Chapter III – Practical studies

Part One: A small town

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We decided to look first at a small town where the issues would not be too complicated. Various factors affected the choice of a town, not the least being the need to find a place where some survey data existed. We finally chose Newbury in Berkshire. The objectives of the study were to reveal the effects of a build-up of vehicle ownership and usage to the maximum foreseeable level, and to ascertain the kind and scale of measures needed to deal with the resulting situation. We quickly found that for an exercise of this kind we needed much more information than was in fact available, and being unable ourselves to conduct any elaborate surveys we were forced to make a great many assumptions. We worked within the local planning authority's proposals for the future size and activities of the town, but we deliberately disregarded all current proposals relating to highways and redevelopment. We also put out of our minds all preconceived ideas on the pattern roads might take, such as ring roads or relief roads. We sought to estimate as accurately as we could the various ways in which people seek to use vehicles, and to see what such usage would involve. In the following paragraphs we describe, as far as possible in non-technical language, the steps of our analysis. In practice it involved many long and laborious calculations.

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We are grateful to the County Planning Officer of Berkshire and his staff, and the Borough Surveyor of Newbury, for allowing us to have access to survey data.