Fantastic London

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 312, 24 March 1928, Page 12

Fantastic London

TRANSPORT OF THE FUTURE Two Million Vehicles! LONDON is confronted with the momentous problem of providing for the traffic congestion of the future; and it cannot indetinitely be postponed. In 1927 there were, on the average, 800,000 vehicles within the London area. This year there will probably be upwards of a million. If vehicles continue to increase at the present rate, this latter figure will be doubled in the next 10 or 20 years.

In Great Britain we have roughly one motor vehicle for every 26 persons. America has one for every five persons, and still the motor boom continues unchecked. In America there are 40 motors per mile of road (not reckoning dust-tracks). In Great Britain there are only 11 a mile. In the very near future our own traffic will show a proportionate increase. How are we to deal with it? (asks Lieut.-Colonel Moore-Brabazon, formerly Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport, in "The Daily Mail”). Imagine the day when there are 2,000,000 vehicles normally in the London area. If it entered London to-day such a mass of transport would form an almost solid block in our busier streets. London's population has increased by about 23 per cent, in the last 25 years. By the time we are imagining it will have increased by, say, another 2,000,000. Hundreds of thousands more people will be thronging the pavements and crossing the roads on foot. HOPELESS CONGESTION The congestion, particularly at rush hours, will be beyond anything ever witnessed. The feeble palliatives to which we are resorting to-day—-round-ing street corners, widening bottlenecks, diverting traffic —will be as futile as attempts to block the Mississippi floods with a garden trowel. But what are we to do? Where is this vast mass of vehicles to go? ... We can rule out the Utopian remedy (suggested in some quarters) of driving uew roads through the heart of London to form a convenient network. Even widening London's principal streets would drain the Road Fuud many times over. It is estimated that it would cost £35,000,000 to double the width of Oxford Street from the Mansion House to Marble Arch. To carry out a general scheme of doubling the width of the principal streets of London would cost nearly as much as another European War. Compared with this figure of £35,000,000, it has been calculated that £12,000,000 would cover the cost of constructing an overhead road at the back of the minor streets north of Oxford Street. And here seems to be a ray of light in the darkness. If the conditions are well nigh impossible of solution on the ground, why not make use of another dimension? Overhead roads and tracks are not a new idea. Many of London’s suburban railways are raised over long stretches. New York has built highlevel tracks for electric cars. Highlevel roads have been suggested in London as approaches to high-level bridges over the Thames. Yet, as far as I know, no suggestion has been made to build overhead roads on a grand scale. There is one obvious position for high-level roads: above the existing suburban railway lines. Here are sites already cleared and free from the host of difficulties which would have to be overcome in laying roads over the tops of houses.

If! motor-vehicles could be driven from outside London along broad tracks laid above the railway lines as far as the termini, where there would be parking places under the control of the railway companies, it would at least ease some of the congestion. The fleets of omnibuses which would be needed to supply Londoh’s growing population would find a ready entrance into the metropolis. The squadrons of six-wheel omnibuses which will serve the rush-hour traffic of to-mor-row would have convenient highways between Central London and the suburbs. OVER TOPS OF BUILDINGS The obstacles in the way of laying roads over the tops of London’s buildings are very great, but perhaps not insurmountable. By law a man owns the space vertically above his property. It would be impossible as the law stands to build a road over a man’s house without paying him for the privilege. There would also be serious difficulties about noise and the exclusion of light, and from the constructional point of view there would be the problem of finding room for the gigantic supports on which the overhead roads would rest. High-level roads running at right angles to surface roads would solve most effectively the hideous problem of street intersections. It is hard to see how any method but a difference in road level can solve it. Removing the tramway lines and making circuses will palliate the evils, but so long as we have two large volumes of traffic crossing at the same level we are bound to have congestion, if not chaos. Overhead roads, then, possibly may come.. Our grandchildren may see great concrete tracks towering above the chimney-pots of Oxford Street and Piccadilly. Huge six-wheel omnibuses and electric cars may speed across the horizon. Massive steel towers with electric lifts may rise into the sky. A second and swifter moving London may rise 100 feet from the ground. The alternative to going above ground is to tunnel below it. In one case, at any rate, tunnels are inevitable. That is in East London. Means of crossing the Thames are at present so inadequate that a great deal of the traffic to and from the docks and factories is obliged to come west to pass over the river in order to go east. Owing to the size of the boats on the Thames, a bridge below the Pool of London requires 150 feet of head-room above the Trinity high-water mark. To the east of London, therefore, tunnels are the obvious means of crossing. Many people have a rooted objection to travelling underground, but there is much to be said for going to ! ground. Roads could be made absolutely straight and traffic control would be simple. There would be no pedestrians crossing and therefore very little danger of accidents. So our children may live to see great underground roads, well aired and brilliantly lit, running in dead straight, lines from I end to end of the Metropolis.