Chapter 3 – Part four: A central metropolitan block

Full use of cars

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We first did a quick exercise to check the consequences if every person should seek to go to work by car, every shopper to use a car, and the residents to have all they desired in the way of cars and parking spaces. This is in addition to the essential commercial, business and industrial traffic. We calculated that the peak generation rate for the whole area would be about 40,000 p.c.u. per hour, and that 60,000 parking spaces would be needed. To provide good access for vehicles, the internal road system would need to be on three physical levels, and six distributors of motorway standard with five lanes in each direction would be needed to distribute the peak period traffic to and from the area alone. The design problem for the area itself would not be insuperable, though the whole of it would have to be rebuilt to a very radical plan. But when we considered the consequences for the primary network of a vast continuous spread of areas similar to our study area, for this is what the middle of London really comprises, we realised that the network would become impossibly large and complicated. This gave us the very important hint that the amount of traffic to be planned for in our study area was likely to be controlled not by what might be needed within the area itself, but by what could be practically contrived in the way of a network to bring traffic to and from the area.