Chapter II: The theoretical basis

The problem of through traffic

75

With this picture in mind of the general nature of traffic, the position within towns can be considered more closely. The first point to note is that in every town there will be a certain amount of traffic, on all approach roads, which passes straight across the town without stopping to conduct any business. This is the phenomenon of through traffic. The presence of through traffic in towns is explained by the nature of the road system which we inherited from the pre-motor age. This consisted essentially of direct links from the centre of one town to the centre of the next, with a close mesh of local roads within each town giving direct access to the buildings, and a much broader mesh over the countryside to serve the small settlements, farms and fields (Figure 43). Although this network has discharged an enormous amount of traffic, and is perhaps the most comprehensive penetrative network of any country in the world, it is clear that apart from the narrowness of the roads it has one outstanding weakness for modern traffic. The direct links from town centre to town centre served admirably when a town-to-town journey was about as much as a coach-and-horses could manage in a day. But they are most unsatisfactory for the long-distance journeys which the motor vehicle has made possible, because all vehicles are forced through the middle of towns whether they want to go that way or not. This is the reason for the presence of through traffic.

76

It will be asked how far through traffic is the cause of the difficulties now arising in towns, and whether the simple answer is not to embark on an extensive programme of ‘by-passes’. The answer to this question is that much depends upon the size of the town. In large towns there is so much local traffic, and so much of the traffic on the approach roads is bound for the town in any case, that the removal of the through traffic makes very little difference (Figure 44). This is not to say, however, that there may not still be enough through traffic to warrant a by-pass for its own sake.

77

In the case of small towns, however, especially those situated on main routes between large towns, the through traffic may be an important element in the congestion. Indeed the position is now arising in which literally thousands of small towns, villages and hamlets are presenting a case for the removal of through traffic on the grounds of the nuisance and danger which it causes within the settlement. By-passes in these cases would give much-needed relief, though not necessarily permanent relief in view of the way in which local traffic is itself likely to increase in the future. It may be noted that so far, in our system of highway administration, the case for by-passing a settlement has rested primarily on the degree of obstruction offered by the settlement to the passage of through traffic. It would amount to a major shift of emphasis to include also, as a main criterion for by-passing, the degree of nuisance offered by the passage of through traffic to the settlement.

78

The global liability for by-passing would appear to be very large. If every settlement, large and small were to be by-passed in every necessary direction, as shown in Figure 46, the total requirement would be so demanding of land, and so disruptive of farming, that one has to question its practicability. An alternative would be to develop a more skeletal network, as shown in Figure 47, onto which the longer flows of traffic would be concentrated, with lateral spurs leading to settlements. This would require a considerable disciplining of traffic so that vehicles moved from place to place on the network, even at the expense of longer journeys, rather than along the old roads through the settlements. It would be outside the scope of this study to pursue these two alternatives in detail, or combinations between them. The main point to be made is that through traffic is a complicating factor in towns, which first needs to be disentangled from the problems of town traffic proper, and then needs careful consideration for the best way to deal with it.

79

One last point requires to be mentioned in connection with by-passes. It concerns the opposition which proposed by-passes nearly always arouse from traders who fear loss of custom. Such opposition may be well-founded in the case of a settlement which has come to the point of being almost entirely dependent upon the passing traffic, with restaurants, cafés, repair garages, filling stations and second-hand car sales. But in the normal small town or village, which is a more-or-less self-contained entity where people live and work, the case that removal of through traffic may have disastrous commercial effects can no longer be taken seriously. Already in many such towns the through traffic is an unmitigated nuisance, but this is nothing compared with the situation which is bound to arise as traffic increases. It is characteristic of most of our towns that the main streets are narrow. This is perhaps fortunate, for otherwise we might be tempted to leave them as through traffic routes, and thus repeat the ‘race-track’ villages of France which are so disastrously bisected by heavy flows of fast traffic. There is an important moral here. It is asking for trouble, especially in the case of small towns, to attempt to deal with through traffic by widening the internal streets—this will merely speed the through traffic, accentuate the severance, and, by virtue of the slight improvement offered to through traffic, delay the undertaking of more constructive measures.