THE TYRANNY OF TRAFFIC-I
Bv ST. JOIN ERVINE.
THE problem of traffic—the road, and how to get along it—becomes more, not less, acute, although great efforts are everywhere being made to solve it. And we are beginning to realize that the solution of other and seem- ingly acuter problems is related to the solution of this one. We have passed beyond the belief that delays in traffic are merely matters of personal vexation, and have come to the belief that our inability to cope with them affects the cost of production, the cost of living and the per- sistent problem of unemployment. I am not a political economist or an expert in social affairs, but I do not sup- pose that any sociologist will dispute my assertion that the confusion in our streets gravely hampers the business man in his attempts to compete with foreign rivals on equal terms. Consider the question of carting. All carters to-day take an appreciably longer time to deliver goods over a given distance than they did twenty years ago, in spite of the fact that motor traffic has largely taken the place of horse traffic, because progress from the point of loading to the point of delivery is continually im- peded by blocks in the street. The hare can move more rapidly than the tortoise, but if the hare is con- tinually held up its rapidity is of little use to it. And everywhere in this country to-day the hare is being held up.
A Committee of the House of Lords, at the moment of writing, is considering a Bill for the building of a tunnel under the Mersey at Liverpool. The Bill is being opposed by the Mersey Railway Company, although there is no doubt that the trade of Liverpool is terribly affected by the delays caused in transporting goods from one side of the river to the other. Large sums of money will be spent in barren law costs because a privately owned business, which is inadequate to deal with the situation, objects to the citizens of Liverpool making this great effort to solve a problem which seriously threatens their commerce. One may see any day at the docks of Liverpool a long line of drays and lorries waiting one or two hours for their turn to be carried across the river by ferry to Birkenhead. The lorrymen are paid a high hourly wage to sit on their lorries until the ferries are free. There is no help for this at present. The Mersey is a difficult river to span, and it is only now, after years of thought and argument, that the problem has been brought within sight of solution. All sorts of schemes have been proposed and considered — bridges and ferries and tunnels—but all of them were open to objection. The least objectionable of them, however, is the tunnel, though its openings will have to be made at some distance from the river and there will be a trouble- some problem of aeration to be dealt with. I am not now concerned with the method of solving this particular traffic problem, but with the fact that failure to solve it so far has cost the people of Liverpool immense sums of money. The wages paid to the lorry-drivers for sitting in a line of lorries waiting their turn to be ferried across the Mersey are wasted wages : their addition to the cost of production is a burden on business for which there is absolutely no economic return.
That is a concrete example of the loss inflicted upon the community by the traffic delays. It is not an isolated instance. What happens in Liverpool is happening, in more or less degree, all over this 'island. Hundreds of thousands of pounds are wasted every year in London alone because traffic does not flow evenly along its course ; and those wasted sums of money make our goods dearer in the world's markets than goods which are more easily delivered.
The confusion in the traffic is due to a variety of causes, the most obvious of them being the extraordinary increase in the number of vehicles now in use as compared with the number in use, say, twenty years ago. Streets which were adequate for the traffic then have, generally speaking, still got to suffice for the traffic of to-day. Where street- widening is being done, as, for example, in the Strand, it is being done in a prolonged and piecemeal manner. The authorities wait until leases expire before they order the demolition of obstructing buildings, and we may actually see to-day a single small shop causing fearful obstruction because the authorities will not or cannot buy up the re- mainder of its owner's lease and get on with the work of widening. The result is that the Strand is, and has been for some time, a succession of bays and channels : wide in front of the Cecil Hotel and narrow at the corner of Villiers Street, a moment's walk away. It would seem surely ordinary common sense to compensate the owners of these small obstructive shops for enforced termination of their leases rather than to spread the work of widening over a long period of time. But the increase in the number of vehicles by itself is not sufficient to cause the confusion in traffic. The fact that motor-lorries are swifter than horse-drawn lorries ought to adjust the difference due to the increase in their number. We must add other causes to this one before we arrive at the whole cause of the trouble.
The erection of high blocks of offices in central positions is responsible for a great increase in the number of persons using a particular and small area. Traffic is congested because many people desire to get to one spot at the same hour. In New York, for instance, the Woolworth Building—a very beautiful piece of architecture—has a population equal to that of a very large village or small town. Some two thousand persons are employed in it, apart altogether from the number of persons who have to go to it to do business with them. Place a succession of such buildings in a single street, and immediately we are presented with a traffic problem of great difficulty : how to get the people who work in them to and from their business easily and quickly. The authorities in New York seem to be no better at solving this problem than we are. I remember being taken into the Subway in that city during a slack part of the morning. I had to strap- hang during my journey, and had the greatest difficulty in getting out of the train when it arrived at my destination. And that was during a slack part of the morning !
This concentration of people in small areas is, perhaps, inevitable, and all our attempts to solve the problem of traffic will have to start off with the assumption that great masses of Londoners will wish to get to and from the neighbourhood of the Mansion House and tlie Bank' of England.
Another cause of the confusion in traffic is due to social! legislation. Hours of labour for all classes tend tol approximate to each other. Formerly, when the manual', labourers began their work at six in the morning and the business and professional classes began theirs between nine and ten, the job of carrying these groups to their: work was easy, but now when all the groups seem to start' work about the same time, the job is complex and hard. The same number of vehicles will not now serve to carry the greater multitude of people, and there must therefore be more vehicles, with an increase in the cost of service and a decrease in the profits made from it. The enact- ment of a six-hour day for everybody would enormously add to the difficulty of controlling traffic, without any real gain in time and leisure to the workers. We have only to go down to the Thames Embankment any evening and observe the crowds of patient men and women waiting for their turn to get on to the tramcars to realize that the time they have gained from their hours of labour is wasted on the job of getting home. The more progress we make, the greater difficulty have we in getting about our business. We have actually arrived at a point when it is quicker to walk along the Strand than to take a taxi- cab or a motor-bus during certain hours. I have myself spent over ten minutes in a taxi-cab driving from the Savile Club in Piccadilly to Piccadilly Circus on my way to Euston Station. If we multiply that experience many times we arrive at a sum of expense and waste which is appalling. We may well ask ourselves how this problem is to be solved, feeling that it is insoluble. Wherever one goes, in London, in Paris, or in New York, one sees civilization halting because of a multiplicity of swift cars which cannot get along. I do not pretend to have dis- covered ways of solving a problem which baffles the wits of able and experienced men, but I propose in my next article to offer a few suggestions which may be helpful, at all events so far as London is concerned.
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