Tin Can Alley
Page 56
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Political Commentary
By JANU;
CARDBOARD cartons and other packing materials deposited by lorry drivers on road verges and in • ditches, particularly near lay-bys, are included among a list of the reasons regarded by 'certain highway authorities as responsible for the untidy appearance of many main roads. In spite of this, it may be said that commercial vehicle .drivers are less prone than the average road user to leave behind them a disfiguring trail of litter.
Perhaps they regard the road as part of their natural environment rather than merely as a medium over which to pass as quickly as possible from one place to another. For several generations we have been trained to forego the pleasure of tossing our rubbish out the windows of our houses. The lorry is to its driver something of a home from home, and he carries his domestic habits along with him. The motorist takes to the road as a form of escape, and his house-training goes out of the car window with a lot of other things besides.
Paper, match-boxes, orange peel, banana skins and goodness knows what else are jettisoned as cheerfully from' a car as from a ship. There is a childish and furtive pleasure in throwing such things from a moving vessel or vehicle By disposing of a minor encumbrance, We symbolize our wish that our more serious difficulties would vanish equally quickly and easily. The cigarette carton, or yesterday's evening paper, slip through our fingers and through the open window. In less than a second they are gone, and we can be certain we 'shall never see them again. '
The casual passer-by may feel less agreeably as he watches the discarded news-sheet shudder and lurch clumsily in the current, of air drawn after the car, then lift and flap once or twice grotesquely and dejectedly, before sprawling across the road, coming to life and taking up the vain chase each time another vehicle goes by. The litter lout leaves an ugly trail and causes unnecessary work on the high road to the same extent as in the fields or in the city streets.
The Litter Lout
The battle against him has been waged there with varying fortune for many years, and although there seems to be as much rubbish about as ever, one cannot help noticing that greater use is being made of the " receptacles provided for the purpose." It may be that public tidiness is increasing in the same ratio as the use of paper bags and cardboard cartons. There is a distinct hope that in the end, even if not in our lifetime, public opinion will eliminate the peripatetic litter lout.
A more serious menace for the future may be the indiscriminate discarding of rubbish from vehicles, particularly as their number grows. The problem is already causing difficulty in the U.S.A., where the vehicle population is much greater. The commissioner of highways for Kentucky has said that nearly a third of the time spent on highway maintenance goes into cleaning up debris. On a main four-lane road, seven lorry-loads of rubbish were picked up in a distance of two miles. Community efforts by organizations known as homemaker clubs have been found necessary to clear the roads in parts of the State, with the assistance of lorries, bulldozers and other equipment.
DI 6 On the whole, the American lorry driver is con mended for keeping the roads tidy. One magazine ha promoted a campaign which calls upon all the country long-distance hauliers to paint the words "Don't be Litterbug" on the rear of every lorry and trailer. Th suggestion is that the litter-happy motorist, instead c (as apparently is usual) cursing the lorry-driver in fror who is holding him up, will see the notice and be apprc priately conscience-stricken. In addition to a resolve t offend no more, he will come to the conclusion ft "these truck guys aren't so bad, after all." So that th display of the notice will achieve two objects at th same time.
As far as my experience goes, there are few Britis motorists likely to react quite in this way. The fie against litter on the roads remains worth while, even the problem is less urgent in this country than i Kentucky. The untidy motorist may also be the careles motorist, and a road that looks neat must to some eater help the precision of the drivers using it.
Hawthorn and Maple
A road is purely functional, like a water-pipe or conveyor. belt. Few people can be persuaded. to regar it as a thing. of beauty, and the highest compliment can be paid is to describe it as unobtrusive. The builde does his best to make it harmonize with and merge int the surrounding countryside, and for this purpose h will often deliberately camouflage it with hedges. I his paper on the design of motorways,'Mr. T. E. Hutto commends hawthorn as excellent for such a hedge, an suggests that it be interspersed with maple and dogwoo or beech for the sake of variety. Such careful thougt deserves the co-operation of the road user, at least t the extent that he should not betray the existence of th road by strewing it with litter.
The problem of waste disposal has more than aestheti importance in other fields of transport, where it ha already given rise to international complications. Nc long ago, the Ministry of Transport published the repo; of a committee appointed last October to consider th prevention of the pollution of the sea by oil from ship: Seaside holiday-makers have learnt in the past year o so what fishermen and bird-lovers have known for som time: that there is a limit to the ocean's priestlike tas of pure ablution round earth's human shores; and tha sooner or later the sea is going to throw up some of th rubbish that is poured into it.
Pollution of the air and of rivers is another familia cause for complaint. Legislation and internatiom agreement may in the end be needed to cope successfull with the defilement of sky and water. The litter problen on the roads can perhaps be solved by exhortation an example, although this may not be sufficient to cur some of the odd manifestations one comes across of th instinct for dumping rubbish in the most unlikely place Most of us have seen, left derelict off the main roac such items as the skeleton of a pram, the rusty carcas of an old car, or an antiquated mangle. On a smal scale, they provoke the same wonder with which w regard Stonehenge and the Pyramids. It is hard t.
understand how those decayed products of a mechanize' age reached their last resting-place without a deliberat effort on the part of their former owners, who must feel for some reason or another, that they have a mission ii life to provide a public exhibition of old junk.