Duncan Macbeth analyses the use and misuse of the motor vehicle in an affluent society.

He relates the
spontaneous chaos of traffic and congestion to the collapse of planning and the abandonment of comprehensive development in our cities. The motor manufacturers, driven by the search for profits, call for more roads, but
the problem cannot be solved within the competitive framework of a free enterprise economy.

20

THE MOTOR vehicle is one of the most useful tools, as

well as one of the most fascinating toys, that man has
ever invented. But used wastefully, selfishly and
stupidly, as it is being used throughout capitalist society
today, it is causing casualties on a military scale (nearly
80,000 people have been killed on British roads since
the war), threatening to disrupt the cities and overrun
the countryside, and destroying the most agreeable
features of town life with its danger, noise, fumes and
congestion.
This may sound absurdly pessimistic, but that is only
because the scale and complexity of the problems raised
by universal car ownership are not widely understood.
The motorist who is regularly caught in traffic jams on
the way to his work or on a weekend outing naturally
thinks that his problem will be solved if the bottlenecks
on the road are removed, roads widened, flyovers
introduced at intersections, or an entirely new motor
road like M1 built to take the through traffic. There is,
in general, no understanding of the fact that the motor
vehicle has not only effected a revolution in our personal
habits, but has made the entire system of streets and
roads inherited from the past out-of-date and almost
unworkable. The effects of this revolution are farreaching, and the problems it raises cannot be solved
by simple remedies.
Before we begin to discuss the nature of this revolution
we must grasp the size of the problem, and attempt to
forecast the future growth of motor traffic, on the
assumption that present trends continue. If we assume
(and it is, of course, a big assumption) that the standard
of living of all sections of the community will rise far
enough and rapidly enough to enable every adult who
wants to do so to own a vehicle for personal transport,
the potential demand is fantastic. The new town of
Stevenage, for example, has adopted a standard, for the
building of garages, of 1.25 cars per house. But in
recent American developments 2 cars per house is
normal, and 3 cars per house is not unknown.
The volume of cars on the roads and the flow of
traffic are both increasing at a rapidly accelerating rate.
In 1946 there were only 3 million vehicles of all kinds
on the roads, and fewer than 2 million private cars.
Since then, the total number of vehicles registered in
each year has been increasing at about 8.2 per cent
compound per annum. At this rate the number doubles
in 9 years, and trebles in 15. There are now some 8
million vehicles in use, including more than 5 million
cars. If present trends continue there could be 16 million
vehicles in 1967 and 24 million (including 13 million
cars) in 1974. But even this would not bring us to the
goal of a car per family, let alone a car per adult.
Traffic volume has been increasing almost as fast as
registrations, by about 7.4 per cent compound per
annum. But congestion increases far faster than traffic.
As the roads become more and more loaded beyond
their capacity, so congestion can be expected to increase
more rapidly still, and with it all the losses that congestion causes. The roads now carry far more goods

than the railways, and have become an integral part

of the industrial equipment of the nationconveyor
belts along which flow raw materials, finished products
and innumerable bits and pieces in process of manufacture or delivery. No manufacturer would ever
tolerate within his works the degree of inefficiency that
he does in the delivery of goods by road. There is a big
element of exaggeration in the much-publicised figure
of 500 million a year, which the road lobby likes to
quote as the loss caused by congestion, because this
figure includes losses in non-working time. But the real
losses are not far short of 200 million a year, and are
increasing.

The Profits-Jam
The reason why the volume of traffic increases more
slowly than the number of vehicles registered, and
congestion more rapidly, is of course the inadequacy of
the entire road system, which has never developed at a
rate commensurate with the growth of the motor
industry. There is evidence to show that, if the road
system was considerably improved and if vehicles could
move freely, traffic would increase more rapidly than
the number of vehicles; partly because the building of
new roads exclusively for motor vehicles generates new
traffic, and partly because the degree of congestion has
for long been so serious that it deters many motorists
from using their cars as much as they would like to.
In London, for example, only 7 per cent of the population working in the centre travel to work by car. The rest
travels by public transport. But if there was no congestion on the roads, and if there were enough parking
places at the other end, as many as 80 or 90 per cent
might go to work by private car.
Only six years ago Britains motor industry produced
a million vehicles a year. Last year, production rose to
a million and a half. By 196263, when the 160 million
expansion programmes of the five major manufacturers
(BMC, Ford, Rootes, General Motors (Vauxhall) and
Standard-Triumph) have been completed, capacity will
have risen to three million, and Britain will have in
proportion to its population a much larger motor
industry than the United States. This is a staggering
prospect, even if one assumes that exports might rise
from 600,000 to a million or even a million and a half
vehicles a year. But this is not the end. The manufacturers investment is exceeded by the parallel
investment in steel, tyres, parts and accessories, and the
expansion programmes recently announced are only the
first instalment of an even bigger programme, whose size
is as yet undisclosed. There is no knowing whether it
will be possible to sell three million vehicles at home and
abroad in 1963, and each of the big five is in fact
hoping to increase its share of the market at the
expense of the other four. But the motor industry is so
highly automated today that profits can only be made
on the basis of a large output. If demand should fall

21

seriously below capacity, we can confidently expect the

most strenuous pressure by the motor lobby for big
reductions in purchase tax and petrol duty and relaxations in hire purchase controls. We can also anticipate
far more vigorous propaganda for a big road building
programme, for the motor manufacturers are at last
becoming worried at the prospect that traffic congestion
might begin to restrict sales.
The prospect is that motor manufacturers singleminded pursuit of profit will divert a bigger and bigger
proportion of the nations income and capital from
more urgent needs. Because so much capital and
employment is now tied up in motor manufacture, the
Government has acquired a political interest in keeping
it going at full blast, regardless of whether this investment could be better spent elsewhere, and regardless
too of the Governments own failure to expand the
road system at anything approaching the rate at which
the traffic on it is increasing.
The vast expansion of the motor industry forms no
part of any rational economic or transport plan. It
involves a large and constantly growing importation of
raw materials and fuel oil which, at the moment, may
be paid for by exporting vehicles, but could in the long
run prove an extravagant burden on the balance of
payments. The government has never pretended that its
road plans are designed in any way to solve the problems
it is helping the motor manufacturers to create; and the
motor manufacturers wash their hands of the problems
too. They pay large sums to finance publicity campaigns
for bigger and better roads, but contribute next to
nothing to researchfor which there is a crying need
into the problem of designing towns and cities, adapted
to the use of the motor vehicle.
It can easily be seen, therefore, that the crisis of
congestion in the city streets (and in every town, large
or small) is going to get very much worse. This article is
not going to concentrate on the problem of the main
roads connecting the towns and cities, because this
presents no technical difficulties. Congestion on the
main roads can undoubtedly be solved by building a
motorway system, like the M1, and by widening or
double-tracking the less important main roads. If the
necessary finance and resources are allocated, such a
system could be built within 20 or 30 years. It would not
be cheap; and before deciding to build it full account
would have to be taken of the impact on the railways,
and the importance of organising road, rail and air as a
single transport system.
In 1957 the Road Research Laboratory estimated that,
on the assumption that traffic would double in 10 years,
it would cost 1,200 million to catch up with congestion
in rural roads alone by 1967. Since then, construction
costs have increased, and if it were decided to plan for
the universal ownership of private motor cars, it would
be necessary to think of traffic volumes four or five
times heavier than they were in 1957, if not more. Before
we declare that expenditure on this scale is impossible,
we might recall that in Victorian times, when the

22

railway building boom was at its height, 350 miles of

railway were built in Britain every year for 20 years, at
a time when there were no mechanical aids and every
ton of earth had to be shifted by hand. A national
motorway system is as necessary today as a national
railway system was 100 years ago.

Road-Relief?
But of course the effect of building such a system
would be to aggravate intensely the existing traffic
congestion in towns and cities. A motorway system
would by-pass all towns and cities, but it is a fallacy to
suppose that a by-pass puts an end to the traffic problem.
The larger the town, the smaller the proportion of
traffic that can be diverted by a by-pass. In this country
so few surveys have been made of the origin and
destination of traffic, that all the plans for ring roads
and by-passes are based on hunches, not on an analysis
of the facts. In the United States it is calculated that,
whereas in a town of less then 5,000 inhabitants nearly
60 per cent of the approaching traffic has no business
there, this figure falls to 18 per cent in cities between
50,000 and 100,000 inhabitants and to 8 per cent in
cities between 500,000 and one million inhabitants.
There is a crying need for by-passes and for motor
roads that will divert through traffic from small villages
and towns, but it is a hoary fallacy to suppose that
by-passes or ring roads will make much difference to
traffic congestion in larger towns or cities.
In the case of London, a survey made in 1948 showed
that 85 per cent of the traffic entering a circle drawn
2 miles from Charing Cross will stop inside it. The
ring roads proposed in various London road plans
would divert relatively little traffic from the centre, and
by improving access to the centre (particularly if built
in conjunction with motor roads radiating from London
to the provincial centres) they would greatly aggravate
traffic congestion. The basic fact that has to be grasped
is that 80 per cent of all traffic originates in the larger
towns and cities. The more elaborate the system of
national motorways, by-passes and ring roads, the
worse the congestion will become within the existing
streets to which, in the end, the traffic has to make its
way to reach its destination.
So far as is known, the only scientific projections of
future traffic movements in this country have been made
in the preparation of the plan for the new town of
Cumbernauld in Scotland. The calculations prove
conclusively that even within a small town of 70,000
inhabitants, from which all through traffic will be
diverted by double-track arterial roads circumventing
the town, immense volumes of traffic will still be
generated. Traffic flows were calculated in detail for
every stretch of road and every intersection on the towns
hypothetical road plan, on the assumption that there
would be 0.7 cars per family in 15 years time, and that
55 per cent of the working population would travel to

work by public transport or on foot. It was found that

the peak hour traffic could only be carried by a full
motorway system, involving flyovers and flyunders at
road junctions, and as many as four traffic lanes in a
single direction (one more than the M1, which has
only three lanes) would be required at the most heavily
loaded point.
Moreover, to enable the motor traffic to circulate in
safety, and to ensure safe and civilised conditions for
pedestrians, a completely separate system of pedestrian
paths is to traverse the whole town, passing under or
over all the roads, except the development roads within
the housing areas themselves. If a road plan of this kind,
and such elaborate measures to segregate vehicles from
pedestrians, are necessary in a small town, what kind
of road system, and what measures of segregation are
required to handle traffic in our existing cities, where car
ownership can now be expected to reach 1 or more cars
per family? While it is relatively easy to cater for the
car on such a scale in a new town on a virgin site, to do
so in an existing city presents the most difficult technical
problems which are immensely aggravated by the
private ownership of land, high land values, speculation,
limitations on the powers and finance of the public
authorities, and the concentration of capital in the
hands of private developers.
It is not possible to point to a single city within which
anything approaching a complete solution to the traffic
problem has been found. But the more one examines
the solutions that have been suggested, the more
obvious it becomes that it is impossible to plan cities on
the assumption that the private car will become the
normal method of personal transport.

Motorists Forever
Victor Gruen, an American architect and planner,
calculated recently that if the shaky public transport
system in New York were bankrupted (as it may well
be) and forced out of business (which is most unlikely),
and if all the workers in New York City had to travel
by private car, it would be necessary to demolish every
building in downtown Manhattan, build nine levels of
transportation space, and then construct new offices
and other buildings on top.
Victor Gruen also prepared, in 1957, a plan for
Fort Worth, a city of 1,200,000 inhabitants in Texas.
This was the first plan for any American city designed
completely to solve the traffic problem in the downtown
business area. He proposed to ring the centre with an
elaborate motor road, and to turn the entire central area
(about the size of the area bounded by Oxford Street,
Park Lane, Piccadilly and Regent Street) into a
pedestrian precinct. Six garages each for 10,000 cars
would adjoin the ring road, and loop roads for buses
would penetrate some distance into the pedestrian
precinct. Underground roads, excavated beneath the

existing roads, would enable commercial vehicles to

service the buildings. Pedestrians would be able to use
travellators; there would be electric trolleys for the old
and infirm. But Gruens plan, elaborate and expensive
though it obviously is, and although it leaves the business
centre as an island cut off from the rest of the city, was
based on a significant assumptionthat half the people
now travelling to the centre by car would travel by bus.
The American free enterprise system has, needless to say,
killed this plan stone dead; but it was a brilliant and
instructive exercise, designed primarily to rescue the
business centre from strangulation by traffic congestion.
The elaborate traffic studies and forecasts now being
made by most American cities point to the same
conclusions as were reached by Gruenthat the traffic
problem is insoluble unless there is a major switch from
private to public transport.

A Rapid Public Service

The propagandists in our newspapers tend, in fact,
to give a false picture of the motor car in America. We
are constantly urged to admire the splendid new
motorways all over America, and to go flat out to cater
for the private car here. Christopher Brumer, a director
of Shell and one of the leading propagandists for motor
roads, even argues that motor roads have only failed
to end congestion in the U.S. because there are not
enough of them. Yet the truth is that, although the US
is now spending 3,000 million a year (double our
defence budget) on new and improved roads, the
experts in the US are coming round to the view that the
money is being poured into a bottomless pit. The
Fortune survey, The Exploding Metropolis, showed
that two-thirds of the motoring commuters in
Washington, Los Angeles and San Francisco believed
(in 1957) that the best solution to the traffic problem
was to build a system of mass rapid transportationor,
as we would say, a fast public transport service.
The French traffic engineer, J. Elkouby, has calculated
that if the population working in the centre of a city of
5 million inhabitants were to travel to work by car the
express roads between the centre and the residential
areas would have to carry a tidal traffic of 500,000
vehicles per hour. To handle this traffic within the
centre would require either a motorway system occupying 5/9 of the surface area, leaving 4/9 for buildings,
parking and other uses, or a grid of one-way seven-lane
streets occupying about one-third of the area of the
centre. M. Elkouby therefore concludes that the ideal
of the man on four wheels is unattainable, without a
strict limitation on the density of development that would
destroy the urban character of towns, and without a
prohibitively costly urban motorway system. From
this it follows, he says, that public transport remains an
essential element of urban transport in a large town.

23

I have gone into these studies in detail because it is

absolutely essential to understand the impossibility,
whether measured in terms of finance, availability of
space, architecture or town planning, to base plans for
the future of the city upon the use of the private car as
the normal means of transport. Once this fact has been
grasped, the absurdity of nearly everything that is being
done at the moment at once becomes evident. For
if the aim is not to provide for the free flow of an
unlimited number of cars, then some other aim must be
set, and some means found to bring the future flow of
traffic and the capacity of the road system into balance.
Tacitly, the reluctance of the Ministry of Transport and
the local authorities to invest thousands of millions in
urban motorways is an admission that there is no limit
to this process until one has reached the final motorway
nightmare city described by Mr. Elkouby, where space
has been largely consumed by roads and parking places.
The governments policy, of slowly adding to the motorway system and tinkering with the existing road system
by increasing road widths and the capacity of intersections, give us the worst of both worlds. It throws money
away on improvementsroundabouts, flyovers,
double carriage-ways, wideningwhere a motorway is
the only real solution and it fails to take the measures
that would make it possible to provide a more limited
but workable motorway system. The primary aim in
planning is to create a satisfying environment for a fully
civilised lifeat home, at work, at recreation. Transport
is a service industry; it exists to serve this environment,
not to dominate and determine it. This is not to deny
that transport has a profound influence on the form
and structure of towns. It is to assert that we have to
design, or redesign, towns in such a way that (1) a
safe, civilised, beautiful environment is created for
living and working in, and (2) the best possible use is
made of every form of transport, to achieve the maximum degree of useful mobility for people and goods.
One says useful mobility, because the movement of an
immense number of vehicles may be evidence of
prosperity and efficiency, but it can equally be evidence
of appalling inefficiency. It is inordinately wasteful for
cars or lorries or buses to be held up for minutes or
hours in traffic jams. But it is even more wasteful for
them to undertake unnecessary journeys. Traffic
planning must begin with town planning, a study of the
use of land, the location of houses, factories, offices,
shops, facilities for recreation and entertainment, the
generation of traffic by different kinds of use and
different kinds of buildings. There is the most urgent
need for immensely more information and research
within this field. The speculator or the businessman who locates his offices in the centre of London may
be doing the most profitable thing from his point of
view, but his action may be throwing an intense strain
on the transport system, which can only be relieved by
expensive improvements (at public expense). One must
ask, for example, whether it is good business to transport
motor bodies half across the country for assembly.

24

Very little is known about the traffic-generating capacity

of buildings of different kinds, although it is obvious
that in town planning there should be a balance, not
only between the volume of traffic and the capacity of
the streets and garages, but also between the trafficgenerating capacity of buildings and the capacity of
the streets and garages.
Land values, the product of the private ownership
and sale of land, have an immense influence on the use
to which land is put. For 100 years the high land values
at the centre of cities have produced two consequences:
the rehousing of the working class (and of the middle
class for that matter) on cheap land at the periphery of
the city, from which cheap transport has brought them
back to work near the centre; and an excessive concentration of commercial buildings at the centre, where
land can only be profitably exploited if it is densely
built up and let or sold at a high price. This evergrowing separation between workplaces and homes
the basic imbalance in the city structureis the cause
of the rush hour; and despite the rather feeble
measures taken by the LCC to promote the outward
movement of offices, the congestion at the rush hour in
London continues to grow worse.

Living Suburbs
The situation is similar in other large cities. To solve
this problem is anything but easy, and it must take time.
But there are one or two examples of what planning can
do. The new housing estate to be built by the City of
London Corporation in the Barbican is not only the
most bold and imaginative solution of the traffic
problem (over an area of 65 acres vehicles and
pedestrians are to be completely separated on different
levels) but it will house 10,000 people in the City. The
demand for flats in central London proves that, while
many families want gardens, many others want the
convenience of a central location near their work and
the amenities of a big city. The rents, however, are far
beyond the level that working-class families can pay,
because land values are so high. Until urban land is in
public ownership, it will not be possible to determine
the use of land solely by town planning criteria, and
until this is done it is going to be uphill work trying to
reduce the rush hour flood by locating workplaces and
homes nearer to each other.
A possible technical solution has been brilliantly
demonstrated by the architects Gregory-Jones, Shankland, Chamberlin, Powell and Bon in a scheme to
redevelop the Middlesex suburb of Boston Manor.
This is today a dreary, low-density dormitory suburb
thrown up near the Boston Manor station on the
Central Line. The architects scheme for a living
suburb, or as others have called it a new town in the
city, was to bridge over the large railway sidings and
the station, and on top of it to build a new regional
centre, with offices, flats, shops, houses, facilities for

recreation and entertainment. Here, too, pedestrians

and vehicles would be segregated on different levels.The
higher residential densities, while providing a large
proportion of houses with gardens or patios, would
bring a large population within walking distance of the
station or of the offices in which they might work.
Instead of a flood of people leaving Boston Manor
every morning to work in the west end or city, many of
them would work in the suburb, and others would
actually travel to Boston Manor to work, thus reversing
the tidal rush hour flows.
The Boston Manor scheme points to another basic
imbalance in the cities. The weekend exodus to the
country and seaside is really a desperate effort to escape
from an intolerable environment. To spend several
hours on Sundays sitting in traffic jams, in order to
share a beach or a bit of grass on the roadside with
thousands of other people, would be absurd if the cities
themselves offered the kind of amenities that wealthy
people seek, and secure, for themselves. The city itself
must become largely self-sufficient for recreation of all
kinds. If our cities were a pleasure to live in, instead of
being noisy, nerve-wracking, congested, ugly places in
the week, and deserts of closed offices and shopfronts
at the weekend, we would have far less reason to go
chasing the elusive countryside that very few motorists
ever really reach.
It is not enough, therefore, in attempting to plan a
transport system, to estimate future traffic movements
on the assumption that land use will remain as it is. In
the long run, the biggest single contribution to traffic
congestion will be made by the re-arrangement of the
use of land, and the elimination of an enormous mass
of wasteful, tiring and expensive travel. This will help
to bring the volume of traffic within manageable limits.
But there remain two other basic problems. The first is,
how to distribute the traffic, while retaining freedom of
choice so far as is possible, between the different
channels that are available (public or private transport,
rail or bus, monorail or taxi, hired car or scooter).
The second is how to remove the basic conflict between
the pedestrian and vehicle, so that the pedestrian ceases
to be what Dr. Doxiades, the Greek planner, has called
a refugee in his own habitat.
The policy today, in fact, is to give priority to the
demands of private transport, and, above all, of the
private car. It will be possible in the future, when
large areas of the cities have been replanned and are
served by a comprehensive system of motorways,
garages and segregation of vehicles from pedestrians,
to use private cars in larger numbers without the
dangers and annoyance they cause today. But this is
bound to take a lot of time, and a lot of money. In the
meantime, the interests of the majority, who travel by
public transport, are being sacrificed to those of the
minority, who travel by private transport. A survey
taken in 1954 showed that, while private cars formed
37 per cent of all moving vehicles in central London,
they only carried 18 per cent of the occupants, whereas

buses formed only 7 per cent of all moving vehicles but

carried more than half the occupants. It would be hard
to find clearer evidence of the inefficiency of the private
car.

Must Transport Pay?

While, therefore, long term plans are being prepared
on the basis of elaborate surveys and research in every
city for the solution of the traffic problem, it is already
clear that the most urgent need is to make dramatic
improvements in public transport. A tremendous noise
is being made about the governments failure to build
new roads. But even more serious has been the total
failure to provide in every city new channels of public
transport, such as railways, over or under ground, or
monorails, and to give clear priority on the roads to the
public bus services. The Victoria tube, for example, is
estimated to cost 55 million, but it would carry as many
passengers as a 14-lane motorway, and would do little
or no damage to buildings on the surface. In the short
run, draconian action to enforce a complete ban on
unauthorised street parking would dramatically cut the
daily flow of private cars, and enable the buses to run
reasonably well.
But the root difficulty is the insistence, first by the
Labour Government, and now by the Tories, that
public transport must pay. This is the cause of the
continuous rise in fares and the continuous switch from
public to private transport. In fact public transport,
like the sewers or the parks, is an essential public
service. While a free transport service would encourage
wasteful long-distance travel, and speed up the process
of suburban dispersal, public transport should always
be available cheaply enough to attract the bulk of the
traffic. The alternative is to rely on the private car, and
the cost of providing for unlimited private motoring
would make the loss on public transport look insignificant. It is cheaper, in other words, to subsidise a
book loss on public transport than to bear the extravagant costs of a transport system based on the most
wasteful use of the private car.
We should envisage a big extension of a cheap taxi
service, a universal car hire service (with depots in
every large garage), and a goods delivery service, so
that the housewife who walks to the shops can find the
goods waiting for her on her return. We might well
find that new kinds of small vehicles could be designed
specially for use in towns, to take less space than
contemporary motor cars. The private car, in the future,
will probably only be wanted by the man who uses it
constantly every day. The rest of us will rely on public
transport, but will be able to get whatever vehicle we
want, whenever we want it, by telephoning or walking to
the car hire depot or the taxi rank.
The most difficult problem of all to solve is the
liberation of the pedestrian from the motor vehicle,
without preventing the motor vehicle from doing its
job. Even when every possible measure has been taken
to reduce the flow of traffic to manageable dimensions,

25

the volume of commercial traffic, buses, taxis, hire cars,

private cars and smaller vehicles will be so great that,
in the long run, nothing less than complete segregation
of vehicles from pedestrians, often on different levels,
will be tolerable in the busy parts of towns and in all
newly developed urban areas. The typical street of
today, lined by shops and offices, used indiscriminately
by every kind of traffic, where pedestrians of every age
take their lives in their hands every moment of the day,
is a complete anachronism. Where a town has some
streets of real architectural merit, or an area of real
character or historical association, the conflict between
the pedestrian and the vehicle can only be settled by
compromise. The vehicle must be kept out for most of
the time, being given limited rights of access at other
times. The sooner this is done, the sooner our historic
old county towns like York and Chester, where today
one is deafened and harrowed by the traffic, will
become worth living in or visiting again. But in most
of our built-up areas there is really very little worth
keeping. Unfortunately, piecemeal redevelopment on
the old road lines is perpetuating the present system,
and frustrating future redevelopment. We are replacing
the buildings, but we are not renewing the towns.

Spontaneous Chaos?
The answer can only be found by redeveloping very
large areas20, 30, 40 acres or moreat a time,
because it is extraordinarily difficult to introduce such
solutions as upper level walkways into existing streets,
when small sites are being developed in isolation. The
resources being squandered in each of the big cities
today on piecemeal office building could, if concentrated
on a single comprehensive development area, bring
about a dramatic transformation in a very short time.
But this is inconceivable within present limitations of
legislation, finance, and land ownershipnot to speak
of the limited horizons within which planning is conceived today.
The main conclusion to be drawn from this survey is
that the traffic problem is not, as the Labour spokesmen
in the House of Commons like to say, a non-party
issue. It is not a problem to be solved merely by thinking
up the brightest technical ideas, the latest in pink or
tartan zones. The traffic problem is rooted in capitalist
society itself, in national economic anarchy, in the
manufacturers pursuit of profit, in the false gods of
status and prestige, in the private ownership of land
and the acquisitiveness of landowners and speculators.
It is a symptom of a disease that is incurable without a
radical operation.
This article does not attempt to draw up a blueprint
for the solution to the traffic problem: but it is worth
setting down some general principles which should
govern a socialist approach to the problem:
1. Transport is a service. New forms of transport
require new planning and architectural solutions, but
the primary aim is to create conditions for a fully

26

civilised life, using all forms of transport in the most

efficient way, but not dominated by transport.
2. Without research into the problem and experiment
in town planning, no solutions can be found.
3. The first priority must be given to the development
of appropriate forms of cheap and efficient public
transport. Public transport should be subsidised to the
extent necessary to enable it to compete successfully
with private transport.
4. Road, rail and air transport, public and private, must
be studied and planned as a single transport system.
5. Transport must be subordinated in planning to
regional and town planning. Only in this way can
traffic be studied and controlled at its source, by the
planned relocation of homes, workplaces, shops and
recreation centres.
6. To relieve congestion at the centre, and ease the
rush hour, new towns should be built in the
suburbs of the cities, and more homes built, at low
rents, in the centre.
7. The development plans of local authorities must be
revised to incorporate long-term plans for motor roads
reserved for motor traffic, with parking garages related
to them.
8. The segregation of vehicles from pedestrians should
be achieved by immediate measures restricting the
access of vehicles to certain streets and areas; and, in
the long run, by concentrating resources on major
areas of comprehensive redevelopment.
9. Motor roads should only be built in towns as part
of a plan for the comprehensive redevelopment of the
areas through which they run.
10. In new housing areas, the principle of complete
segregation of vehicles from pedestrians must be
observed, and priority given in town planning to the
interests of the pedestrian.
11. The trade unions directly concerned with the motor
industry should begin to discuss ways in which the
industry can develop in a planned way, and the skills
and livelihood of their members protected, without
damage to the interests of the rest of the community or
the life of the city.
12. The solution of the traffic problem involves the
planned reallocation of land and its use. This cannot be
achieved so long as the use of land is dictated by the
interests of private ownership and the speculators.