Report of the Steering Group

New urban roads

19

Beyond any question, there will have to be a great deal of urban road-building in British cities. The scale on which this will be necessary can be clearly seen from the practical studies in Chapter Three of the Buchanan Report. Moreover, if these new roads are to perform their function of carrying the very heavy volumes of traffic that will arise in the future, many of them will have to be free of such obstructions as Cross-roads and roundabouts. Some of them, indeed, in the larger cities, will have to be built to motorway standards.

20

The engineering and other difficulties of building new roads in cities should not be underrated. The greatest difficulty is the land that such roads require. Only rarely will an existing street be wide enough to serve as a main distributor without some destruction of buildings. Interchanges are particularly voracious consumers of space, needing up to 40 acres or even more*, depending on the number of streams of traffic to be separated from each other. Nevertheless, these technical problems are not insoluble, given the money and the determination to solve them.

*For comparison, the area in London bounded by Piccadilly, Lower Regent Street, Pall Mall and St. James's Street is 35 acres; Green Park is 53 acres, and St. James's Park 93 acres

21

But there are a number of considerations that set limits on what can be hoped for from even the most vigorous policy of urban road-building. In the first place, most American cities are physically much better adapted for the creation of motor-ways than any British city. All but a few of the oldest are, even in their centres, much less tightly packed than the typical British city. There are more interstices through which the roads can be driven. (It is releyant to observe that in Manhattan Island, New York City, the most tightly packed American city, the only motorways that it has been Found possible to construct are on the edges of the island). Moreover, most of them, when the Motor Age began, were surrounded by spacious open country, and there was scope for a policy of making room for the motorways by decanting part of the population of the city to its fringes. If a large proportion of the working population of a typical American city can drive to work every day, it is partly because many of the work places have been evacuated to the periphery. The difficulty of preserving any green countryside between our towns is already so great that there is very little scope for a similar policy in Britain.

22

Secondly, the American policy of providing motorway, for commuters can succeed, even in American conditions only if there is a disregard for all considerations other than the free flow of traffic which seems sometimes to be almost ruthless. Our British cities are not only packed with buildings they are also packed with history, and to drive motorway, through them on the American scale would inevitably destroy much that ought to be preserved.

23

Thirdly, even with all the advantages that their circumstances provide for the success of a motorway policy, many Americans are coming to doubt whether it provides a final solution. Each new motorway, built to cope with existing traffic, seems to call into existence new traffic sufficient to create a new congestion. The leading case is that of San Francisco and its satellite cities, where the citizens recently voted to tax themselves for a new system of interurban railways, because the motorways were becoming too congested, San Francisco, limited in its expansion on three sides by salt water, is not a typical American city. But British cities are restricted in their expansion on all four sides, and the case history may well be relevant.

24

We believe that there is need in this country for a vigorous programme of urban road-building—not rushed into haphazardly, but as the result of careful analysis of probable traffic flows and needs. But we cannot hold out any hope that this by itself will go very far towards solving the problem.