Spaces of Congestion and Traffic

Politics and Technologies in Twentieth-Century London

David Rooney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138580732
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429016462
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book provides a political history of urban traffic congestion in the twentieth century, and explores how and why experts from a range of professional disciplines have attempted to solve what they have called 'the traffic problem'.

It draws on case studies of historical traffic projects in London to trace the relationship among technologies, infrastructures, politics, and power on the capital's congested streets. From the visions of urban planners to the concrete realities of engineers, and from the demands of traffic cops and economists to the new world of electronic surveillance, the book examines the political tensions embedded in the streets of our world cities. It also reveals the hand of capital in our traffic landscape.

This book challenges conventional wisdom on urban traffic congestion, deploying a broad array of historical and material sources to tell a powerful account of how our cities work and why traffic remains such a problem. It is a welcome addition to literature on histories and geographies of urban mobility and will appeal to students and researchers in the fields of urban history, transport studies, historical geography, planning history, and the history of technology.

1 Introducing the traffic problem

Introduction

‘Vehicle speeds in Central London are falling’, wrote Ruth Bashall and Gavin Smith in a 1992 account of London’s transport crisis, ‘and at 10 mph are currently little faster than the horse and cart of the turn of the century’.¹ This is a common refrain and, as will be shown presently, an accurate one. But it does not do much to scratch the surface of the experience of traffic in London, which depends on the person doing the experiencing, and varies through time and from place to place. Perhaps that is the point of singular statistics: they imprison the breadth of experience in a black box and hide it from view, so that the only reasonable response can be one of dismay at how bad things have got – at the crisis we find ourselves in. No faster than a horse and cart? So much for progress. Yet, for a crisis situation, it seems to have been with us for a long time. In 1938, London’s Evening Standard newspaper carried out a publicity stunt focusing attention on the capital’s traffic jams whereby it drove a van fitted with a large four-sided clock on timed journeys across London, demonstrating where and why congestion occurred.² During the stunt, both the British Road Federation and the House of Lords lamented that the newspaper van did not travel any faster than a horse.³

The Evening Standard’s timed trips followed a project in summer 1936, in which the Ministry of Transport carried out, for the first time, systematic research into traffic speeds and delays caused by congestion in the capital. The newspaper stunt might well have been inspired by the Ministry research project, in which an Austin Light-Six motor-car, driven by a professional chauffeur, ferried officials with stop-watches and clipboards on a series of journeys across four routes through the capital.⁴ The first route ran 12.6 miles from Chiswick in the west to Bow Road in the east. The second ran the same length from Hornsey in the north to Streatham in the south. The third route ran from Golders Green in the north-west to Lewisham in the south-east. The fourth was a route of 22.75 miles from Chiswick around the North Circular Road to Ilford. Journey times were recorded, as were the locations and duration of delays and stoppages. The driver was ‘steady and competent’, with ‘no inducement to attempt to break records or to take risks’. He therefore represented the ‘punctiliously cautious and considerate driver who presumably constitutes the bulk of the British motoring community’.⁵

After the officials had spent several weeks plying the routes daily, the results showed an overall average speed across the three cross-London routes of 12.5 mph. But it was the west-to-east route through the City that was the slowest, averaging 5.85 mph with the worst journey averaging just 3.6 mph. These journeys were ‘painfully slow’ and ‘ceaselessly congested’, according to the official report.⁶ Next-worst was the route from Euston Road south to Trafalgar Square, with the slowest journey averaging 6.3 mph. The problems occurred most markedly at junctions, and the report listed the most problematic intersections, including Ludgate Circus, Bank, Gardiner’s Corner at Aldgate, St Giles’ Circus, and the junction of Euston Road and Tottenham Court Road. By contrast, the circular route avoiding Central London was much faster, with average speeds of 23.6 mph, meaning it was often quicker to go the long way around. Commentators, noting the Ministry of Transport’s 1936 traffic survey work, asked ‘Is a road crisis developing?’⁷

This book examines traffic congestion in twentieth-century London, focusing largely on the period to about 1980, but with some excursions into more recent territory. It surveys the ways congestion has been considered in the history of urban planning, and examines a range of alternative ‘solutions’ to the problem as well as how they have been negotiated into reality. In doing so, it will decode ‘the traffic problem’, setting it into wider geographical, political, and technological contexts.

The traffic problem in history

The answer to the question posed in 1936 about a road crisis seems obvious. It is all we talk about when we discuss transport in the capital – the congestion, the fact that we go no faster today than in the age of the horse. It is all we have ever talked about, as London’s canon of modern-day chroniclers has described. Peter Ackroyd, for instance, tracks complaints about the traffic problem back 500 years, noting that ‘The state of traffic in the capital was a source of constant complaint in the sixteenth century, as it has become for each generation.’⁸ Stephen Inwood notes that there was a brief improvement following the seventeenth-century Great Fire, but that ‘in the eighteenth century the traffic problem grew worse again’ and, the following century, ‘London’s traffic congestion went from bad to worse.’⁹ Calls for something to be done became more insistent in Regency times, as James Winter has described, noting ‘officialdom’s growing concern about the traffic problem’ in the 1830s, when new traffic legislation expressed the seriousness with which it was taken.¹⁰ Roy Porter told a similar tale of traffic woe in the nineteenth century, a time when ‘London’s traffic problems were becoming ominous’ and ‘jams could be grim’.¹¹ As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth and the motor-car joined the streetscape, the problem just continued to get worse. Jonathan Schneer observes that, in 1900, ‘London traffic jams were notorious, new-fangled horseless carriages and traditional horse-drawn vehicles often merging in near gridlock conditions.’¹² Jerry White agrees, commenting that ‘Traffic was one of the enduring problems of the nineteenth century … and so it remained throughout the twentieth.’¹³ The traffic problem is a refrain, ever present in the mouths of Londoners and London historians. We keep returning to it when we speak of London.

Amid this constant background of general complaint can be discerned peaks of concern. Two such peaks will be considered time and again in this study. The first spanned the late 1920s and early 1930s. Joe Moran has noted that this was a period of critical importance in the traffic experience, with the foundation of the Pedestrians’ Association in the face of growing concerns over road safety, a Road Traffic Act that sought to impose responsibilities on motorists, and the publication of the Highway Code.¹⁴ The Ministry of Transport, with its 1936 traffic survey, was thus responding to a growing concern about traffic. A second peak of concern over London’s traffic was the period from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, this time over what Simon Gunn has described as a ‘motor revolution’ in the expansion of automobility in urban Britain, when motor transport was ‘high on the political agenda’.¹⁵

One example demonstrates the seriousness with which 1930s commentators viewed the traffic problem. In 1933, a former railway worker and transport writer, Henry Watson, published the book Street Traffic Flow. It was a major study of urban traffic congestion, and in order to treat the traffic system as a whole, Watson consulted a wide range of bodies, including the Ministry of Transport, Home Office, Automobile Association, Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, National Safety First Association, Pedestrians’ Association, National Horse Association, Metropolitan Police, tram and bus companies, journal editors, and traffic signal manufacturers, as well as traffic specialists in the USA.¹⁶

Watson’s study showed the traffic problem in fine grain. He differentiated between traffic types and their speeds and handling characteristics. He considered the way traffic varied from city to city, between residential and industrial districts, by time of day, by season, and by weather. He also observed the irregular, minute-by-minute variation of flow in busy streets, as well as the lateral position adopted by different vehicle classes at a time when camber mattered, surfaces were often slippery with oil and horse manure, and many streets included tramway tracks. He provided exhaustive data on delays owing to obstructions; analysis of flow over different types of junction; accident statistics; and the effects of traffic signals, of pedestrian crossings, and of parked vehicles. He included 21 newly commissioned photographs representing traffic problems in London’s streets; 89 graphs, illustrations and diagrams; 35 tables of statistics; and an extensive bibliography. He concluded his account with an assessment of the economics and politics of traffic, considering how time could be given value in order to estimate the costs of congestion, and whether certain users should be subject to restrictions.

Watson’s book gives us a clear sense of the technical problems of traffic. Yet it also shows that apparently even-handed representations contain political bias. Watson favoured tram travel, and the book comes down strongly in its favour against motor buses. He claimed that:

For heavy passenger transport the bus is commonly – and in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• 1     Introducing the traffic problem
• 2     The traffic problem in urban planning
• 3     Engineers, flyovers, and empires
• 4     Cops, guard rails, and segregation1
• 5     Economists, prices, and markets1
• 6     Scientists, sensors, and surveillance
• 7     The traffic problem and the mobilities of capital
• 8     Conclusions and epilogue
• Index