Are Trams Socialist Read online

  Trolleybuses, a particularly useful form of public transport as they were quiet and did not emit fumes, as well as being cheaper than trams, were also culled. There were roughly fifty systems around the UK at the peak, and because they required less investment, and were not perceived to be getting in the way of cars quite so much, they survived longer. Many were not closed down until the 1960s, and the schemes in Walsall and Cardiff survived until the start of the 1970s. Again, numerous European cities saw the value in these ­quiet (if slightly cumbersome) buses and they survive to this day.

  Remarkably, the Underground, now such an overused resource, was also seen as expendable in the post-war period. In researching The Subterranean Railway, my history of the London Tube, I discovered that there were several years in the 1950s when the Underground received as little as £300,000 to fund its entire investment programme. Expansions planned before the war were shelved and the much-needed Victoria Line, first mooted in the 1940s, did not see the light of day until 1968. Indeed, after the splurge of lines built in the first decade of the twentieth century, the only other new Tube line opened in the twentieth century was the Jubilee line, built – with a characteristic lack of planning – in two sections twenty years apart. Moreover, in a monument to the incompetence of British transport planning, a section of the line, to Charing Cross, had to be abandoned because the extension was constructed on an alignment not originally envisaged: a fantastic waste of resources given the paucity of investment in the system during this period. It lies gathering dust under a city crying out for more Underground capacity.

  Chapter 3

  Roads and more roads

  The long-term emphasis on roads in transport policy should be viewed in the context of an exceptionalism about British attitudes. Britain has long had a somewhat different attitude towards roads and traffic than its European counterparts, even looking far back in history, and this helps to explain the rapidity with which the new form of traction was allowed to dominate after World War I, especially in urban areas. The town planning academic Carmen Hass-Klau suggests there are key cultural differences between German (and other continental European) and British (and, consequently, Anglo-­American, also including Australian, Canadian and New Zealand) attitudes towards road use. She postulates that it is to do with national concepts of freedom and suspicion of state intervention, and this may explain why, for example, British towns and cities have been slow to embrace the kind of pedestrianization schemes that are commonplace on the continent or to try to create the central pedestrianized squares that are so important in giving cities vibrancy. German cities were traditionally more likely to impose controls over the use of wheeled vehicles, especially in narrow streets, out of a Teutonic desire for order. British city rulers tended not to interfere in that way, and in Britain

  there appears to have been (and still is) a greater acceptance of wheeled, and later motor, traffic as a way of life from very early on and a possible fear of conflicts of ‘equal rights’ of all participants were not provided.⁶

  This attitude was later encapsulated by Nicholas Ridley in clear ideological terms:

  The private motorist … wants the chance to live a life that gives him [sic] a new dimension of freedom – freedom to go where he wants, when he wants, and for as long as he wants.⁷

  There is only one thing wrong with this argument, but it is a rather fundamental point: one person’s freedom may require another’s imprisonment. It is the ­tragedy of the commons. Road space is a scarce resource and yet there is no price control on it. As has been argued before, in a world of infinite resources and land, the car would be perfect. Traffic jams in space are rare. However, on this planet, and particularly in urban areas, the space available for cars is not limitless. Indeed, it is highly constrained. The road lobby has, therefore, devoted the thrust of its efforts to trying to make it less constrained.

  The apogee of this line of thinking was the publication of the Buchanan Report – Traffic in Towns – in 1963. The motorways were beginning to tackle the inter-urban traffic jams that regularly hit the headlines, most notoriously on the Exeter bypass in the summer, but the roads in towns were becoming clogged and the congestion was unbearable. Even in relatively small towns, congestion, noise, accidents and fumes were making life in central areas intolerable and were driving people out to the suburbs, where the quality of life was seen as better. It was an irony, then, that enhanced mobility was the start of the decline of many inner city areas – a phenomenon that was of course much more intense and widespread in the US. Better access into city centres also made it easier to get out of them.

  Buchanan’s report, which was commissioned by the government, was an attempt to adapt towns and cities to the ‘full motorization’ that he deemed inevitable given the popularity of cars. Interest in the issue was so great that the report was published, in a shortened edition, as a ‘Penguin special’ that sold tens of thousands of copies.

  The key recommendation was the segregation of motor traffic and pedestrians, which inevitably required the construction of a vast network of urban motorways, dual carriageways and feeder roads in every town and city. While Colin Buchanan himself expressed some concerns about the implications of motorization, he was of the view that if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. The forces propelling society towards a car-dominated culture were, he thought, irresistible and had to be accommodated. As he explained in the introduction to the report,

  we concluded, since it is obviously the desire of society to use the motor vehicle to the full, that the only practical basis for a study of the present kind was to accept this desire as a starting point and then to explore and demonstrate its consequences.⁸

  In the preface, Sir Geoffrey Crowther, a former editor of The Economist, wrote: ‘One of the peculiarities of the motor car is that virtually everybody wants to have one.’⁹ It was that misconception which was to fuel transport policy throughout this period.

  A neat illustration of the Buchanan ideal is the small Berkshire town of Newbury, which he used as an example. He argued that it was essential to build a road network in the town to cope with ‘peak car’, which entailed the reorganization of towns around this priority. In Newbury, with a population of just 30,000, his estimate was that commuting car numbers would increase threefold, from 3,000 to 9,000. He then admitted that the existing town structure simply could not accommodate this growth:

  We did not construct a peak hour flow diagram for the year 2010 on the basis of the existing street system because it was quite obvious that the existing system could not possibly carry the enormously increased loads.¹⁰

  In other words, to meet the needs of the motorists, the whole town centre would have to be destroyed and rebuilt because the urban motorways and what were known as distributor roads (new roads aimed at better ‘distributing the traffic’) would channel traffic into the traditional main street.

  Plymouth, which had the bad luck of being flattened by German bombers targeting its shipyard, had the further misfortune of being rebuilt precisely on this basis and as a result remains a nightmare to this day for road users and public transport passengers alike. As Ernest Marples, the transport minister in the Conservative government of 1959–64, explained to a British Road Federation conference in 1963, this was to be the norm for towns and cities across the UK because they were laid out in the wrong way to accommodate cars:

  Plymouth: a town centre fashioned for the motorist.

  Source: photo by Smalljim (see page 115 for full details).

  We have to face the fact, whether we like it or not, that the way we have built our towns is entirely the wrong way for motor traffic. We want an entirely different type of town.¹¹

  Newbury fortunately survived that fate at the time but was, ironically, the subject of a fierce row in the 1990s over the improvement of its bypass, which was eventually built. Imagine, by way of contrast, an Italian transport minister suggesting that the historic centres of Italy’s towns and cities be pulled down
in order to make space for the growing number of Cinquecentos. They would be ridiculed and laughed out of office, and yet city centres across the UK were ripped out and destroyed to make way for the car far more comprehensively than the Luftwaffe (which had, in places such as Coventry, started the process) had ever achieved.

  The most remarkable aspect of the Buchanan Report was its blindness towards other forms of transport. There was no consideration of how accommodating this vast influx of cars would affect bus and rail services. As Kerry Hamilton and Stephen Potter wrote in a book that accompanied a Channel 4 series on transport,

  there was no reference anywhere in the report of the implications this would have for forms of transport other than the private car.¹²

  To encourage acceptance of Buchanan’s plans, the ministry organized a roadshow to present the findings in cities such as Glasgow, Liverpool and Newcastle upon Tyne and then sent a circular out to local councils exhorting them to draw up ‘land use transportation plans’, which were, essentially, an American idea that required them to forecast how much traffic there would be and then plan the roads necessary to accommodate that traffic. This was the basis of the now much discredited ‘predict and provide’ technique, which, in fact, has never been applied to other modes of transport – apart from aviation, and even there the obstacles to airport development have proved to be a constraint. More than a hundred local authorities drew up these land use transportation plans over the next decade, determining the nature of their town planning for a generation.

  In the event, the Buchanan Report could not be implemented because of its own internal contradictions. While many towns and cities still bear the hallmarks of failed attempts to worship at Buchanan’s altar, none could afford the full Monty. That would simply have required far too much spending in relation to the size of the area the roads would have served and raised the ire of too many local citizens. While the constraints of cost, political opposition and practicality prevented local authorities from adopting the Buchanan thinking in toto, many town centres – ranging in size from Burnley to Birmingham, Leicester to Luton – remain blighted to this day by half-implemented ‘Buchananization’, with ring roads, dual carriageways and even odd short stretches of motorway creating soulless car-oriented environments that encourage motor vehicles to enter city centres or speed through them, cutting cities in half as decisively as the Berlin wall. Poor Leeds even had ‘Motorway city of the seventies’ stamped on all outgoing letters as testimony to its adoption of the Buchanan ethic. Buchanan’s ideas formed the core of advice from central government to local planners for a couple of decades, and some planners and highway engineers are still influenced by it when drawing up transport schemes today. The nirvana of an urban landscape built to accommodate the car remains a dream for the true believers.

  It was London, though, that became the subject of the most ambitious motorization plan, but it was a scheme that proved to be Buchanan’s nemesis. London, with its enormous traffic jams and its narrow streets, had been subjected to many ‘solutions’ by planners and politicians. Ensuring cars could get into central London was seen as vital to the national interest and the functioning of the economy. The scheme that best illustrated this was the transformation of Park Lane, the short road that runs for a bit less than a mile between Hyde Park Corner and Marble Arch, into a dual carriageway with four lanes in both directions. This took some effort on the part of politicians, since it required nabbing a ­twenty-acre section out of Hyde Park, a Royal Park, but was justified by the transport minister, John Boyd Carpenter, because

  no single road development scheme could make a greater contribution to the relief of growing traffic congestion.¹³

  Savour that statement for a moment. This was more important than motorways, dual carriageways, bypas­ses and any country roads. More important than trains, buses and planes. The priority, according to Boyd Carpenter, was to get people into the centre of London as quickly as possible. Nothing encapsulates the thinking of the period better than the establishment in 1961 of Britain’s first drive-in bank: a branch of Drummonds (now Royal Bank of Scotland) in Trafalgar Square. The thinking, therefore, was that it was desirable for people to drive into the city centre in order to carry out banking operations without getting out of their cars: a neat illustration of the contradictions and lack of reality of these car-based ideas. Fortunately, the drive-in bank did not catch on and soon disappeared.

  In the event, taking out a chunk of the Royal Parks was not enough for the likes of Boyd Carpenter. A much more ambitious scheme to solve London’s traffic problems once and for all was in the offing. A plan for a series of ring roads in and around London was first mooted in the 1940s, but it was not until Marples was installed as transport minister in 1959 that the government began to seriously plan them. The favoured idea was for three concentric ‘motorway ­boxes’: the outer one became the M25 and the middle one was essentially a revamped north and south circular. It was the inner one – an urban motorway, largely on stilts, running in a 3–4 mile circle from Charing Cross – that was most controversial. At first the scheme was quietly developed away from the public gaze by a team of road engineers working jointly for the ministry and the Greater London Council (GLC) with the support of both main political parties. Once information about the plan began to be made public, however, there was growing opposition. The plan would have involved the demolition of at least 20,000 homes, which was seen as unproblematic by the British Road Federation because, according to evidence the organization gave to the GLC, ‘much of the route lies in obsolete areas which urgently need rebuilding’. That was not the way that residents of Battersea, Hampstead, Chelsea and Blackheath viewed their local areas. It was precisely because the road, which would have had eight lanes in some sections, would have destroyed parts of these affluent and middle-class areas of London that the project was probably always doomed.

  However, a section of it was built. Motorists wondering why they are ‘blessed’ with a half-mile section of motorway (barely long enough to reach the seventy mile an hour speed limit) north of Shepherds Bush round­about in West London can thank the promoters of the motorway boxes, even if all it succeeds in doing is getting them to the inevitable jams on the A40 more quickly. It was the sight of that motorway and the linked two-and-a-half-mile Westway spur into central London that roused considerable protest – not least on the day in 1970 that it was opened by Michael Heseltine – and ensured that the project would eventually be shelved permanently. It was not until 1971, though, when the Labour party changed its mind and came out against the ringways, that the project started to fall apart. The issue featured prominently in the 1973 GLC election, and the victorious Labour party soon scrapped the two innermost ringways, but it had no power to stop the outer one, which was eventually built as the M25, as it was routed outside the capital’s boundaries.

  It would be naive to say that the popularity of the car and its primary place in planning were purely the result of the policies of a few politicians and civil servants. The car was popular and its negative effects were not always apparent. It was still possible in the 1960s, and possibly even in the 1970s, ‘to go for a drive’ in the countryside and enjoy the experience. Owning a car seemed to offer unparalleled freedom and unlimited potential to travel. However, it was the alacrity with which the likes of Buchanan supported the notion of the car as the solution to all problems of mobility without any understanding of the context or of the limitations that was so damaging and so at odds with thinking elsewhere in Europe, where there was in many places a far more measured ­approach. They may still use their cars, but, because there is ­decent public transport, Europeans can also make use of an ­alternative. In other words, spending on public transport has increased, not decreased, their options.

  Chapter 4

  Love and hate on the tracks

  The loss of the motorway boxes marked a turning point in transport history. It made clear that there were limits to motorization and that, in urban a
reas particularly, a policy of trying to enable unlimited access to the car was bound to fail. It was not just in London that the penny had dropped. Across Britain in the late 1970s, public inquiries into road schemes were being disrupted by anti-roads campaigners, who combined direct action with playing the Department of Transport at its own game by mugging up on statistics and other technical issues. No longer could the department simply announce plans and expect to see them quietly come to fruition. Mick Hamer describes in his book on the roads lobby how a meeting in Shipley Town Hall about the Aire Valley motorway, the M650 (the three digits rather give away the fact that it was solving a traffic problem that did not exist), was disrupted when

  two chairs which had been jamming the door handles splintered and fell away. In rushed an angry crowd led by a local farmer… Suddenly, through the doors of Shipley Town Hall flooded a tide of people who had gained the self-confidence to challenge the unchallengeable. No longer were they to be fobbed off by technicalities, or defeated by rules that loaded the dice in the ministry’s favour.¹⁴