Are Trams Socialist Read online

  London had the extra benefit of underground railways. The stimulus for the creation of the Underground was the congested nature of London’s thoroughfares, epitomized by Doré’s famous print of Ludgate Hill with the streets clogged with carriages, costermongers and a throng of people. This was not a new phenomenon. London’s streets were narrow, crowded and insanitary, with overhanging buildings and crowded dwellings. They had been this way for centuries and the rebuilding of the city after the Great Fire had been a fantastic missed opportunity. The centres of provincial cities also suffered from overcrowding, though not on the same scale as London.

  The Metropolitan Railway between Farringdon and Paddington, completed in 1863, was the world’s first underground railway and was built by the simple cut and cover method – essentially digging a hole, putting a railway in it and covering it over. Over the next quarter of a century an extensive network of lines – powered, remarkably, by steam engines, and encompassing today’s Circle, District and Metropolitan lines – was built up. The Metropolitan recognized early on the value of providing for the working classes and offered cheap tickets on early morning trains at a third of the normal nine pence return fare.

  With too many buildings on London’s streets and too many utilities underneath them, a series of deep-level ‘Tubes’ were cut out of the capital’s clay and, by necessity, were also electrically powered since steam would have created a deadly atmosphere in the closed tunnels deep below the city’s streets. In the UK, only Glasgow emulated London by creating an underground system, but several cities built up extensive suburban rail networks, some of which survive today. Commuting became a way of life for large swathes of the population.

  With technological improvements such as electrification – which was eventually adopted throughout the Underground and began to be introduced on the rail network late in the nineteenth century – and substantial investment thanks to the profits generated by what was often a monopoly situation, the railways enjoyed something of a golden age in the run-up to World War I. Motor buses, replacing their horse-drawn predecessors, were also a great improvement, and tram networks were intensifying. Public transport, operated by a mix of public and private interests, was dominant. And then that most disruptive of technologies, the motor car, arrived, destroying these cosy monopolies and breaking up the established pattern of transport in an unplanned and unpredictable way. The policy response was then, as it is now, inchoate and confused.

  Chapter 2

  Getting nowhere faster

  Today’s Lycra-clad cyclists will find it ironic that the roads were initially improved for their more modestly dressed predecessors, who campaigned for the creation of a network that would enable them to enjoy a day’s outing without numerous punctures. For a couple of decades from the mid 1870s, cyclists were the fastest travellers on the roads and the two main cycling organizations linked together to form the Roads Improvement Association (RIA), which lobbied for the creation of a network of smooth roads. Cyclists even raised money to pay for road improvements and took recalcitrant highway authorities to court under the Highways Act 1835 for their failure to maintain the roads in a proper state of repair. The lobbying by cyclists was all too successful. County surveyors, terrified by seeing their counterparts humiliated in court, rushed to spend money on making good their highways. A similar process took place in the US, where cyclists also paid for a network of cycle paths and lobbied for road improvements.

  For the cyclists, it proved to be a case of turkeys voting for Christmas. The smooth roads were even better suited to cars than bicycles. Consequently, the motoring organizations that the cyclists helped set up were soon lobbying against them and arguing to exclude them from the roads entirely. Worse, some of the keenest cycling lobbyists were also early motorists and soon spurned their former colleagues, lured by the attraction of effortless travel at unprecedented speeds. The roads, which had initially been created largely for pedestrians, were soon excluding them: their main, and sometimes only, purpose was to cater for motor vehicles travelling as fast as possible from A to B. Once the Red Flag Act was repealed in 1896, the triumph of the car was inevitable.

  At the outbreak of World War I, there were just over 100,000 private cars registered in the UK, but already the rules of the road were being rewritten in their favour. As Carlton Reid, the chronicler of the history of cycling and roads, put it:

  In just a short space of time cyclists – and pedestrians – became alien and undesirable users of British roads. Alien and undesirable to motorists, that is.²

  The early motorists speeding through the countryside were not universally welcome. There was no shortage of cartoons in the press depicting these Mr Toads imperilling the lives of country folk and being upbraided. Consequently, the early roads lobby did not have it all their own way. There were plenty of people who objected to the dirt, the dust and the danger, like Evelyn ­Everett-Green, a prominent turn-of-the-century author, who lived on the main road between Guildford and Dorking and complained to a parliamentary enquiry that drivers ‘would go at any speed’, with the dust stirred up by their vehicles meaning that ‘all her flowers were spoiled and [her] health injured’. She had been forced to move her study to the back of the house because of ‘the vibration, the noise and the smell’.³

  However, the march of the car was unstoppable, not least because it was the rich and the powerful who were able to afford motor vehicles, while the ‘lower orders’ could often not even afford a bicycle and were restricted to walking and public transport. Motorists were helped by both legislative measures and government policies. The first major legislation, the 1903 Motor Car Act, required cars to be licensed and display a registration number, and it imposed a twenty miles per hour speed limit that was to be implemented by county councils. The crucial element, however, was the gradual acceptance and codification of the notion of ‘obstructing the highway’: people and animals had to get out of the way of the cars. This prioritization, which survives to this day, underpins the flow of traffic and established today’s pattern of urban transport.

  The first taxes on motor vehicles were introduced by Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George in the 1909 budget and consisted of a petrol tax of three pence per gallon and an annual vehicle tax of between £2 2s and £42 depending on the vehicle type and its horsepower. Lloyd George made a key concession to motorists by promising that all the money raised would be spent on improvements to the road network. However, by the mid 1920s his successor, Winston Churchill, was already raiding the fund for general taxation, and eventually, in 1937, the link was formally abandoned, though many advocates for motoring suggest that this hypothecation still exists. Oddly, in his first post-election budget in 2015, the chancellor, George Osborne, suggested that a reformed Vehicle Excise Duty would be earmarked solely for spending on roads.

  The naive cycling lobby had pushed for the creation of wide main roads in the expectation that cyclists would then be safer on the minor ones, but, instead, the construction of bypasses and dual carriageways (a quaintly inappropriate word, which is a reminder that cars were initially considered to be carriages) merely encouraged cars to go faster and did little to improve conditions elsewhere. The Roads Improvement Association, which remained influential throughout the interwar period, was responsible for a fundamental change in philosophy. According to Mick Hamer’s classic book on the roads lobby, Wheels within Wheels, the RIA

  established the philosophy that the roads should be made to suit the traffic. Before the RIA, no single philosophy prevailed.⁴

  Indeed, Hamer cites the requirement, before the advent of cars, that wagons had to have large wheels in order to avoid cutting up tracks, and, as he points out,

  the RIA’s philosophy, ‘that roads should be made to suit the traffic’, ruled for the next sixty years.⁴

  Measures controlling car use were slower to be introduced. The driving test was not introduced until 1935, and even then it was suspended during World War II and not reintroduc
ed until 1946. The notional speed limit of twenty miles per hour that had been introduced in 1903 was universally disregarded, as noted by a parliamentary inquiry in 1930, which estimated that not one driver in a thousand observed the limit and that, indeed, bus services were timetabled on the basis of travelling faster than the law stipulated. Consequently, the limit was abolished that year but the death toll, already over 6,000 annually, rose alarmingly to 7,343 in 1934, forcing the authorities to create a thirty miles per hour limit in built-up areas. The first drink-driving legislation was introduced in 1925, but a legal threshold of alcohol content in the blood was only introduced in 1967, amid much controversy about country pubs being forced out of business as a result. Wearing a seat belt in the front seats of a car was not made mandatory until 1983, although anchorage points had been a requirement in new cars since the 1960s, and the requirement for rear seat belts was brought in as recently as 1991. Pedestrian crossings were only first established in the mid 1930s.

  Much of this was the result of attacks on positive legislation and rearguard action by the roads lobby, which outgrew its origins as the plaything of car-enthusiast aristocrats, such as Lord Montague of Beaulieu, after World War I and became a highly professionalized and influential group that included car manufacturers (protected at the time by an import duty of a third on all vehicles), oil companies, the country’s two motoring clubs (the Automobile Association and the Royal Automobile Club), road hauliers, car salesmen and bus companies (notably the biggest: the London General Omnibus Company). At the end of World War I, David Lloyd George, by then prime minister, had wanted to nationalize the railways (supported by Winston Churchill) and incorporate them into the Ministry of Transport, which was already responsible for roads. The motoring lobby baulked at the prospect, concerned that the railway interest would dominate, especially as the inaugural transport minister, Sir Eric Geddes, had been a leading executive of the North Eastern Railway. Therefore, the Automobile Association and the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders lobbied successfully not only to ensure that the legislation specified there should be a separate department within the ministry to deal with roads but also that there would be a committee, made up of representatives of highway authorities and other motoring interests, to advise the minister on matters concerning roads, bridges and other facilities for vehicles. In other words, the power of the roads lobby was actually legally enshrined in the legislation whereas the poor railways were always outsiders looking in.

  The ministry of transport in its various successive incarnations has always been riven between the two modes: roads and rail. Ministers have always been characterized as ‘roads men’ or ‘railway men’ (there have only ever been three women transport cabinet members and, of them, only Barbara Castle had any lasting impact) and the two sections of the department have traditionally acted separately, even when, as recently, they were supposed to be integrated.

  Pushed by the powerful roads lobby and backed by many politicians who embraced the same type of philosophy later expressed so neatly by Nicholas Ridley (one of the most influential of Margaret Thatcher’s transport secretaries), between the wars Britain embraced the car wholeheartedly and began to adapt its infrastructure to accommodate this new deity, both within urban areas and between them. The roads lobby won an important battle over the composition of the Ministry of Transport created in the aftermath of the war by ensuring that roads and rail remained separate sections in the ministry. This was to have a lasting impact and remains crucially important even today. As Philip Bagwell and Peter Lyth’s Transport in Britain explains:

  In the years that followed, road building and motor transport assumed an ever growing importance by comparison with the railways.⁵

  This was reflected in the numbers of staff in the ministry who worked on the roads side: by the mid twentieth century they outnumbered their railway colleagues by a factor of at least four to one – a neat illustration of the politicians’ priorities.

  The demand for road space was soaring. The development of road freight traffic had been stimulated by the cheap availability of ex-army lorries in the aftermath of the war. These were bought cheaply by ex-servicemen, who promptly set up local haulage businesses, taking freight off the railways, which never recovered to their pre-war levels of goods carriage. The General Strike of 1926, when the rail network effectively ground to a halt, also proved a boon to the haulage industry as, mostly not unionized, it kept running for the duration of the action. The number of buses also increased rapidly in the 1920s, mostly run by small outfits, although the railway companies, now consolidated into just four groupings, were eager to stifle competition by using their industrial muscle to enter the bus market.

  The newly created Ministry of Transport recognized the need for a network of major roads across the country and started providing funds, partly to relieve unemployment and give the demobbed soldiers work. Progress was, in truth, slow. Before 1937, responsibility for roads, even major arteries, remained with the often-cash-strapped county councils, and road schemes tended to focus on areas of high unemployment rather than on those with the greatest traffic congestion. As such, there was no coherent national plan until the establishment of the trunk road network in 1937: a network that encompassed more than 4,000 miles of road and became the direct responsibility of the ministry. Despite the efforts of the ministry and the roads lobby, the lack of a centralized strategy and the shortage of money in the aftermath of the Depression, the development of Britain’s road network lagged behind progress in America and in several European nations, notably Germany, where early types of motorway had started being built.

  A rather louche gossip magazine, with the suggestive title of Tit-Bits, was to play an unlikely key role in the development of the British motorway network. The County Surveyors Society had begun work on a plan for a 1,000-mile network of motorways and had even sought the advice of their German counterparts. Just before the outbreak of war, the plan – consisting of rather crudely drawn crayon lines on a road map originally published in Tit-Bits – was presented to the government and became the basis of the campaign for road improvements.

  The map that set out Britain's ­motorway ­network (from Tit-Bits magazine).

  The war put this lobbying on hold, though there was some activity behind the scenes to ensure that road investment would be given a high priority after the conflict. The British Roads Federation (BRF), which encompassed a wide range of members from across the industry, had now taken on the mantle of leading the roads lobby and pushed vociferously for the Tit-Bits scheme. Although there was no money to build roads in the immediate aftermath of the war, the BRF managed to persuade the Labour transport minister, Alfred Barnes, to announce, in May 1946, a ten-year plan to build an 800-mile network of motorways not much different from the scheme set out in Tit-Bits. The BRF increased the pressure by distributing 35,000 copies of a pamphlet called ‘The case for motorways’, which helped ensure the passage of legislation through parliament allowing for the construction of motorways.

  Despite the lack of government money (post-war austerity was on a different scale to even the worst aspects of the current version), the BRF continued pressing its case – and it was pushing at an open door. The Conservative government that was elected in 1951 was even more eager than its predecessor to see a major expansion in the roads network, once money allowed. It took up and expanded Labour’s motorway programme, with construction soon starting.

  In one of those bizarre anomalies beloved of pub quiz question setters, Britain’s first motorway, opened in 1958, was the Preston bypass. It was no coincidence that it was located in Lancashire, as the county surveyor, James Drake, had long been an advocate of motorways and had drawn up plans for what essentially became a part of the M6. Plans for several other motorways were taking shape by then, and the arrival at the Ministry of Transport of Ernest Marples, who owned a majority shareholding in the eponymous civil engineering firm, ensured a speeding up of the motorway programme. The pend
ulum swung even further towards roads and against the railways in 1961 when Marples appointed the notorious axeman, Richard Beeching, to head British Railways, which had been nationalized thirteen years previously.

  The shift towards motorization was now in full swing. Once the country started recovering from the austerity of the immediate post-war period, with full employment, rising wages and the relative costs of motoring falling, owning a car became feasible for the middle classes and even for blue-collar workers who were enjoying a period of stable employment. There was, at least initially, a built-in time advantage for drivers. They could get door to door more quickly, given that public transport had to be accessed by walking to a bus stop or station. However, that advantage started being eroded as more and more people took to their cars, causing increasing congestion, a contradiction that was never recognized by policymakers intent on furthering the spread of car ownership, which was seen as desirable in and of itself.

  Public transport was reckoned to be of little relevance and suburban rail networks in the provinces were consequently pared back and bus networks were thinned out. All of Britain’s tram networks, with the exception of Blackpool’s famous seafront route, were closed between the 1930s and the early 1960s. They were seen as getting in the way of cars and as being irrelevant to the needs of the second half of the twentieth century. Manchester’s last tram ran in 1949, Liverpool’s system was scrapped the following year and London went in 1952, while Birmingham stumbled on till the year after that. Dozens of systems in smaller towns, nearly all of which had become municipally owned as they were loss-making, had gone already. Before the war there had been a few attempts to modernize systems. Leeds, for example, drew up a scheme to put trams in tunnels and allocate more road space for them, but, like all other attempts to improve tram networks, the plan was soon ditched as too expensive. While it was principally the competition for road space from the car that killed off the trams, often it was the need for renovation and the purchase of new trams that made systems unviable in the eyes of the municipal authorities. Many towns and cities in Europe, however – particularly in Eastern Europe, where car ownership was low under Communism, and in northern countries, which had a more enlightened attitude towards public transport – saw the value in keeping alive a system that, by its very nature, had priority over cars.