Report of the Steering Group

Deliberate limitation

29

A third general means of relieving the pressure has also often been suggested. This is the deliberate limitation of the number of vehicles on the streets of our cities. In Soviet Russia this is achieved by what appears to be a deliberate restriction on the number of motor cars available for sale to the general public. We hope we may assume that this is excluded for Britain, But if a limitation on the ownership of cars is out of the question, perhaps a legal limitation on their use is not. There are several ways in which this could be done. There is, for example, direct prohibition of the circulation of vehicles at specified times and places. This we will call ‘limitation by edict’. Or it has often been suggested that limitation could be secured by levying some form of special tax or charge on those who insist on driving their cars at times when and in places where they will contribute to excessive congestion. This we can call ‘limitation by taxation’. And, finally, as a mixture of both methods, there is the limitation that can be secured by a restriction on the number of permitted parking places combined with a tight prohibition of parking anywhere else. This is limitation by control of parking.

30

The general comment we want to make on all these methods of deliberate limitation of traffic is closely similar to what we have said in earlier paragraphs about the other two main suggested solutions-more roads and more public transport. Distasteful though we find the whole idea, we think that some deliberate limitation of the volume of motor traffic in our cities is quite unavoidable. The need for it simply cannot be escaped. Even when everything that it is possible to do by way of building new and better roads and expanding public transport has been done, there would still be, in the absence of deliberate limitation, more cars trying to move into, or within, the cities than could possibly be accommodated. And if this happens, then the result will be that even less traffic will move than might be carried. The greater the demand for circulating space, the less the supply.

31

Deliberate limitation, to some extent and by some means, there must be in the central districts of all our large cities and many of the smaller towns. This remedy, like the others, will have to be looked to for part of the final solution. But, as with the others, the extent of what can be accomplished by this means seems to us to be more limited than might appear at first sight. There are several reasons why this should be so. Perhaps the most decisive is that a car-owning electorate will not stand for a severe restriction. And even if a severe restriction could be got on to the statute book, it would be almost impossible to enforce. It is a difficult and dangerous thing, in a democracy, to try to prevent a substantial part of the population from doing things that they do not regard as wrong; black markets and corruption are the invariable fruit of such attempts at prohibition. Even If this overriding objection could be removed, there would still be severe difficulty in pushing any of the particular methods of limitation very far.

32

The trouble with limitation by edict is that it can rarely be absolute, and the difficulties start with the attempt to define the exceptions. To close a single street, for a defined period, to all traffic is possible; it is done in play streets. But obviously this cannot be applied to the problem of cities as a whole. The object of any limitation would be to make it possible for some traffic to move. Exactly what traffic? Essential traffic, of course, would have to be permitted. But what is essential traffic? Few things are more essential than the doctor going on his rounds. But how permit this and prevent the doctor from using his car to go to a party? To set up the categories of permitted traffic by definition in a statute would be impossible. But to put the power of granting or refusing permits, case by case, into the hands of any official would be most dangerous. At the best it would be arbitrary, at the worst it would be corrupt. These are only some of the very difficult questions that would arise. We do not mean to suggest that any restriction of traffic by this means is impossible. But we do think that the limits on what can be done will be found to be narrow. It will be observed from Chapter Three Part Two of the Buchanan Report that, in a large city such as Leeds, to enable even 26% of the people who work in the centre of the city to travel by private car would require very large and expensive works, while in London the proportion is even smaller. Is it conceivable that a policy of prohibiting and licensing, unassisted by other measures, could be pursued so far that only such small proportions of the applications would be granted?

33

Limitation by taxation would raise similar difficulties if it were pushed very far. We do not wish to go into the many interesting and highly ingenious methods that have been suggested for making it expensive to the car-owner to drive his car in places where and at times when there is no room for him. They well deserve intensive study and some of them will have to be tried. The point we want to make is one that applies to all of them—that they cannot by themselves go very far towards solving the problem. This, also, follows from its sheer magnitude. If a tax, or special charge, is to limit the traffic in the degree that is required, it will have to be very heavy indeed. It would probably have to be a matter not of shillings but, in some instances, of pounds per vehicle per day. Apart from all the very great administrative difficulties of levying charges on this scale (for example, there would have to be exemptions, and the same difficulty as before in defining them), there is the fundamental objection that driving in cities would then be limited to the rich or the privileged.

34

Limitation by control of parking can also, within limits, be efficacious. But those limits, though considerably more effective than we have yet reached, are very real. This method will not work at all unless the motorist is certain that he will be prosecuted for parking anywhere but in an authorised parking place, and that requires a formidable administrative apparatus, as well as creating much bad blood. It is very difficult for packing limitations to distinguish between essential and non-essential traffic, though a very rough distinction can often be made by prohibiting the all-day parking that is the mark of the car-commuter. Moreover, this method of limitation, if it is not reinforced by others, has the defect of actually creating some traffic that would not otherwise exist, in the shape of cars cruising the streets looking for parking places, or going endlessly ‘round the block’ waiting to pick up a passenger. Control of parking is one of the weapons of a co-ordinated plan—indeed, it is essential that the provision of parking should be calculated in relation to the traffic capacity of the roads—but used by itself without such co-ordination it can at best achieve a very arbitrary result.