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TRAFFIC CONGESTION A
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THREAT to PUBLIC HEALTH
By Alan Smith,
F.R.S.A. ALTHOUGH partisan interests have not been mute about the effect of thickening traffic congestion upon the bus and the delivery van, what is probably a more serious aspect of the problem has received scant attention. The stage has been reached in the centre of large cities when a breakdown in refuse-collection services, and thus a threat to the maintenance of public health, is almost imminent, and can be avoided only by drastic measures taken quickly.
Matters are worst in certain parts of London where a number of trends combine to produce ever-increasing difficulties for cleansing superintendents. They ask whether it is inevitable that the pattern be allowed to be repeated elsewhere, or whether painful lessons are to be ignored.
What are these trends? Traffic congestion means that the operation of municipal vehicles during the working day in the major thoroughfares is unthinkable. And neither is it easy in many side streets effectively narrowed by parked cars.
The lot of the driver of a refuse collector is to be abused with varying degrees of acerbity throughout his every stint by impatient motorists held up when he makes his calls— and who can blame him if he answers back?
Early Start
One solution is to make an early start before the morning rush hour, but steadily over the past few years the peak, so far as the entry of car owners into the city is concerned, has crept away from 9 a.m. to nearer 8 a.m. The commuter sets out ever earlier to find his parking space, choke the streets, and impede such servants as the refuse collector.
Starting at, say, 6 a.m. it was just possible about a year ago for municipal vehicles to beat the morning rush and collect from those premises impossible of access duiing the busy part of the day. Because of the shift of the time of the appearance of the allday parker, this is impossible today, or at least it would be in some instances without a certain blindness of eye on the part of the police. Many " early " rounds are protracted into the peak of the rush hour itself or even past it.
B22 Surely, then, they should start even earlier? Not a simple answer. A shift is of stipulated length. If begun an hour earlier before the rush, too little time would be left after it until the end of the shift for the back streets and squares to be served. Double shifts and night shifts, as are, indeed, practised, suggest themselves, together with their attendant drawbacks, not least of which is cost.
Other peculiar difficulties are represented by the enormous office blocks being erected on sites where previously only threeor four-storey buildings stood, and the abandonment of solid-fuel heating in favour of oil firing and electricity.
Added to these is the general tendency towards the diminishing density of refuse to which modern methods of packaging contribute. Years ago one bought a bar of soap—simply that. Today one peels off two or three layers of fabric before getting to the fabulous pink pupa within.
Even when there was nothing but Victorian buildings, the yield of refuse from premises in the major commercial streets made daily collections imperative. With land values at around 1200,000 an acre, nobody has ever allowed moreroom for dustbins than necessary, so that collections at
less than a daily frequency have been the rule for many years.
Now, however, 12-storey office blocks each capable of accommodating up to 7,000 people are sprouting up. The value of construction work in hand in the centre of London runs into several hundreds of millions of pounds.
Although each building has sufficiently large storage for its own refuse, assuming 'daily clearance, if a certain area is covered with buildings three or four times as high as before, the yield of refuse will be that much as great and correspondingly more vehicles will be needed to remove it.
An even more aggravating condition is the almost complete disappearance of the solid-fuel fire. The domestic type of grate found in many older offices, and even the solid-fuel boiler, was a great destroyer of refuse to an extent that is only now becoming appreciated.
The fact that has become apparent
is that in bygone days the problem of refuse disposal was dealt with largely by the occupiers of premises themselves by incineration. Today, there is often no longer the open fire on which to toss the odd scraps of paper and cardboard, and cleansing staff even find they have to collect bulky pieces of old furniture which once would have been burned.
The British Museum is one of the last remaining buildings burning solid fuel: somebody has wrily suggested that they should keep their cinders as
valuable objects of extreme rarity.
This poses the question whether large new buildings should be required to have incinerators to reduce the volume of their refuse, and thereby compensate for the multiplication of yield that they create. As incineration, however, conflicts with smokeless-zone legislation, a preferable alternative might be the installation of baling presses.
A great opportunity to relieve collection difficulties is presented here. The existing methods of dealing with refuse are not appropriate to modern, sophisticated essays in architecture, suitable though they may have been for the buildings now being replaced.
If such legislation were passed, no new principle would be invoked. Something to take the place of the solid-fuel fire as a• destroyer of refuse is required, a need made more urgent by the hugeness of modern buildings.
But even if the desirable measure could be enacted within a few years, the effects would not be complete for a lifetime. The adaptation of those buildings which have already been erected, with the necessary plants and shafts, is, in most cases, probably out of the question, because of the nature of their design. The problem they present today will exist until the time
comes, at least 60 years hence, for their demolition.
What other steps can be taken? The design of refuse-collection vehicles themselves presents an obvious approach, the endeavour being to get a quart into a pint pot. If the customer cannot or will not reduce the density of his refuse, then the refuse collector has to do it for him. Hence the variety of compaction types of vehicle that has been produced.
They have their disadvantages. Some are noisy; others drink fuel; and, perhaps, they all take a little longer to make their rounds, when time is precious, than a simple container vehicle does. Initial cost, maintenance expenses and reliability may be left aside, because these types succeed in what they are supposed to do—to make One vehicle do the job of two or three.
Under present conditions, is this sufficient? Or will the volume of refuse amount to such mountainous propor tions, and the difficulties of even travelling to the collection points grow to such an extent, that any amelioration which can be offered by vehicle designers is outstripped?
It is too easy to suggest that the problem could be overcome simply by the provision of more vehicles. One drawback alone is that of garaging. Again because of land costs, the accommodation of vehicles right in the centre of London is expensive, even if the space for them can be found.
Complete Reorganization Increasing support is being found for proposals for the complete reorganization of cleansing services under one authority. Many of the practical handicaps which hamper operational efficiency could be removed if services covering a large area were under single control, instead of being divided into zones with boundaries of political significance only.
It does not seem rational, for example, that one end of a street should be served by one corporation and just a few premises at the other end by the neighbouring municipality. A great deal of resistance will, however, have to be overcome before such a radical change can be made.
These proposals stand in their own right as leading to a logical development. Current difficulties such as I have described lend it urgency.