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Industrial Efficiency Depends on Good Roads

7th November 1952
Page 45
Page 45, 7th November 1952 — Industrial Efficiency Depends on Good Roads
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

MOT only does a good road system increase industrial efficiency by reducing lost time, but it diminishes running costs, raises land and industrial values, reduces the strain and anxiety of travel, and almost eliminates the cost and misery of accidents, which are inseparable from the operation of modern traffic over roads which were not intended or fitted to carry it.

These observations were made by Lieut-Col. E. W. W. Richards, in a paper, " Why America Builds Better Roads," which he read at the Public Works and Municipal Services Congress at Olympia, London, on Tuesday. It was the belief in America, he said, that the country's road system was an extension of the production lines of industry and an integral part of its economic structure.

The United States was already discarding the types of road that other countries had not yet built, and was building those which they could not afford. But for its road system, the American nation could not have risen to its present pre-eminent position in economic, financial and international affairs.

Pre-war studies of the cost of congestion in American cities showed that the economic loss in New York was £122m. a year, in Boston £6.500 per mile per year, and in Detroit L3-6m. a year. Los Angeles, said the speaker, was investing £360m. in contiolled-access urban express roads. One well-designed four-lane road of this kind would accommodate the same number of vehicles at nearly twice the average speed as would five 40-ft. ordinary streets on which parking was prohibited and under favourable conditions of control for the intersecting streets. A turnpike road' in Pennsylvania, which, when completed would be 327 miles long and would cost f86m.. had yielded f 15m. in tolls in 10 years on the original 160-mile completed section.

The greatest volume of traffic recorded on any turnpike highway in the world was the 84.000 vehicles a day at New Jersey.

American experience had shown that a partially modern highway could be more dangerous than one which was _ obviously unsafe, because it gave a driver a false sense of security.

The results of driver-behaviour studies had had a profound effect on the geometric designs of modern highways in the United States, and the application of engineering data obtained from such studies had made a major contribution towards the safety and economy of road transport.

In 1949, State revenue for highways reached a gross total of f1,160m., of which £60m. was used under existing State laws for non-highway purposes.

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