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The Future of
Page 103
Page 104
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The Coach Station
Stability Obtained Under the Road Traffic Act Facilitates Co-ordinated Coach-station Enterprise
THE stage of discussion as to the need for coach stations has been left far behind and the provision of terminal facilities off the highway has evolve.d into a problem of ways and means.
This is no easy matter, this task of marshalling passengers at the ends and interchange points of Britain's roadtravel arteries.
It plainly takes on a public significance when we consider the urgency of the need and the cost figures involved. Certainly, the Traffic Commissioners appreciate this and local authorities are following one another in facing the fact. It seems a little unfair that the motor coach—speedy and manceuvrable as it is—should be burdened with this need for accommodation off the highways, when horsed drays and trams go their dilatory way unquestioned.
There is, however, a justification for coach stations that is founded upon better logic. The passengers need the terminal amenities that only a station can give. This applies particularly to interchange between long-distance and local services. It is going, in the future, to apply with increasing force to interchange between all road services and long-distance rail services.
In most of our big towns local services are operated by the municipal authorities, which are finding it necessary to co-ordinate with services running farther afield.
It would appear, therefore, that the question of ways and means, in respect of coach stations, is largely one for local government bodies. Their watch committees are responsible for internal traffic and the Traffic Commissioners are in no small measure guided by them. Local-authority conditions attached to road-service licences incorporate their recommendations. At the same time, it has to be understood that a characteristic of the local government of this country is the provision for contemporary development of municipal and private enterprise. If this harmonious condition of collateral advance can be introduced widely in the matter of road services, and stations for them, it will be to the benefit of the public and the operators.
The aolution appears to be that in big centres where the municipal interest in road services is predominant, the local authority should guide the policy of co-ordination of local and distant services and should provide a station, and support should be forthcoming from private and railway-associated operators as lessees on reasonable terms. To locate the station adjacent to the main-line railway station is to afford an obvious comfort to the public—for nobody is going to suggest that the road should rob the rail of the bulk of long-distance passenger traffic.
In centres where the predominant road-travel interest is in the hands of private enterprise an excellent opportunity exists for either the operating companies or property investors, or both, to erect a station.
As regards the question of coachstation design, a point of view which has been strongly put forward in this journal in the past year or two is now coming to be recognized. It is that the accommodation of waiting coaches under
cover is not necessary. Covered platform space and comfortable indoor amenities for passengers are required, but the housing of numbers of vehicles within station buildings involves costly construction and difficulties of forced ventilation which are not always justified.
On the previous page is shown an illustration of the new coach station now being completed in London for London Coastal Coaches, Ltd. The building is L-shaped, and vehicles will enter and leave the park through arches, there being a glazed roof over only the platform section of the park. This station is a sound example of the type of structure that is being found serviceable.