Guidelines for city traffic
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• "Congestion should be managed, not metered" said Professor W. Fisher Cassie in the 25th Henry Spurrier Memorial Lecture to the Institute of Transport in London on Monday.
Today, said the-professor, when experience proved that public bus services suffered in contpetition with private cars occupied by olle person, viable public transport service's were needed.
In 1964 private transport formed 76.5 per cent of the total and public transport only 23.5 per cent. "In 1975, on carefully assessed figures, the figures are likely to be 88.9 per cent and 11.1 per cent." Only Sweden, Germany, Denmark and France were likely to allow their public transport to fall below this figure, said Prof. Cassie.
These authoritative figures, he said, were not appreciated by the authors of surveys and reports on new towns. Most reports assumed that public transport by bus on the streets would be ubiquitous despite evidence to the contrary. The experience of the United States showed that the Phased construction of urban primary distributor roads was not a complete solution.
Special bus lanes were in use in Hanover, Leeds, Brussels and Newcastle upon Tyne and buses ran on separate tracks in Bremen and The Hague, but other systems of mobility were called for. Rapid transport in central areas was not necessary. said Prof. Cassie. Communal systems of transport which would attract motorists must have certain fundamental properties without which they need not be considered:—
(a) They should be continuously available; waiting must be eliminated.
(b) They should transport passengers and their portable goods smoothly, without stopping, and at speeds appropriate to the purpose; high speeds are not necessary.
(c) The final distributor need not have a speed greater than 8-10 mph in the business and shopping areas.
(d) The systems should be protected from the weather.
(e) They should be usable by the old and the young as are buses and Underground trains.
(f) They should normally be guided and not under the control of the traveller, although there may be the possibility of exemption from this condition in some circumstances.
The speaker said there were nearly 20 acceptable systems fulfilling some or all of these requirements. They could be classified into six or seven broad groups; some had had full-scale trials or were already on order as part of a city's system. Running costs of some of these systems were estimated at about a tenth of the cost per passenger-mile of the conventional public transport of today, although capital cost was still high.