Chapter 5: General conclusions

A two-fold problem

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The best use is not being made of the motor vehicle in urban areas at present because of grossly inefficient circulations and the adverse effects of traffic on human life and surroundings. The first is costing the community great sums annually, the second is building up to a major social problem with a deeply tragic aspect. Unless something is done the position is bound to get steadily worse as the number of vehicles increases. But there is no simple ‘solution’. The trouble is that the motor vehicle has put our urban arrangements based on streets completely out of date, it really demands quite different arrangements of buildings and access ways. The usage of vehicles in towns could be curtailed deliberately in order to avoid these problems, but the only justification for doing so would be the sheer difficulty of designing the necessary alterations to towns and the expense of carrying them out.