Let's get London moving: appoint a supremo
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John Darker, back from an examination of routes in the Paris region, asks: 'Are French planners more persuasive, or Frenchmen more docile than their British counterparts?'
HE APPOINTMENT of a Cabinet linister to co-ordinate policies ir London and end the political lertia over transport and lanning was recently proposed j the British Road Federation to le House of Commons transDrt committee.
The BRF, which is the domiant voice of the road transport Derators' associations in road letters, has urged MPs and :her interested parties to visit le Paris region to see the draordinary strides taken in 'ance. For not, only are the .ench also taking great strides
building magnificent urban ads, but they are planning Jblic transport services.
In France it is not a matter of Ai)lic transport versus roads; e mobility problem is seen as embracing both.
As one of a small party of journalists taken to Paris by the BRF to see the scale of transport planning, I returned with the conviction that London's traffic problems will never be settled without a powerful regional directorate.
The GLC's area does not include much of the land occupied by the M25 and the definition of the regional boundary could well take in whole counties whose borders impinge on Greater London. The powers of London Boroughs often compete with the GLC's ideas.
London Transport is an uneasy bedmate of British Rail in the metropolis. The Department of Transport presides over a planning mish mash.
In the provinces the power and wealth of London is envied, even despised, but it is worth recalling Benjamin Disraeli's description of London as "a nation not a city." Though London covers only one per cent of Britain's land area, it houses 13 per cent of the population and contributes 16 per cent of gross domestic product. Probably no country in the world is so dependent on its capital for so much of its wealth.
A continuance of London's slide towards poverty would not help the provinces, Wales or Scotland. In 25 years a million manufacturing jobs have been lost in London, three times the rate of fall in the rest of England and Wales. More than 250,000 people are how jobless in London, a greater concentration than in any other region.
Service industries provide four out of five jobs in London, but their growth has not countered the erosion of manufacturing jobs. A Department of Industry Survey found that only 27 per cent of the total job loss was due to the re-location of factories; 43 per cent was caused by firms contracting or closing at a faster rate than new firms were set up.
Road transport operators may not need convincing that a prime cause of London's economic decline lies in its inadequate road network. The Motorway Box and the inner ring roads were political hot potatoes. The politicians who responded to public protests, cancelling vital roads, now have to face the thousands of workless. Better roads might have saved many jobs!
The outer ring road, M25, has the highest priority in the country, but its completion, hopefully by 1985, will not do much for London's mobility, though it will greatly benefit those approaching London.
Andrew Warren, secretary of the Movement for London, told a BRF conference on the impact of the M25, that less than five per cent of the 230 million tons of goods carried annually, and only a miniscule proportion of the seven million journeys by car recorded daily in London were truly through traffic. All the rest began or ended or were carried out entirely within the metropolis. He was not aware of a single main road which the GLC had identified which would lose even 15 per cent of its existing traffic to the M25.
Fears were expressed that M25 could easily become overloaded with traffic from peripheral developments. There