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Traffic in Towns:

A Retrospective

Feb 2103


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www.transportincities.com PAGE ii

Contents

Executive summary ............................................................................................................................................... 1Background ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 1Theoretical basis ............................................................................................................................................................................. 1Lineage (what the report built on and into) ..................................................................................................................................... 2Reports critics ................................................................................................................................................................................ 2Implementing Traffic in Towns ........................................................................................................................................................ 3Conclusions .................................................................................................................................................................................... 3

1. Background ................................................................................................................................................ 51.1 Urban reconstruction and environmentalism in post-war Britain ...................................................................................... 51.2 Colin Buchanan and Traffic in Towns .............................................................................................................................. 6

2. Working principles and general conc lusions ......................................................................................... 82.1 The problem ..................................................................................................................................................................... 82.2 Theoretical basis .............................................................................................................................................................. 92.3 General considerations .................................................................................................................................................. 122.4 Lineage (what the report built on and into) .................................................................................................................... 132.5 Reports critics ............................................................................................................................................................... 16

3. Implementing the Buchanan Report: motor ising the c ity ................................................................... 183.1 Land use / transportation studies ................................................................................................................................... 183.2 Town and Country Planning Act and Transport Act 1968 .............................................................................................. 193.3 Policy transfer ................................................................................................................................................................ 203.4 Buchanan layout in practice ........................................................................................................................................... 233.5 One level up: the South Hampshire Study ..................................................................................................................... 25

4. Conclusions ............................................................................................................................................. 28NOTES................................................................................................................................................................... 31REFERENCES ...................................................................................................................................................... 36

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www.transportincities.com PAGE 1

Executive summary

With the 50th anniversary in 2013 of Sir Colin Buchanans landmark publication, Traffic in Towns, a timelyretrospective is underway to revisit the core themes, issues and solutions and understand the effectivenessof these solutions for cities across the globe.

Background

The publication of the Traffic in Towns report in 1963 marked a watershed in planning thinking. The reportexhibited a common-sense approach towards major strategic issues that not only had a deep effect on the

development of transport planning, but also posed important questions related to contemporary urban landmanagement practices.

From the late 1950s, the UK had experienced a steady growth in vehicle ownership. Licensed motor vehiclesin Britain doubled in number between 1950 and 1960 (from 4.5 to 9.4 million), while the road networkremained modest in size and scale.

As traffic in Britains towns and cities grew worse, public anger was rising against the perceived failure ofgovernment to tackle the issue. While long-term planning for motor traffic in urban areas was firmly on thepolitical agenda by the early 1960s, few transport schemes were in the pipeline and the government was wellaware that the existing road capacity would have to cater for traffic in the short term.

In 1960, Ernest Marples, the Transport Minister of the Macmillan Government set up the London TrafficManagement Unit to carry out a special investigation into the nature of urban traffic. Rather than setting up alarge committee representative of all interests concerned, the Minister asked Colin Buchanan to join thedepartment and lead a team to undertake the study.

An engineer, architect and planner, Buchanan entered imperial service in Sudan before joining the BritishMinistry of Transport in 1935. Buchanan was allowed to hand-pick the nine members of his interdisciplinaryteam of architects, engineers, planners and economists, and a two-year limit was set for the study.

Published in November 1963, Traffic in Towns proved an immediate hit with the public selling nearly18,000 copies in four months before being republished the following year. The high quality report produced asuite of options for towns and cities to consider and resulted in urban areas taking on radical new planningapproaches in the immediate aftermath and over the following 20 years.

Traffic in Towns had a large impact in the UK and across much of the world. It is still the only report everproduced by Her Majesty's Stationery Office (HMSO) to be privately published in paperback (by Penguin in1964). Its long-term impact may have derived at least as much through the adoption ofTraffic in Towns asthe transport planning manual for generations of graduates and post-graduates in transport and planning asit did through direct impacts on government policy.

Theoretical basis

The overarching concept providing the theoretical context for Traffic in Towns is that transport planning andthe building of highway systems are part and parcel of a much wider subject. Buchanan believed in the ideaof towns as accumulated investment of centuries.


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Railway development in the 19th century allowed for a considerable loosening of urban structures, butsuburban development at the time tended to cluster around railway stations and their catchment areas. Itwas only in the early part of the 20th century, when cars and heavy-goods vehicles arrived with their ability toprovide a door-to-door transport service that the scene was set for a great physical expansion of urbanareas.

By the second part of the 20th century car ownership became a mass phenomenon as cities began toexpand outwards as never before.

The report laid out five key principles to sustain compact cities and address the urban traffic problem:

1. Transport is a function of land uses Traffic is not a mysterious event. People undertake journeys for avariety of reasons, with travel patterns closely related to the manner in which land uses are arranged.

2. Road hierarchy Most European cities have a road system based on a more or less symmetricalspider's-web plan with the town centre lying at the centre of and the other main concentrations of activitydisposed asymmetrically around it. Traffic in Towns argued that the road network should depend on thedisposition of the land use in different areas and the kind and quantities of traffic they generate.

3. The application of environmental standards to control the levels of fumes, noise and pollution Thereport pointed out that: there is a great deal at stake: it is not a question of retaining a few old buildings,but of conserving, in the face of the onslaught of motor traffic, a major part of the heritage of the English-

speaking world.

4. The traffic problem is related to three variables the standard of accessibility (or degree of usage ofmotor vehicles), the standard of environment (or degree of freedom from the adverse effects of traffic),and the extent of physical alterations (and hence of capital expenditure) for the purpose ofaccommodating traffic. Any urban community faced with traffic congestion can adjust these variables in anumber of ways but as said, to contain the anti-environmental effects of traffic, environment standardsshould be set.

5. Environmental management techniques traffic calming and speed reduction to protect theenvironmental standards in whole areas of towns.

Lineage (what the report built on and into)

Many of the ideas contained in the report were not new at the time of its publication. The separation of

transport modes and elevated floors for pedestrians had already been discussed by planners in many partsof the world during the late 1920s and 1930s. By the early 1960s, different towns and cities had alreadybegun to experiment with the introduction of hierarchical traffic networks, multi-storey car parks and traffic-free precincts. What the Buchanan Report did was to consolidate these ideas into a general theory.

Reports critics

The report was not without its critics. Two economists, Michael Beesley and J ohn Kain, argued thatTraffic inTowns had substantially overestimated the future levels of car ownership and use in cities by mirroring andsometimes exceeding the US estimates of the time.

A second critique endorsed by many transport planners in the 1970s, was that the concept of environmentalareas was inherently problematic and once applied to existing neighbourhoods would restrict movement,


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especially on foot, because these areas would be separated by large road networks catering for high-speedtraffic. The report may have well underestimated the intrusive effects of noise and fumes of traffic on theproposed environmental areas; even more so in central areas where movement is vertically segregated.

More generally, it was claimed that the report treated all other modes of urban transport includingmotorcycles, bicycles, buses, and pedestrian movement as an adjunct to the car, rather than as a seriousalternative to it.

A fourth critique was that the transport models developed in the 1960s worked on the basis of two demand-led assumptions. Private car use would increase; therefore it was necessary to increase road capacity, with

public transport provided for the relatively few people unable to use cars. The point made was car ownershipwas not universal and the people who lost most from such a strategy were precisely those who already hadthe greatest travel problems, namely children, the elderly, the poor, and women, who together formed amajority, not a minority.

Implementing Traffic in Towns

Following its publication and despite the interest it generated, successive governments to a large extentdeclined to implement the reports recommendations.

By and large during the first half of the 20th century, town planning, highway engineering and publictransport operations were undertaken as entirely separate activities. In Traffic in Towns, it is argued that roadplanning cannot be undertaken as an aim in itself. Rather, it must be done as an integral part of the general

land planning process in which the claims of transport are properly balanced against other claims on land.Traffic in Towns informed the drafting of the landmark Town and Country Planning Act 1968 and theTransport Act which came into force the same year. They both called for the treatment of transport planningas a part of the general planning of the structure of each locality.

Traffic in Towns introduced a new conceptual vocabulary that included terms such as road hierarchy andenvironmental management, which were to become a fixture in the planning lexicon for the next twodecades. Perhaps more importantly, in the report Buchanan effectively presented a fundamental code forurban layout, setting out idealised relationships between circulation and built form that informed much of thepolicy guidance issued in the following two decades. Some of its basic principles still survive in currentdesign guidance and practice.

Nearly 25 years later, Transport in the Urban Environment (1997) still recommended the use of the conceptof environmental capacity to ascertain the capacity of road links.

Conclusions

As noted by Malcolm Buchanan, fifty years after the publication ofTraffic in Towns we have attempted toabsorb the forecast traffic growth by improving the inherited urban road networks, building some bypassesand relief roads, controlling parking and used traffic management to get the maximum capacity from the roadnetwork, while also attempting to minimise the adverse effects on other road users and frontages. Manytown centres have also introduced pedestrian zones and safety has been improved.

Meanwhile some inner city locations have been regenerated and now cater for a new urban demand, butcountless numbers of businesses, retailing and jobs have decentralised. Hospitals, schools, and


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1. Background

A great deal has been written over the years on Traffic in Towns and its long-term impact on the urban form.This Chapter provides a brief overview of the context in which the report was prepared. It describes the waytraffic and transport problems were conceptualised; the conclusions it drew, and how it informed bothplanning theory and practice. Finally, the last section teases out key messages in terms of the reportslegacy, 50 years on.

The publication of the Traffic in Towns report in 1963 marked a watershed in planning thinking. The reportexhibited a common-sense approach towards major strategic issues that not only had a deep effect on thedevelopment of transport planning, but also pose important questions related to contemporary urban landmanagement practices.

1.1 Urban reconstruction and environmentalism in post -war Britain

Starting from the late 1950s, the UK experienced a steady growth in vehicle ownership. Post-war rationingand the Suez crisis held it back, but thereafter it rose very quickly. In 1939 the number of licensed motorvehicles in Britain stood at just over three million, but by 1950 the number had increased to almost 4.5million. Between 1950 and 1960 this figure doubled (from 4.5 to 9.4 million), while the road networkremained modest in size and scale. What little new road building had occurred up until this time centred onthe construction of bypasses and trunk road developments near urban areas. A National Plan for a motorwaysystem was set out in 1946, but construction did not begin until much later with the first stretch of the M1 (72

miles), inaugurated only towards the end of 1959 [1].

At the time there was a palpable concern that poor transport infrastructure was hindering economicproductivity. The government-sponsored Road Research Laboratory estimated in 1959 the costs ofcongestion at 250 million, some five times the annual roads budget. There was, of course, nothing new inthe problem of traffic per se. London had already experienced severe traffic jams in the mid-1850s, but mosttowns and cities possessed a street pattern that had originated in medieval or Victorian times, which provedunsuited for motorised transport. Partly because of this, road casualties were heavy. While the ratio ofvehicles to deaths on the road had diminished from its height in the 1930s, in absolute numbers deaths andinjuries were increasing [2].

As traffic in Britains towns and cities grew worse, public anger was rising against the perceived failure ofgovernment to tackle the issue. In 1956 alone, nine parliamentary debates were held on road conditions andby the early 1960s long-term planning for motor traffic in urban areas was firmly on the political agenda [3].However, with few transport schemes in the pipeline the government was well aware that for at least a fewyears, traffic had to be catered for using existing road capacity. In 1960 Ernest Marples, the TransportMinister of the Macmillan Government set out the London Traffic Management Unit. This experimented withthe extensive use of parking meters and implemented a number of major one-way street schemes (eg theTottenham Court Road/Gower Street scheme). Eager to introduce bolder urban traffic strategies to be rolledout nationwide, the Minister announced to the press his intention to carry out a special investigation into thenature of urban traffic. Rather than setting up a large committee representative of all interests concerned, theMinister asked Colin Buchanan to join his department and lead a team tasked with undertaking the study [4].


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1.2 Colin Buchanan and Traffic in Towns

Buchanan was an unusual figure, being professionally qualified as an engineer, architect and planner. Bornin India, he entered imperial service in Sudan before joining the British Ministry of Transport in 1935. Afterthe war ended, he joined the new Ministry of Town and Country Planning and from the late 1940s becameincreasingly interested in the integration of land use planning and transport policy [5]. In 1958 he publishedMixed Blessing: the Motorcar in Britain, one of the few books at the time available on the problem ofreconciling traffic, planning, and environmental policies.

Buchanan was appointed as the Ministry of Transport Adviser on Urban Road Planning in 1961. He was

allowed to pick the members of his team from outside the civil service, and a two-year limit was set for thestudy. The small interdisciplinary team included nine people; among them architects, engineers, plannersand economists.

Figure 1.1 Traffic in Towns Team

From left to right: Bill Crompton, David Dallimore, Peter Hills, Anne MacEwen, Colin Buchanan,

Geoff Crow, Gordon Michell and Derry Burton.


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The team reported directly to the study steering group chaired by Sir Geoffrey Crowther, remaining this wayvirtually free from departmental interferences. The recommendations of the steering group were published asa ten-page introduction to the same volume, becoming separately known as the Crowther report.

The terms of reference for the study were to consider and report on the long-term demands for motortransport in towns, the nature and probable cost of the measures required to accommodate such transport

and the time required to implement them, and the compatibility of these measures with other needs of towns

such as reasonable compactness, economical use of land and buildings, and good environment. [6]

The resulting study, Traffic in Towns, was published in November 1963. Written in a language that the man-

in-the-street could readily understand and illustrated with colour drawings prepared by a well-knowntownscape artist, the report proved an immediate hit with the public. In four months it sold nearly 18,000copies and was republished the following year as a Penguin paperback. The report made headline news; thePeterborough conservative column in the Daily Telegraph deemed it equivalent in significance to theBeveridge Report of 1942, while the modernist Architectural Review declared it perhaps the most importantplanning document of the twentieth century. [7]

As discussed in more detail below, the ideas in the report led to a suite of options for towns and cities toconsider and resulted in urban areas taking on radical new planning approaches in the immediate aftermathand over the following 20 years. These in turn caused a transformation in the appearance of some townsand cities and have created their own legacies, physical and attitudinal, towards town planning moregenerally [8].

Forty years after the publication Buchanan recalled: Ernest Marples seemed pleased enough with the result,but I am sure it is not the kind of report he had hoped for. I think he was really hoping for a miracle, for some

formula which, applied to London, would soon have the traffic moving as sweetly as could be desired.

Instead of which, he got a readable manual on urban planning. [9]

In the UK, Ebenezer Howards Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902) is often referred to as the first 20th

centurytown planning manual. This articulates a vision for planned settlements comprehensive of land reform,transport infrastructure, residential and commercial developments, greenbelt and amenities. By the sametoken, Traffic in Towns can be described as the last town planning handbook of the 20

thcentury. The

analysis of the causes creating congestion brought the authors to call for a radical rethink of the way citieswere designed, and ultimately a change in the scope and structure of the planning system itself. AfterBuchanan, many of the attempts to address all planning problems at once were abandoned in the belief

that it is more fruitful to concentrate on specific sectoral issues, which in themselves contain enoughcomplexity.


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Figure 2.2 Example of Radburn style precinct

Source: Traffic in Towns (1963), pp. 37, 42

2) In Traffic in Towns it is argued that most European cities have developed a road system based on a

more or less symmetrical spider's-web plan with the town centre lying at the centre of the web, and theother main concentrations of activity disposed asymmetrically around it. With an increase in the numberof vehicles, heavy traffic flows tend to develop on the radial routes. As a result, orbital ad hocconnections between the radials, and eventually complete inner and outer ring roads are built to diverttraffic round the centre and connect the outer districts.

Figure 2.3 The basic spiders web plan

Source: Traffic in Towns (1963), pp. 37, 42


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In Traffic in Towns, it is not claimed that the ring road should not form part of urban network. The objection israther that this should not be taken as a standardised model. A primary road network of highway standardshould be developed to serve urban areas and neighbourhoods, where environmental standards are set andthrough traffic cannot penetrate. In the same way that corridors serve rooms, the pattern of the networkshould depend on the disposition of the environmental areas and the kind and quantities of traffic theygenerate. The network should take the form needed to serve the environmental areas and not vice versa.The idea of road hierarchy is then introduced whereby primary distributors feed traffic to minor distributorroads, and then down to local roads that give access to buildings. When this concept is applied on a largescale, a whole area of the city takes on a cellular structure consisting of environmental areas set within aninterlocking network of distributor highways.

Figure 2.4 Hierarchy of distribu tors and cellular structure

The principle of the hierarchy of distributors. Example of environmental areas and the pattern of the networkAccess roads not shown.

3) The application of environmental standards to control the levels of fumes, noise and pollution in turn

implies that there are absolute limits to the amount of traffic that urban areas, and particularly historictowns, are able to accommodate. As in the case of traffic architecture, the report is explicit in relation tothe value of conservation. Asking to make no compromises, it points to the fact that: there is a greatdeal at stake: it is not a question of retaining a few old buildings, but of conserving, in the face of the

onslaught of motor traffic, a major part of the heritage of the English-speaking world. [16]

4) The traffic problem can be seen as related to three variables: the standard of accessibility (or degree ofusage of motor vehicles), the standard of environment (or degree of freedom from the adverse effects oftraffic), and the extent of physical alterations (and hence of capital expenditure) for the purpose ofaccommodating traffic. Any urban community faced with traffic congestion can adjust these variables ina number of ways but as said, to contain the anti-environmental effects of traffic, environmentstandards should be set. The three variables were brought together in a rough and ready law statingthat: within an urban area as it stands the establishment of environmental standards automatically


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determines the accessibility, but the latter can be increased according to the amount of money that can

be spent on physical alterations. [17]

5) Environmental management techniques including traffic calming and speed reduction should be appliedto protect the environmental standards in whole areas of towns.

2.3 General considerations

It is clear that Buchanan believed that far more investment was required in roads and in transport moregenerally. At the same time it is worth noting that the report did not contain any practical recommendation; it

set out key facts and trends, extrapolated to 2010, and considered a number of future options for dealingwith increased traffic in urban areas [18]. It can thus be argued that Traffic in Towns was primarily ademonstration of choices. The report proposed, on the assumption that environmental standards aremaintained, a sliding scale of accessibility. If a city wanted a great deal of traffic in decent environmentalconditions then it had to be willing to face very extensive and costly reconstruction. But if it did not want tochange the urban form much, then it could still have decent environmental conditions provided it was contentwith much less traffic [19]. The report was clear on the fact that those were not technical matters, but choicesfor local communities and their elected politicians to make. In this sense it could be claimed that the enduringpopularity ofTraffic in Towns was, at least partially, due to the fact that it meant all things to all men. Theplanners saw it as an argument for rolling back the frontiers of the car and saving our towns from the roadbuilding required to accommodate it; the public transport professionals saw it as requiring better publictransport; and the highway engineers saw it as making the case for better roads [20].

The reports case studies in Newbury, Norwich, Leeds and a part of central London, were designed toexplore and illustrate the choices that would arise in each town as a result of planning to accommodatedifferent levels of provision for car use. In conducting the exploratory studies in the four exemplar towns, theauthors examined the ways in which different levels of highway investment could be used in each toconstruct road networks that would draw the extraneous traffic from the environmental areas within which anacceptable balance between environmental quality and accessibility was to be struck. Unsurprisingly theroad networks required to cope with both the growth in car ownership and the traffic to be diverted aroundthe environmental areas turned out to be large, expensive and unwelcome in many of the towns they wereintended to improve. Grand scale redevelopment schemes such as Glasgow town centre may haveimproved the environment because they were less polluted and more secure, but proved unwanted anddisliked by the great majority of people.

The report was revolutionary in that for the first time it brought the word environment out of its old biologicalcontext and applied it to human surroundings. It recommended the setting of environmental standards as anabsolute requirement, taking precedence over any other consideration. This contradicted the basicassumption that everything could be traded off against everything else implicit in cost benefit analyses [21].

The report recognised that in areas of historic or architectural interest, or where major changes to the builtenvironment were not possible, restrictions on car use were required, together with good, cheap publictransport [22]. The possible means identified to restrain traffic demand were:

permits or licences to control the entry of vehicles to certain defined zones;

road pricing;

parking policy; and


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subsidy of public transport.

In assessing these alternatives the report discouraged the idea of permits and correctly saw road pricing asbeing at least 20 years off. It accordingly concluded that everything points to the immediate importance ofparking policy and recommended that local authorities should retain complete control of the amount ofparking space provided, its location and the charges levied [23]. Traffic in Towns also supported the use ofsubsidy for public transport so that this could offer considerable financial advantages over the use of cars. In1962, Beeching was working on his proposals to cut back the rail network and therefore the subject wasexcluded from the remit given to the Traffic in Towns team. The previous year, the J ack Committees inquiryinto rural bus services (1961) deemed the network extent adequate but recommended direct financial

assistance from central government and county councils to maintain most of the services viably. In Traffic inTowns it was suggested that fare reductions were the major improvement worth offering to those who mightbe tempted from their cars. In the 1960s trams had only recently been closed down in favour of buses, so theoption of reinstating them was not seriously considered. The team also looked for innovative forms oftransport, such as travelators and tracked hovercraft but did not identify anything likely to challenge thesupremacy of the car [24].

Figure 2.5 Tracked hovercraft

Source: Traffic in Towns (1963), p. 25

2.4 Lineage (what the report built on and into)

Many of the ideas contained in the report were not new at the time this was published. The separation oftransport modes and elevated floors for pedestrians had already been discussed by planners in many partsof the world during the late 1920s and 1930s. By the early 1960s, different towns and cities had alreadybegun to experiment with the introduction of hierarchical traffic networks, multi-storey car parks and traffic-free precincts. What the Buchanan Report did was to consolidate these ideas into a general theory.

The idea of dividing London into precincts, allowing only local traffic through, had originally been advocatedby Alker Tripp, Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard in 1942. According to Tripp, precincts would

consist of areas bordered by sub-arterial and arterial roads; they would have different purposes: retail,


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working and residential, or precincts for conservation areas, some controlled by gates [25]. His idea ofprecinct included also traffic-free shopping streets and was applied extensively in many of the 1940s plans.For example, all of the Abercrombies post-war plans (eg London and Plymouth) recommended the creationof precincts, and pedestrian schemes were included in Thomas Sharps plans for Exeter (1946) and Oxford(1948) but also in Gibsons and Fords plan for Coventry (1941). But while Tripp and Abercrombie saw theprecinct principally as a means of diverting traffic, with the decisive factor being road traffic flows, Buchanantook the idea one step further. As Tripp and Abercrombie had imagined, the environmental areas would be ofdifferent character and the level of traffic would vary according to their function (residential, shopping andindustrial) but it would be environmental capacity, a completely new concept rather than traffic flows, whichwould provide both the standards and limits for the environmental areas [26].

Modernist ideas related to multi-level structures and layout influenced the design of the second generation ofNew Towns built in 1950s and the 1960s. Traffic in Towns describes the central area of Cumbernauld, aNew Town developed in the mid-1950s with a planned population of 70,000 as follows:

[] a linear form, built on a deck above the approach road. The idea of an inner ring road

encircling the central area has completely vanished. The shops and business premises are to

be built on the deck with a number of dwellings on top. Thus cars, buses and service vehicles

are brought in underneath the shops but in very close proximity thereto, and complete

separation of vehicles and pedestrian is obtained. [] The principle of concentrating as much

vehicular traffic as possible on roads of near motorway standard specifically designed for free

flow and safety and giving very little choice of route, does mean that the network consists of

high-powered roads of near motorway standard with elaborate intersections. [27]

However it was to be Livingstone, the Scottish New Town designated in 1962 that, with its four levelhierarchical road network encapsulated the Buchanan philosophy more than any other New Town.

While traffic architecture was to be applied to areas with a lot of movement in them, at lower densitiesBuchanan advocated the application of the Radburn layout. Radburn, planned in the late 1920s in the USby Clarence Stein and Henry Wright in New J ersey, was explicitly designed to separate traffic by mode, witha pedestrian path system that did not cross any major roads at grade. It incorporated neighbourhood units,as originally conceived by the American planner Clarence Perry. The neighbourhood unit proposed theconscious grouping of schools, community facilities and shops within easy walking distance of housing in away that would create a sense of social identity and attachment to the locality [28].

Since the late 1950s there has been growing scepticism about the sociological value of the neighbourhoodunit as a physical means of creating social cohesion [29]. Nonetheless, during the 1950s and 1960s, theconcept has been widely applied in New Towns and Town Extensions, as a framework for the provision ofessential social facilities in reasonable proximity to housing. Greenhill, a suburb of Sheffield, developed inthe early 1950s, was one of such scheme and an early notorious British example of the Radburn layout (seeFigure 2.7).


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The Radburn layout is credited with incorporating some of the earliest cul-de-sacs in the United States andhad a profound influence on residential design all over the world. For example, the British New Town ofMilton Keynes was built around a grid of one-kilometre square superblocks. In Australia, the Radburn layoutwas used in the planning of some of Canberra in the early 1960s, in particular Charnwood, Curtin andGarran. It was also used in the Melbourne suburb of Doncaster East, in an area known as the Milgate ParkEstate.

2.5 Report s critic s

At the time of its publication, a powerful critique to the report came from two economists, Michael Beesley

and J ohn Kain [30]. They argued that Traffic in Towns had substantially overestimated the levels of carownership and use in cities in future years. It was pointed out that while the report assumed the existence ofa dense and fixed urban fabric, the levels of car ownership and use deployed to assess future needs were inline with (and sometimes 25 per cent in excess of) the US estimates of the time. Yet in American cities,development was occurring at much lower densities. This led to some internal inconsistencies within thereport. For example, it was noted that the Leeds case study contained figures related to levels of carownership in twenty years that were 60 per cent lower than the reports general estimates. In other words, ifa dense and fixed urban fabric is assumed, car ownership cannot rise as predicted because there would notbe the enough space to accommodate all the vehicles.

A second critique endorsed by many transport planners in the 1970s, was that the concept of environmentalareas was inherently problematic; and that once applied in practice it was likely to lead to negative socialoutcomes [31]. Once applied to existing neighbourhoods, environmental areas would restrict movement,especially on foot, because these areas would be separated by large road networks catering for high-speedtraffic. The application of the concept was also likely to lead to edge effects, whereby people living on theperipheral roads would be more exposed to the nuisance generated by traffic.

It is true that the definition of environmental areas was not connected to the idea of neighbourhoods and itssocial ramifications. Rather, these were loosely defined in the report; the key factor being that traffic withinthem would be subordinate to the environment. As noted by Buchanan himself, the principle of a networkdraining all exogenous traffic out of environmental areas does imply that there is compartmentalism of thehabitable areas of the city; this to a certain extent was seen as unavoidable. Yet in Buchanans view, this didnot necessarily mean a rigid separation [32]. Elevated decks were designed precisely with the pedestrian inmind but have now fallen out of favour. The report may have well underestimated the intrusive effects ofnoise and fumes of traffic on the proposed environmental areas; even more so in central areas where

movement is vertically segregated.

More generally, it was claimed that the report treated all other modes of urban transport includingmotorcycles, bicycles, buses, and pedestrian movement as an adjunct to the car, rather than as a seriousalternative to it [33]. This is a well-rehearsed argument. From a standpoint of a later age, the idea to allowmaximum penetration of vehicles into town centres may appear curious and alien but at the time this was avision arguably still in balance with the ethos of the public.

A fourth critique was that the transport models developed in the 1960s worked on the basis of two demand-led assumptions. Private car use would increase; therefore it was necessary to increase road capacity. Andpublic transport must be provided for the people unable to use cars, although they would become relativelyfew in number. The point made was that even if household car ownership was high, it was not universal. Inaddition not all members of a household had access to a car at all times. The people who lost most from


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such a strategy were precisely those who already had the greatest travel problems, namely children, theelderly, the poor, and women, and together these formed a majority, not a minority [34].


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3. Implementing the Buchanan Report: motorising the city

Following its publication and despite the interest it generated, successive governments to a large extentdeclined to implement the reports recommendations. The Treasury deemed the solutions envisioned inTraffic in Towns too expensive, while the incoming Labour administration remained committed to publictransport over private cars and found the report lacking in this respect. This said, the reports principlespermeated much of the transport and planning policy and guidance that followed; and local authoritiesapplied extensively components of the Buchanan philosophy in their urban renewal schemes [35].

Although the government officially endorsed the reports findings, evidence suggests that with nine monthsfrom the 1964 general election, it was not willing to commit itself to a massive road building program [36]. Ittherefore resorted to delaying tactics. In order for local communities to make an informed choice about thetrade-offs available between accessibility and environmental quality, new land use/transportation studies hadfirst to be carried out in each locality [37].

3.1 Land use / transpor tation studies

In a joint Ministry of Housing and Transport Circular titled Traffic in Towns, local authorities were calledupon to prepare land use/transportation studies. The government offered technical advice and providedfinancial help to those councils willing to undertake such work [38]. In total, 18 studies were producedthroughout the late 1960s, including some looking at the largest conurbations of Greater Manchester,Merseyside and Glasgow. The approach adopted differed from case to case but essentially these studies

assessed changes in the allocation of land uses and then went on to estimate how travel patterns would varyin accordance with the new land uses. On one side of the equation there were the American-style home-interview surveys; as it was recognised that the household was at the origin or destination of the bulk of allpersonal journeys. On the other side, there was the forecast related to the number and location ofhouseholds, their incomes and car ownership per household, projected forward 10, 15 and 20 years ahead.

As land use/transportation studies based their income forecasts on increases of around 3.5 per cent perannum and assumed car ownership to grow twice that much, inevitably the results pointed to levels ofinvestment that were completely unrealistic. But then the early 1960s were characterised by a great sense ofoptimism. In 1964 the Treasury for example set public expenditure to rise at least as fast as the GDP, withthis expected to grow at around 4.5 per cent [39]. A study from the late 1970s compared the assumptionscontained in the land use / transportation studies with what happened on the ground, and came to theconclusion that the assumptions were so wide of the mark that if the planners had assumed zero change,frequently these would have been more accurate. Evidence also suggests that in many instancestransportation studies were used to demonstrate that schemes already in the pipeline represented the rightsolution to problems identified much earlier on [40].

In the early 1960s cars were quickly becoming part of the vision of a new affluent society and the idea ofreshaping cities to give them a more modern outlook could still count on a broad base support. By the end ofthe decade the climate of opinion surrounding urban planning was changing quickly and the governmentincreasingly began to spell out the need to restrain traffic in the larger towns and cities. Yet as noted byStarkie (1982), it would be wrong to assume that successive administrations were moving away from theurban motorway paradigm. On the contrary, at this time the intention was to build Buchanan-type primarynetworks. However, it was recognised that this would take time. The government first intended to completeits 1,000-mile program of inter-urban motorways and then gradually shift a substantial part of its growing


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roads budget towards urban areas. In 1964/65 approximately one-third of the resources were earmarked forurban roads, but this was expected to grow to half of the roads budget by 1969/70 [41].

In the 1970s, with town centres losing population and problems related to the rapid development of innercities, urban motorways were no longer a priority. By the end of the decade the level of spending of new roadworks was little more than half of what it had been in 1973/74, and as a proportion of all expenditure on localtransport it declined from just over a third to about a fifth. One casualty was the plan for ambitious highwaysfrom transportation studies. But even long after proposals were abandoned, the analytical processesemerging from those studies continued to exert a powerful influence on urban transport policy and practice[42].

By a strange coincidence in November 1973, exactly ten years after the publication ofTraffic in Towns, J ohnPayton, the then Tory Minister, announced to the House of Commons his proposal to switch resources awayfrom urban road construction [43]. As noted by Headicar (2009), what was significant in the governmentsresponse to the financial crisis of the mid-70s was not just that its spending plans were temporarily put onhold. Rather the whole trajectory of growth that had underpinned assumptions during the previous 20 yearsdisappeared. Strategic planning in particular, the cutting edge of planning practice in the late 1960s and early1970s, would never recover from such a blow.

3.2 Town and Country Planning Act and Transport Act 1968

By and large during the first half of the 20th century, town planning, highway engineering and publictransport operations were undertaken as entirely separate activities. In Traffic in Towns, it is argued that road

planning cannot be undertaken as an aim in itself. Rather, it must be done as an integral part of the generalland planning process in which the claims of transport are properly balanced against other claims on land.Traffic in Towns informed the drafting of the landmark Town and Country Planning Act 1968 and theTransport Act, which came into force the same year. They both called for the treatment of transport planningas a part of the general planning of the structure of each locality.

The Planning Advisory Group set up in 1964 was originally tasked with examining the issues raised by theBuchanan report and the procedures and finance for urban renewal. It soon became apparent however, thatthe group could also lead the review of the development plan system [44]. The Buchanan reportrecommended the adoption of two new types of plan; a transportation plan and an implementation plan butthe government was concerned with the overall level of complexity [45]. The group therefore proposed anurban structure plan, which would facilitate on one hand the integration of land use and transport planning,

and on the other the application of Buchanan concepts of primary road networks and environmental areas.

The groups proposals led to the Town and Country Planning Act 1968, which sought to streamline theblueprint approach that had dominated the development plans from the 1947 Act. To do so, it introduced thedistinction between policy and strategic issues, addressed in Structure Plans, and detailed tactical issues tobe dealt with in Local P lans. This two-tier system became the cornerstone of the land use planning system inmany countries around the world and policies covering the management of traffic were included within theremit of development plans for the first time.

The Transport Act 1968 put forward 5 key principles, all fully endorsed inTraffic in Towns:

1. Since local authorities are responsible for planning, they must be the authorities responsible for publictransport.


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2. All transport matters for which local authorities are to be responsible the improvement of the local roadnetwork, investment in public transport, traffic management measures, the balance public and privatetransport must be focused in an integrated transport plan, which in turn is related to the generalplanning for each area.

3. Investment in local transport must be grant-aided by central government just as the investment ingeneral roads

4. The main network of public transport must be publicly owned.

5. The planning and operation of public transport can only be done intelligently over areas which makesense in transport terms [46].

With regard to this latter point, under the 1968 Transport Act Passenger Transport Authorities wereestablished for each of the seven conurbations to coordinate public transport provision in the metropolitanareas.

3.3 Policy transfer

Road hierarchy

As noted by Gunn (2011) Traffic in Towns put in circulation a new conceptual vocabulary that included termssuch as road hierarchy and environmental management, which were to become a fixture in the planninglexicon for the next two decades. Perhaps more importantly, the Buchanan report effectively presented a

fundamental code for urban layout, setting out idealised relationships between circulation and built form thatinformed much of the policy guidance issued in the following two decades. Some of its basic principles stillsurvive in current design guidance and practice. For example, the hierarchical approach to roads in the UKcan be traced back to Transport in the Urban Environment (1997); a revision of official guidance (Roads andTraffic in Urban Areas (1987)), which in turn elaborated a series of principles set out inTraffic in Towns. [47]

In Traffic in Towns, Buchanan subdivided distributors into primary, district and local distributors, whichtogether with access roads, gives a simple system of four types of road. In Roads and Traffic in Urban Areas(1987) the same classification is maintained, but with the addition of pedestrianised streets as a fifth elementat the bottom of the hierarchy.


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Figure 3.1 Illustration of di fferent types of roads within the hierarchy

Source: Roads and Traffic in Urban Areas (1987) p.37.

According to Roads and Traffic in Urban Areas (1987) the rationale for having a road hierarchy in place isthat conflicts tend to arise as a consequence of competing demands that cannot all be accommodated. It istherefore important to determine which of the various demands should be given priority. Road hierarchiesperform such a role. By reinforcing the intended balance of functions, they encourage what are deemed

appropriate uses and likewise, discourage incompatible behaviours. Hierarchies are based on the actual andintended use of roads: from strategic routes carrying heavier traffic flows at higher speeds with limitedaccess, to minor roads designed for local traffic with frontage access. The basic underlining assumption isthat the provision of access to sites and buildings and their immediate surroundings should, wheneverpossible, be separated from the provision for the through movement of motor vehicles. The legacy of themodernist application of this concept is that the old street, conceptualised as a multi-purpose space cateringfor a diversity of urban uses and transport modes tend to disappear [48]. In stark contrast to thecontemporary preference for a shared space approach, Buchanans metaphor of urban rooms andcorridors seems to suggest that corridors are there simply to facilitate circulation.


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From Environmental Areas to Home Zones

In the report it is argued that each street had its own environmental capacity, which could be set with regardto its use, the amount of pedestrian traffic it generates, the volume of vehicular movement to be allowed andthe character of the adjacent buildings [49]. Buchanan suggested defining environmental areas and thenproviding a road network capable of serving them. But even without the construction of primary networks, theconcept of environmental capacity offered a set of criteria that could be used as a traffic managementmeasure to direct traffic between existing and improved streets. After the publication ofTraffic in Towns,many local authorities followed this avenue and set up environmental areas. Most schemes included amixture of housing initiative and traffic management measures. According to Appleyard (1981) about 150

schemes were either planned or in existence by 1973. Nearly all were part of the General Improvement AreaProgramme.

Nearly 25 years later, Transport in the Urban Environment (1997) still recommends the use of the concept ofenvironmental capacity to ascertain the capacity of road links. If the capacity of a street is exceeded, designfeatures and traffic management are then required to restrict traffic flows and to control the type and speedof vehicles permitted in. It is interesting to note that official guidance dated 1997 still refers to Traffic inTowns for the definition of environmental capacity.

Home zones, originally called Woonerf(Living Yard) and pioneered in the 1970s in the Netherlands, werethemselves partially inspired by the concept of environmental areas [51]. Home zones work through thephysical alteration of streets and roads in an area that force motorists to drive with greater care and at lowerspeeds. The Urban Task Force Report (1999) supported the introduction of home zones using tested streetdesigns, reduced speed limits and traffic calming, and the Transport Act 2000 provided the first directlegislative basis for establishing Home zones in England and Wales.

Parking policies

The reports emphasis on the importance of managing traffic was readily accepted by the government. TheTransport Policy White Paper published in J uly 1966 suggested that deliberate measures of traffic restraintswere required to ensure that the volume of traffic entering congested areas was sensibly related to thecapacity of the road system. It went on to suggest that: at present, a thoroughgoing parking policy is thebest method of achieving this. This conclusion, already reached in Traffic in Towns, was then confirmed afew months later in the report Better Use of Town Roads [52].

To supplement the space available for public use, development control powers were commonly usedthroughout the 1950s requiring commerce and industry to provide minimum parking for visitors andemployees. In a Planning Bulletin on Parking in Town Centres issued in 1965, the government encouragedauthorities to take a comprehensive view of parking policies and their possible contribution to limiting trafficcongestion, including the setting of maximum rather than minimum requirements in new developments [53].Road Circular 1/68 (1968) asked urban authorities of over 50,000 population, and all traffic and parkingauthorities in the provincial conurbations, to submit Traffic and Transport Plans to the Ministry. These wereto show how a balance between traffic and road capacity was to be achieved in the years immediatelyahead. In the Circular, it was expected that control of parking would be the crucial instrument of trafficrestraint and authorities were told that it was the total amount of parking space and the way it was used thathad to be related in a realistic fashion to the capacity of the towns road system. [54]


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3.4 Buchanan layout in practice

Although successive governments declined to implement the recommendations contained in Traffic inTowns, the Buchanan principles were applied extensively by town councils when these began to considerthe development potential of their central areas and a renewed layout for vehicular and pedestrianmovement. Local authorities could in fact use powers available under the 1947 Act to declareComprehensive Development Areas and apply compulsory purchase powers to demolish existing buildings,erase the road network and undertake complete rebuilding. [55]

As discussed earlier, the Buchanan report gave impetus to a series of ideas that were already in the air. In

general terms, the report reflected and reinforced a shift in urban policy from housing to transport, but designinfluences towards multi-level modernist decks and urban conservation were various and are thereforedifficult to pin down. For example, after initial retailer and developer caution, the notion of openpedestrianised precincts was gradually accepted so that private developers increasingly took on suchschemes [56]. Early examples of such developments, now familiar to all, include Carrefour at Caerphilly,Bristol and Chandlers Ford; Asda at Merthyr Tydfil and Leamington Spa; Tesco at St. Mellons (Cardiff);Sainsburys at Thornhill (Cardiff). Although many of these buildings do not look like traffic architecture, theprinciple is the same: pedestrianised and covered town centre developments with rear, subterranean servicebays or roof-top serving. Perhaps Milton Keynes centre, with its futuristic outlook, comes closest to beingtraffic architecture [57].

In the design sense, the concept of a hierarchical highway network was readily accepted and implemented inpractice in those situations where new developments were initiated. For example the New Town ofLivingstone in Scotland, designated in 1962, has a Buchanan-type road network based on a four-levelhierarchical system with different categories of roads fulfilling different traffic functions. At the upper level itcomprises a rectangular grid of Town Roads with roundabouts at the junctions, defining the residential,commercial and industrial areas. The Town Roads are designed to carry peak-period traffic to majoremployment areas, through and commuting traffic, heavy goods vehicles and traffic to the town centre. Thenext level of road comprises a system of single carriageway District Roads, providing access from the TownRoad system to the various residential, commercial and industrial areas and movement between them. Thelowest level in the hierarchy of roads comprises single carriageway cul-de-sacs, providing access from theDistrict Roads into the individual housing, employment or community sites. Such cul-de-sacs serve amaximum of 200 houses. Where this number has had to be exceeded, short loop roads are provided as analternative [58].


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Figure 3.2 Livingstone Master Plan Report (1963) Phase 4 and Districts m aps

Source: Idox plc.

In built-up areas and inner cities, only authorities that initiated development early (ahead of what has beendescribed as the environmental backlash) managed to progress the construction of their urban motorwayschemes. Leeds had its Inner-City Ring Road substantially completed by the end of the 1970s; Glasgow hadby the 1980s completed over 12 miles of urban motorway linking in with the Strathclyde regional motorway,and progress was made in Liverpool, Newcastle and in Cardiff with links to the waterfront/docks. In London,the Greater London Development Plan (1973) prepared by the Greater London Council included a series ofconcentric ring roads of motorway standards. The inner one, also known as the motorway box, provedparticularly contentious as it would have required the demolition of thousands of homes and the decanting ofapproximately 10,000 people. The technical arguments for and against the ring roads were presented at thepublic inquiry that preceded adoption of the plan. However, given the strenuous opposition, the motorwayscomponent of the plan was dropped even before the public inquiry was completed.

The legacy of the Buchanan report was also to be felt abroad. For example, the network identified in todaysAucklands Regional State Highway Strategy is remarkably similar to the one Buchanan drew up in the

1960s [59].

Buchanan-type secondary distributors were incorporated in many large housing schemes built by privatesector developers. Examples include the Woodloes housing area in Warwick and the Eastern Kenilworthhousing development in Kenilworth [60]. Environmental and traffic management techniques have beenwidely applied and new roads built to divert traffic from town centres. One example is offered by NorwichCathedral Close today when compared with figure 159 in the report (see Figure 3.3).


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Figure 3.3 Norwich Cathedral Close

Source: Traffic in Towns (1963)

The same can be said of Queen Street in Cardiff now if compared with the 1970s, and of similar schemesimplemented in towns such as Hereford, Abingdon, Oxford and many other small market towns. The onenegative corollary of these schemes has been the need to spread the load of the diverted traffic on theimmediately adjacent streets [61].

3.5 One level up: the South Hampshi re Study

A few months after the publication ofTraffic in Towns, the government commissioned Colin Buchanan andPartners to undertake a growth study of South Hampshire. South Hampshire, the wide corridor between

Southampton and Portsmouth is some 25 miles long, 10 to 12 miles wide and in 1961 had a population ofaround 773,000 [62]. By the 1950s, the perception was that the development pressures that characterisedthe interwar years had resumed, and that with the exclusion of the New Forest, the whole of the costal beltwas at risk of becoming a continuous sprawl of urban development [63]. In line with the findings of the SouthEast Study (1964), the study brief asked consultants to consider accommodating a total growth of 300,000by 1981, half of which would have been planned intake; and a further 100,000 planned intake after 1981,together with natural increase [64]. A major challenge was the need to shift an historic residue of land-usepatterns that could only be served by private car, towards a pattern that could be serviced by publictransport.

The exercise of planning a sub-region so diverse in terms of its geography necessarily brought about aseries of key questions that are still relevant today. They have to do with the different configurations that city-


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regions can assume; but also with the possibilities for organising and delivering development and itsassociated infrastructure across local government boundaries.

The South Hampshire Study, together with supplementary reports, was published in J uly 1966. In the reportthe study area is treated as a single corridor city-region. The plan proposed a loose grid structure, withgrowth areas located close to existing employment and service centres; close to the emerging motorwaynetwork, but also well served by the regions rail system and by buses. The study came to the conclusionthat the area was growing at such a pace under market forces that, provided present trends continued, therewas no need for planned intake of population, as spontaneous migration would add 130,000 people to itsarea by 1981.

Figure 3.4 South Hampshi re Plan

Source: Ministry of Housing and Local Government (1966)

Unfortunately the plan was destined to remain on paper and it has been described as the greatest missed

opportunity of Buchanans planning career [65]. The general public reacted to the scale of developmentenvisioned and the diagrammatic nature of the maps contained in the report a mixture of anti-urban and anti-growth sentiments. The study team attempted to pre-empt a misconception based on an erroneousunderstanding of the proposed scale and design:

We are conscious of the fact that the diagrams we have presented convey an impression of

geometrical rigidity. [] However it cannot be too strongly emphasised that any idea that we are

proposing the application of a rigid Manhattan Grid to South Hampshire be utterly erroneous.

[] We are thinking in terms of perhaps three-quarters of a million extra people being

accommodated in the corridor. This is the equivalent of ten conventional New Towns put

together [66].


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But the South Hampshire Study was published at a time in the UK of vigorous debate regarding localgovernment boundaries. Local politicians had vested interests in preserving the separate identities of thehistorical settlements, and supported continued administrative fragmentation at the expense of any form ofconsolidation.

The study proved to be far-sighted. The sub-region grew more or less as trends predicted; in 2001 the areahad a population of around one million. Ironically the area became what has been described as the worst ofboth worlds: accommodating a similar quantum of development, but without the social and physicalinfrastructure capable of supporting it [67]. Without a comprehensive plan much of the development thatoccurred in South Hampshire in the last 40 years has been infill and suburban in nature. This has taken

place at low density close to the main arterial roads the M27, M3 and A3(M) and away from the publictransport main routes and railway lines. Moreover, in many instances the facilities have come only afterhousing schemes were substantially completed and the lack of local services means these are in a high-demand.

In rejecting the studys idea of a single metropolitan authority, local politicians seem to have allowedscattered urban sprawl to take place. As noted by Hall (2004):

Ironically, market forces then produced an amorphous spread city, rather American in quality, in

the intervening space. [] So the result is a highly unsatisfactory congested sprawl of a kind

rather unusual in Britain. The irony is that, if the plan had been taken on board, the result would

have been in some ways different but immeasurably better in terms of both accessibility and

environment [68].


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4. Conclusions

As noted by Malcolm Buchanan, fifty years after the publication ofTraffic in Towns we have attempted toabsorb the forecast traffic growth by improving the inherited urban road networks, building some bypassesand relief roads, controlling parking and used traffic management to get the maximum capacity from the roadnetwork, while also attempting to minimise the adverse effects on other road users and frontages. Inaddition, many town centres have been pedestrianised and safety has been improved.

Meanwhile, some inner city locations have been regenerated and now cater for a new urban demand, butcountless numbers of businesses, retailing and jobs have moved out to shopping centres, retail andbusiness parks. Similarly hospitals, schools, and warehousing have sought economies of scale byconcentrating into larger units in out-of-town or edge-of-town locations, often close to motorwayinterchanges.

Housing has also spread out at lower densities in estates organised to be served by the car [69]. As a result,some of the problems that Buchanan foresaw have now become even more difficult to handle. Towns andcities have dispersed on such a huge scale (and with urban structures laid out neither for full use of the carnor for service by public transport) that it has proved difficult to provide the good, cheap public transportthat the Traffic in Towns team assumed would come to the rescue when car access had to be restricted.Some of the important choices to be faced today are in fact different and mainly concern the dispersed intra-suburban travel markets [70].

Recent studies suggest that the preference of the public for low density suburban locations is a commonfeature of many affluent societies [71]. Looking at Europe but also at developing countries in othercontinents, Buchanan in the mid-1960s noted:

It can surely be assumed that personal wealth will steadily increase and that more and more

people will become better and better educated. This is bound to lead to steadily rising

expectations: people will want better homes, more chances to travel, more interesting things to

do with their lives. What will be the effect of this on the planning of urban areas? And in

particular what will be the influence on residential areas which are by far the largest users of

urban land? [72].

As noted by Phelps (2012) this places the general public and its preferences at the heart of patterns ofdevelopment that precisely the same public, often organised into groups concerned with conservation of the

natural and built environment, seek to prevent [71]. Only recently we have begun to address seriously thechallenges to be faced in retrofitting vast swathes of suburbs and in repairing urban sprawl. To date thereare only a limited number of successful examples in different locations around the world where the degree ofdensity offers some options in terms of transit-oriented development [73].

Traffic in Towns clearly had a large impact not just in the UK but across much of the world. It remains theonly HMSO report to have been privately published in paperback (by Penguin in 1964). Its long-term impactmay have derived at least as much through the adoption ofTraffic in Towns as the transport planningmanual for generations of graduates and post-graduates in transport and planning as it did through directimpacts on government policy.

The report placed great emphasis on the different policy and planning options open to authorities. Sir Colin

commented many years afterwards: I think Ernest Marples was really hoping for a miracle, for some formula


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The most important items of capital equipment the modern industrial nation possesses are its

cities, and the quality of the environment in those cities is crucially important to the happiness,

welfare, efficiency and productivity of the people who live in them.

The challenges for Transport in Cities will be many and varied, not least that of living up to its illustriouspredecessor.


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NOTES

[1] Early examples include the building of the Great West Road, opened in 1925, running from London toAvonmouth near Bristol. But also, the A3 Kingston Bypass (1927) often referred to as Britain's first bypass,and the Mickleham (A24) and the Winchester (A33) bypasses, opened respectively in 1938 and 1940;among the first dual-carriageway bypasses ever built. For more information, see SABRE database, availableat: http://www.sabre-roads.org.uk, last accessed 21.07.2012. See also Charlesworth (1984).

[2] See Gunn (2011). In 1942 there were 148,000 casualties (including fatalities) on British roads, with non-fatal casualties reaching a peak of 398,000 in 1965. See also Keep and Rutherford (2011) p.3.

[3] See Starkie (1982).

[4] Evidence suggests that one of the leading factors concurring to the commissioning of the report was thefindings of a joint study group of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, the Treasury and theMinistry of Transport set up to examine the implications of the great expansion of the car population uponwhich the motor industrys production plans were based. For more details, see Hall (2004) and Clarke(1978). It is also worth noting that Buchanan was not the only person Marples used. Almost simultaneouslyhe hired a joint UKUS consultancy team, Freeman Fox and Wilbur Smith, to conduct a traffic survey as afirst stage in developing an American-style transportation study and plan for Greater London. The early1960s, in effect, witnessed a flurry of governmental initiatives designed to deal with the effects of growingmotorization. A further group under Peter Hall was busy working to project the wider transport needs of

Britain over the next twenty years (Ministry of Transport, 1963) and four months after the publication of theBuchanan report, the government published the South East Study (Ministry of Housing and LocalGovernment, 1964).

[5] See Ward (2007).

[6] See TNA: MT 128/99, Buchanan to Marples, 26 April 1961, cited in Gunn (2011). In addition it is worthnoting that in the first page of the report, the scope of work is described as: to study the long termdevelopment or roads and traffic in urban areas and their influence on the urban environment. [7] DailyTelegraph, 28 November 1963, 16; R. Spurrier, The Architectural Implications of the Buchanan Report,Architectural Review, 135 (1964), 3557, cited in Gunn (2011). In 1941 the government appointed SirWilliam Beveridge to head an inquiry into Social Insurance and Allied Services. The report of the inquiry,commonly known as the Beveridge Report, was published in 1942 and formed the basis of decisions on post

war legislation. The document is often referred to as being at the origin the Welfare State in the UK. Amongother actions, it recommended the expansion of National Insurance and the creation of the National HealthService.

[8] See for example Hart (1992), Davies (1998), Taylor (2003); Hebbert (2005) and Tewdwr-J ones (2011).

[9] Buchanan (2001) p.66.

[10] See Buchanan (1964).

[11] Ribbon development is a line of buildings, served by individual accesses, extending along a radial road,without accompanying development of the land to the rear. Demand for this type of development emerged in


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[25] See Tripp (1942).

[26] See Hass-Klau (1993).

[27] HM Government (1963), par. 377-378.

[28] See Ward (2004).

[29] See for example Glass (1948).

[30] See Beesley and Kain (1964).

[31] See for example Plowden (1972).

[32] See Buchanan (1962) p.23.

[33] See Hillman (1983) and Gunn (2011).

[34] See Hillman et al. (1973).

[35] See Gunn (2011).

[36] See Gold (2007).

[37] Starkie (1982) p.41.

[38] See Ministry of Housing and Local Government and Ministry of Transport (1964).

[39] See Starkie (1982).

[40] See Mackinder (1979).

[41] See Starkie (1982) p.59.

[42] See Bannister (2001).

[43] See Starkie (1982) p.90.

[44] See Delafons (1998).

[45] See HM Government (1963) par. 449.

[46] See Cullingworth (1976) p.148.

[47] See MacKay (1997) and Dep. of Transport (1987).

[48] See Marshall (2005).

[49] HM Government (1963) par. 129.


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[50] See Appleyard (1981) cited in Hass-Klau (1993).

[51] See Ward (2004).

[52] See Transport White Paper J uly and Better Use of Town Roads: Report of A Study of the Means ofRestraint of Traffic on Urban Roads. HMSO Published 1967.

[53] See Ministry of Housing and Local Government (1965) Bulletin 7: Parking in Town Centres, HMSO:London.

[54] Ministry of Transport Traffic and Transport Plans Road Circular 1/68, HMSO: London.

[55] See Gold (2007), p. 107.

[56] See Marriott (1969).

[57] See Bruton (1981).

[58] See Livingstone Master Plan Report (1963), Origins and Development of the New Towns Record - Firstand Second Editions, IDOX plc at: http://www.idoxplc.com/idox/athens/ntr/ntr/cd1/html/txt/u0330000.htm.Last accessed 14-10-2012.

[59] See Boulter (2004).

[60] See Bruton (1981) p.101.

[61] Ibid.

[62] See Hall et al. 1973 and Ministry of Housing and Local Government (1966) par. 23.

[63] See Phelps (2012) p.45.

[64] Ministry of Housing and Local Government (1966) par.1 and 2

[65] See Hall (2004).

[66] Ministry of Housing and Local Government (1966) par. 287.

[67] See Phelps (2012) pp. 52-53.

[68] See Hall (2004).

[69] See Malcolm Buchanan (2009).

[70] See Malcolm Buchanan (2004).

[71] See for example Breugmann (2005).

[72] See Buchanan (1968).


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[73] See Dunham-J ones and Williamson (2009), Tachieva (2010) and Phelps and Wood (2011).


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