks necessary .o guarantee access even to the essential traffic in 2010—that means all goods deliveries, all buses, coaches and mobile services—and at the same time give acceptable environmental stan- dards, would still involve large-scale demolition, as the Report's minimum scheme for the Totten- ham Court Road shows.
Professor Buchanan clearly believes that such minimum schemes ought to be avoided as much as possible. 'I think we have got to have a net- work,' he has said. 'The difficulty will be getting a high-powered one.' It is not just a matter of expense in buying the land but in accommodat- ing the people displaced.
Nevertheless, the main barrier in the way of making British cities fit to live in and reasonably convenient to drive in seems to be a state of mind rather than a state of purse. Costed out over fifty years the ninety million pounds net- work for Leeds or the four and a half million pounds one for Newbury would work out at be- tween three and four pounds per head of local population per year. But the setting up of Regional Development Agencies to get things built as suggested by Sir Geoffrey Crowther's Steering Committee, and the prospect of huge extensions in public acquisition of land were very gloomily received by Sir Keith Joseph and Mr. M arples.
The impossibility of planning a city without a clearly defined primary grid is indicated by the impasse over Piccadilly Circus. Sir William Hol- fGrd has been in the position of a man with a lamp to connect up but no idea what size plug to put on the flex because no one can tell him what size the socket is going to be. 'The future of Piccadilly Circus,' says Professor Buchanan, 'is not something that can be settled by itself: -it can only be settled by considering what one wants to do with the streets leading into it. If we cared a damn about Regent Street we would be seeing how we could cut down the traffic by 50 per cent instead of increasing it by that amount. Since it is one of the most important shopping streets in London, we might even de- cide to make it into a pedestrian street. And as an underpass has been built at Hyde Park Corner that funnels the West Country into Piccadilly we might just as well accept that route as a primary distributor.'
The same uncertainty hangs over other large developments everywhere. The City of London's twenty-one million pounds road scheme announced on November 20 is very likely to have too much or too little capacity to fit a grid related to the projected needs of the con- urbation.
Even though the data on which the projections will be made is available, it will be several years before final plans can be published. To Profes- sor Buchanan this is only one reason why the next ten years will be critical. However, the principle of delaying development now seems to be. accepted even though there is no statutory permission to do so. 'We've held up Jack Cotton for four or five years now over Piccadilly Circus and I'd rather hedge it off for another five years if it means getting it right in the end.'
Meanwhile, the delineating of environmental areas and of embryonic primary grids should be started in towns and cities all over the country. This would involve blocking off side streets to stop short-cutting. Many shopping streets might be made pedestrian streets from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. as is common practice on the Continent. As such environmental management is in direct opposition to the current practice of traffic management, it would be bound to cause con- gestion on the embryo network. Professor Buchanan believes this must be . done if en- vironmental control is to be established. For the time being traffic would have to be restricted by various means pending the construction of new urban roads. When these are opened, the restric- tions could be lifted to whatever ceiling good environment permitted.
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