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a revolution in our personal habits, but has made the entire system of streets and roads inherited from the past out-of-date and almost unworkable.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

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

22

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.

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.

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

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.

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

24

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

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.

26