In and Out of Town

21st September 1956, Page 238

21st September 1956

Page 238

Page 238, 21st September 1956 — In and Out of Town

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MUCH is to be said in favour of the occasional trips organized for the purpose of letting M.P.s and other notabilities inspect at first hand the road systems of other countries. Seeing is believing. Photographs and descriptions may help, but cannot completely overcome the suspicion that the clover-leaf junctions, the mammoth viaducts, and the other wonders that they record are not quite real. We have grown used to our ordinary roads, and we cannot believe or accept a mere picture of something so different.

The same may be said about vehicles. They are so associated in our mind with the roads on which they travel that, as each Commercial Motor Show comes round, we feel, at least on our first visit, that there is something odd about the gleaming buses, lorries and coaches, displayed with such tender care like giant fish out of their element, all dressed up and nowhere to go While paying the customary tribute to the manufacturers of vehicles, accessories, components and so forth, it is a good thing not to forget that the most up-to-date vehicle is so much scrap metal unless it has a road surface on which to run. However high the intrinsic efficiency of a vehicle, its actual operating efficiency depends upon the roads and the traffic.

A timely reminder of this fact has been given by the urban motorways conference organized this week by the British Road Federation. The vehicles at Earls Court deliberately isolated from their element are symbolic of the many other vehicles almost as hopelessly stranded at certain times of the day in the London streets. The need for urban motorways is impressing itself upon the public in more ways than one.

With the principle of the motorway we are already familiar. It is designed for the exclusive use of motor vehicles. Distractions that might affect smooth running and safety are reduced to the minimum: Dual carriageways means that there is no approaching traffic. Fly-over crossings and other devices avoid or reduce the need for junctions. No buildings have access to the motorway; there are no shop frontages; there arc no parked vehicles; there are no pedestrians or pedal cyclists.

Tremendous Problems

In large towns these requirements raise tremendous problems. Existing streets cannot be widened without prohibitive cost and trouble, especially when they are well-established routes and shopping centres. Elsewhere there is not likely to be space for a completely new motorway at ground-level, so that for much of the length viaducts, cuttings and tunnels are needed. These things also are expensive, but not impossibly so.

Motorways in town will have much more of an impact than their counterpart in the country. Their construction will attract more public attention to the importance of road transport. The feeling they must give to the user of being in town and yet out of it will be strange at first, -particularly where a motorway goes sometimes below around-level and at other times high above it.

The futuristic element in urban motorways should not be stressed to the extent that people fail to envisage them as a subject for urgent consideration in the present. Perhaps some of the contributors to the discussions at this week's conference put too much stress on the novelty so far as this country is concerned.

It is true that we have no urban motorways, and that many people still think the building of a by-pass will ai one stroke banish Congestion from a town. But the road authorities, as well as the experts, seem well aware that the problem of better roads in built-up areas is just as important as the problem of roads connecting those areas. In his message to the conference, the chairman of the British Road Federation, Lord Derwent, actually expresses his gratification for the support of the Minister of Transport and his colleagues on this principle. • • As on many other subjects, public opinion lags far behind the experts. There is some excuse for regarding the pace as fatiguing. Ever since the war, the vision of a network of motorways has tormented politicians and public alike. Only recently have one or two small fragments of the vision come down to earth. Even the roads that may be built 10 years hence would hardly have satisfied the demand quite 10 years ago. Against this background, we may be excused for feeling daunted by the reminder that the real requirements are greatly in excess of a programme that has hardly begun.

American Experience Much of the discussion at the urban motorways conference has inevitably been based upon experience in the U.S.A. It 'has been found there that the bigger a town the less likelihood is there of solving its traffic problem with a by-pass. It might help a small community of less than 5,000 souls, because the evidence is that 60 per cent. of approaching traffic intends to go through, and could equally easily go round. The proportion of through traffic is about 4 per cent, in a city with a population of 500,000, so that motorways in that city provide the obvious means for absorbing -the constant stream of foreign-based vehicles.

Large cities all over the U.S.A. have tackled the problem of their own motorways with typical and impressive lavishness. Los Angeles has 102 miles of this kind of road, including the 8--mile Hollywood Free way which cost over £2m. a mile to build. Two expressways started in Detroit in 1947, although they lie below ground-level, have three 12-ft. traffic lanes in each direction, separated by a I4-ft. centre strip.

Seattle's Alaskan Way is built on two levels, each carrying three lanes of one-way traffic, and at one stage goes underground for nearly half a mile to avoid seven main streets. A tunnel, proudly proclaimed as the widest vehicular tunnel in the world," is also included in the plans for Boston's Central Artery. Washington" and Pittsburgh are other towns with ambitious programmes, and in the really huge towns, such. as New York, urban motorways have become a commonplace.

Europe is a long way behind, although the representatives of several countries at the conference have been' able to report good progress. In Great Britain there are proposals and plenty of ideas, and it is time that some of them began to be put into practice. The cost is high, and the idea of an exclusive motorway through the centre or near the centre of a city may be repugnant to many of the people living there. But the road, once it is built, will save so much time and money, and it is so obvious and logical an extension of motorways already planned to commence at the outskirts of the city that the case for its construction must sooner or later be overwhelming.