Pedestrians and cyclists deserve and should have segregated landscaped paths, which never have to cross a road, because all roads are dangerous. These must reach every house, and are new routes. Though it will take time to acquire the land from many owners; they will use very little land. They will be green, beautiful, and cheap to build. They are called RADBURNS.
The FUNCTIONAL JUNCTION SCHEME does not require new roads or road space. It does require road works, but these are a 100 times cheaper than building new motorways. It allows car numbers to increase three times and at the same time solves pollution, congestion, and safety, all for less money than subsidising public transport. However there is a need to change legislation and start planning immediately. National Governments must remove restrictions, on such things as, driverless cars, lower road bridges, and allow private enterprise to build new cities. Local governments must permit off street parking and refrain from building on railway land, which they call brown field sites, and slowly disallow main road shopping. But because the status quo must not be upset, only a few £ millions will be required in the next decade for design and advertising. The final cost will be no more than the Victorians spent on clean water and sewage.
This report shows that the Buchanan Royal Commission report is misleading; it is possible for everyone to commute by car in towns as large as London. Because it is universally believed that congestion is unsolvable, politicians see no point in spending money on roads, as it will only increase car numbers. Just as the belief in the Malthusian population limit has been discredited I show that high-tech solutions allow for increasing car numbers.
The secret of my scheme is to think in 3 dimensions, and jettison existing legislation. It does not require new inventions, only technical developments appropriate to mass-production which depend upon the political certainty that there will be no restrictions.
No political party or action group appears to have a viable transport policy for urban areas. The current fashion is to blame the motor car and hope that negative restrictions will some how cure road congestion, road accidents, pollution, and the shortage of parking spaces. Yet every year more passengers travel by road (90% currently) and less by rail.
I believe our great grand children in one hundred years will be seven times as rich as we are; if gross national income continues to rise, at 2% as it has more than done this century. This means that a family, which has one car today, will be able to afford seven cars! They will hold in contempt any city, which fails to give their private transport 100% mobility. Even if motoring costs are doubled by tax, every person as, opposed to family, will still be able to afford a car.
In order to avoid accidents; pedestrians, cyclists and cars must be completely separated. So that there would be no need to jaywalk or have zebra crossings. I believe that cycling and walking is much healthier than going by car, but sadly it is not as safe. With the coming of RADBURNISATION [separate pedestrian and cycle routes] accidents should be reduced by 90%. There are more cycles than cars in England today, but sadly they are kept in bedrooms. It is much cheaper to build a brand new pathway system, than to build new roads. The cycleways and footpaths would mainly be on garden land as is revealed in the captions to MAPS 1 & 2 and Plan 3.
Only 1.5% of accommodation, mainly basements would be lost, which could easily be made up when rebuilding elsewhere. Cycling is quicker than the car today. Journeys in London of 2.5 miles took 18 mins. by cycle, 33 mins by car, 31 mins on trains and 38 mins by bus. Separation may be slow in existing historic towns but every individual separation is valuable. 100% can be instantly achieved in new cities. Pedestrians and cyclists need greenery, silence, clean air and safety. See chapter No.2. RADBURN.
There is a false notion that it is impossible to design roads that would permit everyone in a large city, to drive to work in a car. By reducing the height of flyovers and underpasses to give priority to car height vehicles the sewers can be avoided and these FUNCTIONAL JUNCTIONS can be built at one hundredth of the cost of standard Ministry of Transport intersections. They can usually be fitted into the existing road pattern and therefore do not require extra land. Since no two cars need ever pass at right angles, red traffic lights can become history. This will save lives and injury and make for cheaper insurance. By tripling the flow, and tripling the speed, everyone should be able to use their car whenever they want. See Chapter No. 3 FUNCTIONAL JUNCTIONS or car height bridges. Yes you heard right at 100th of the cost.
In the FUNCTIONAL JUNCTION scheme the under road goes one metre down which is above the sewer and therefore can drain into the sewer while the cross road only has to rise one metre. You can divert the gas, the electricity, the water, the phones but not the gravity draining sewer. Ministry of Transport underpasses have to go under the sewer, which means approx. 10m underground; this lengthens the ramp by 10 times, compared with my 1m and this tends to make the down ramp foul another sewer. M.O.T. bridges, on the other hand, have to climb well above the roofs of double decker buses. The ramps are so long that they tend to cut off the next cross road unless the road is kept up for miles on expensive columns, destroying the street architecturally, and cowering the pedestrians.
In 100 years time no cars will have drivers they will be pre-programmed and steered by little gadgets in the base of the lampposts. So public transport can be slowly phased-out as the new computerised driverless taxi modules can go more directly than buses. The giving of second hand cars to poor people would be more electorally popular than subsidising railways. ROADIONICS or computer guidance [see Chapter No.4] will allow road pricing, which can fairly distribute the cost amongst the users.
Parking problems have been deliberately induced by planners, who use it as a method of stopping congestion, this it has failed to do. Change the planning laws, to permit private enterprise, to build multi-storey car parks, when they are putting up new buildings and in 30 years we will have enough parking for present demand, and in 100 years enough for everyone. We don't have to put up with cars dangerously parked in the road, they should be tidily concealed. See PARKING chapter No.5
Why do the lower classes
need higher vehicles than the upper classes? The rich do not want double decker
cars, or ones as long or as wide as buses, they seem to be happy with Rolls
Royces. There are no essential loads which are larger than a family sized car.
Lorry size relates to driver economy, not the size of furniture or packages.
See VEHICLE HEIGHT Chapter No 6. I believe we do not require 100% penetration
for 16'-6" high vehicles. 20% of people today live in flats which have
lifts separating their personal front door from their parked cars, furniture
vans, dustcarts and ambulances, so there need be no lowering of standards. Because
in practice I think only 20% of road frontage would be denied access to high
vehicles, with a further 30% which would require high vehicles to journey an
extra mile per journey.
RAILWAYS
Slippery steel rails have no advantage over rubber on tarmac when guided by
ROADIONICS. Since non-drivers, the blind, the old and children will be able
to safely use cars on their own. The need for PUBLIC TRANSPORT will have faded
away before an efficient mass transport system could be built. See RAILWAY chapter
No 7.
My prejudice that led me to my solution, is concern for the environment, in particular size and scale. Beauty is woman sized, anthropomorphic, human in scale. See BEAUTY chapter No.8. Pedestrians and car drivers must be able to see over both bridges and cars, and see under bridges to the other side. I do not believe a road should be higher than a kitchen counter top above it's surroundings.. I think MoT junctions are out of scale with houses and people, please refer to the caption to Chapter 3 on FUNCTIONAL JUNCTIONS for an explanation of what a MoT junction is. Women are taller than cars, but lorries, trains, and buses have an unnecessary chassis which make them high and ugly. They are noisy and carry flu germs. I would phase them out but this is not essential to the working of the scheme.
FUNCTIONAL JUNCTIONS can be slotted into existing towns without the need for extensive demolition and relieve congestion, but it is much simpler and cheaper to incorporate them in NEW CITIES chapter No 9 where all congestion can be abolished. The building of a new Capital in the Thames Estuary would act as an even better magnet and be more profitable. The coming of the horseless carriage and the bicycle is an historic turning point, that requires the rebuilding of our infrastructure.
New Cities will require changes in legislation but will not require Government income expenditure; rather it will be a great source of national capital wealth so that taxes and unemployment can be reduced. Ebeneezer Howard of Garden City fame showed how. See FINANCE Chapter No.10.
A hundred years ago everyone was getting hysterical about pollution, - horse shit in the road - it was frightful. Men had to walk on the outside to stop the women's dresses getting splattered, it was everywhere. Nobody discusses the problem now and yet nothing was done about it. Why? because there is no horse shit today. In a hundred years time there will be no benzene or CO2 pollution from our roads. Why? Because petrol and oil will have run out or become so prohibitively expensive that cars will run on a different fuel, probably hydrogen whose exhaust will dribble pure water. See POLLUTION Chapter No.11. We don't have to wait a hundred years, to clean the air, we can hurry the process by differential taxation.
Because the car can travel faster, than 9 mph in London today, the car will be on the road for a shorter time this should more than halve the pollution. Travelling in low gear means the engine is going no slower just because the car is travelling slowly. Constant braking fills the air with dust and a great deal of energy/pollution is needed to get the car rolling again, after a traffic light stop.
Building work can not be done abroad, it is the only long term solution to unemployment. But we must start now, critical path analysis reveals that we need one hundred years if there is to be no crisis when the oil runs out.
If the solutions I propose were used world-wide, traffic congestion and pollution would not be a problem and the third world as well as ourselves could enjoy a car and a bicycle per person not just one per family.
The present political policy, by prohibiting parking is to reduce cars by 10%. Husbands will just go round and round the block while their wives shop. As car numbers rise each decade the negative restrictions will have to become more and more Draconian, until they are politically unacceptable. To use my enemies favourite word, this is not ‘sustainable’. My FUNCTIONAL JUNCTION proposals are 30 times as effective, and when fully implemented will solve the problems of congestion forever, ie they are SUSTAINABLE.
Your personal incredulity, that there would be no congestion, if every strap hanging tube traveller was an extra car on the existing roads of London is insufficient argument for me to climb down. You must find a fact or a calculation somewhere in my book that is wrong. But even if you do find several 10% errors that I have failed to see. I cover myself with 4 separate 100% arguments, in chapter 15 on CONGESTION
If, after reading this synopsis, you still doubt that RADBURNISATION, ROADIONICS AND FUNCTIONAL JUNCTIONS, are capable of curing road congestion, pollution and accidents, in cities, even when everyone has a car which they are not frightened to use, you will have to read the 90 page illustrated book.