Transport Planning

Vision and Practice

John Adams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000360585
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Transportation & Navigation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Originally published in 1981, this volume provides a systematic and detailed critique of the practice of transport planning. It shows how past transport policies blighted cities, suburbs and countryside alike, led to increased death and injury on the roads and offered the whole of the motorized world as a hostage to the oil-producing countries. The book urges us all to consider whether increase mobility is really synonymous with progress and to take a more active part in planning decisions that may adversely affect our futures. The book will be of interest to those concerned with environmental issues & transport planning.

Part I

PROBLEMS:
A global perspective

1 The Ladder of Progress

Car ownership ... should increase, for personal mobility is what people want, and those who already have it should not try to pull the ladder up behind them ... (1)

That everyone is entitled tomorrow to what the most fortunate enjoy today is a belief that has understandable appeal for politicians and electorates of all ideological hues. It is a belief that dominates the planning of transport and communications, and to challenge it is widely thought to be tantamount to committing political suicide. The following quotation is taken from ‘Socialist Commentary’ but would be equally at home in the manifestos of almost all political parties everywhere:

no politician can ride roughshod over such a strong desire for personal or family transport. In the society of the future one must continue to expect that a wish for a car, or some similar means of personal transport, will rank almost as high among the necessities of life as a decent home, even for the poorest families. (2)

Sir Colin Buchanan, perhaps Britain’s best-known and most influential transport planner, explains why the desire for automotive personal mobility is so strong, and argues that it must not be denied:

I have never managed to make very much money, and for the most part, in my half century of motoring, I have made do with second-hand cars. But what an enrichment of life has resulted! Marvellous holidays - camping, caravanning, much of Europe at our disposal in a three week vacation. Short visits in infinite variety - to relatives and friends, to the sea, out into the country, to great houses, gardens, zoos and parks. Spur of the moment trips - it is a fine day so out we go . . . . Why cannot we be less hypocritical and admit that a motor car is just about the most convenient device that we ever invented, and that possession of it and usage in moderation is a perfectly legitimate ambition for all classes of people.(3)

The above three statements have been taken from discussions of British transport planning problems arising from the growth of car ownership, but the strength of the desire for increased personal mobility, and the legitimacy that is claimed for it are not confined to Britain. A similar spirit is found in John Rae’s ‘The Road and the Car in American Life’:

Transportation is essential to social progress; to be exact, transportation is social progress because it has been throughout history the way in which not only goods and services but ideas as well were exchanged among peoples.... The Road and the Car together have an enormous capacity for promoting economic growth, raising standards of living, and creating a good society. The challenge before us is to implement this capacity.(4)

A belief in the existence of a ladder of progress that all classes of people everywhere can and should climb also informs discussions about the prospects for travel by airplane and other more exotic means. Sir Peter Masefield, former head of the British Airports Authority, is optimistic about the possibilities of extending the ladder:

I have no doubt that the Ballistic Transport will appear in the wake of the Space Shuttle and in the train of the astronauts. Anywhere to anywhere in an hour - reclining comfortably, oblivious to accelerations or surroundings after a pleasant knockout draught and before an instant reviver on arrival. Such ballistic transport will not only be very quick but also very cheap.... What is clear is that air transport still has a vast contribution to make to the prosperity, the happiness and the well being of mankind. Its disbenefits, of noise and congestion, can be phased out - its benefits enhanced.(5)

Such attitudes are, historically speaking, relatively recent. Throughout history most people in most places have led pedestrian lives. Their settlement patterns and travelling have been, as a consequence, very tightly constrained. Such vehicular transport as existed was powered by humans, animals or wind. The rich had more mobility than the poor, but nobody had very much. Mythologies abounding in advanced technologies - flying carpets, winged chariots, seven-league boots, broomsticks and the like - attest to a pervasive desire for more, but in technologically unimaginative ages most people were resigned to this remaining the prerogative of the gods. Indeed the legend of Icarus suggests that the very idea of a ladder by which mere mortals might attain such mobility was considered an impious one. Mobility, generally speaking, was something rudimentary that people provided for themselves rather than something planned and provided by the state.

At a time that roughly coincides with the beginning of industrialization in England there began a period of remarkable reductions in the cost of transport and even more remarkable increases in its speed and comfort and in the numbers who made use of it. The achievements of the gods have been equalled and surpassed. Concorde can fly faster than Apollo’s flaming chariot and advances in the technology of telecommunications have created a capability for exchanging messages that far exceeds anything ever attributed to Mercury. There have been those who have doubted the desirability of these achievements - Thoreau writing at the beginning of the railway age and Illich writing at the end of it are examples - but the transport and communications history of this period is almost invariably told as a story of economic and social progress following in the train of technological advance. In this story Icarus’s vices of hubris and impiety have been transformed into a heroism that dares to subject the forces of nature. It is a story of mankind becoming, if not more god-like, at least more civilized.

Histories of transport and communications, the planning literature, and the speeches of politicians on the subject are dominated by the ladder metaphor. The historians chart the past progress of mankind’s ascent, the planners and politicians project this progress into the future. Harold Perkin, in a history of Britain’s railways, exemplifies this spirit of progress that pervades almost all such literature:

All civilization depends on communication - between man and man, town and town, country and country, perhaps in the future between planet and planet.... The invention of the railway, next to that of the power driven factory, is Britain’s greatest contribution to the progress of civilization, for it was here that the real conquest of space began. Whatever new frontiers of space men may conquer in the last third of the twentieth century, the first conquest of physical distance by mechanical power was the revolution in communications from which all the rest have stemmed.(6)

What has stemmed from it is an impressive a...