Traffic in Towns is an influential report and popular book on urban and transport planning policy published 25 November 1963 for the UKMinistry of Transport by a team headed by the architect, civil engineer and planner Colin Buchanan.[1][2] The report warned of the potential damage caused by the motor car, while offering ways to mitigate it.[3] It gave planners a set of policy blueprints to deal with its effects on the urban environment, including traffic containment and segregation, which could be balanced against urban redevelopment, new corridor and distribution roads and precincts.
These policies shaped the development of the urban landscape in the UK and some other countries for two or three decades. Unusually for a technical policy report, it was so much in demand that Penguin abridged it and republished it as a book in 1964.
Britain was still reconstructing itself after the devastation of World War II, and, although the economy was recovering, towns and cities still had large areas of bomb damage that needed rebuilding or re-use. New motorways were being planned and built across the country, and the motor car was already starting to fill up towns and villages. Wartime had seen the establishment of central planning, and the discipline of urban planning was looking for good patterns and policies to be implemented as they rebuilt.
Although the government was looking to manage motor vehicle growth, potentially with a congestion charge as suggested by the Smeed Report, this was contrasted by a strong desire for dramatic cost-saving measures in nationalised public transport. Doctor Beeching's proposed closure of a third of the passenger railway lines, the withdrawal of tramways and trolleybuses and shunning of light rail, with bus services offering a partial replacement, all emphasised the widely held expectation that "progress" would see an increasing dependency on private motor cars. This represented a departure from the previous policies set by the Salter Report of 1933, which looked to balance the needs of railways against motor vehicles.
Predictions
The Vicious Cycle of Predict and Provide
At the time of the report,[5] there were 10.5 million vehicles registered in Britain, but, at predicted growth rates, this number was expected to become 18 million by 1970, 27 million by 1980 and about 40 million vehicles in 2010, or 540 vehicles for every 1,000 population, equivalent to 1.3 cars per household. They expected growth in traffic to be uneven, with more congestion in South East England, and to incorporate a population that would reach 74 million. Buchanan declared:
It is impossible to spend any time on the study of the future of traffic in towns without at once being appalled by the magnitude of the emergency that is coming upon us. We are nourishing at immense cost a monster of great potential destructiveness, and yet we love him dearly. To refuse to accept the challenge it presents would be an act of defeatism.
The impact of the motor car was compared with that of a heavy goods vehicle which;
given its head, would wreck our towns within a decade... The problems of traffic are crowding in upon us with desperate urgency. Unless steps are taken, the motor vehicle will defeat its own utility and bring about a disastrous degradation of the surroundings for living... Either the utility of vehicles in town will decline rapidly, or the pleasantness and safety of surroundings will deteriorate catastrophically – in all probability both will happen.[5]
Indeed it can be said in advance that the measures required to deal with the full potential amount of motor traffic in big cities are so formidable that society will have to ask itself seriously how far it is prepared to go with the motor vehicle.[6]
There was a need to limit vehicle access to some urban areas:
Distasteful though we find the whole idea, we think that some deliberate limitation of the volume of motor traffic is quite unavoidable. The need for it just can't be escaped. Even when everything that it is possibly to do by way of building new roads and expanding public transport has been done, there would still be, in the absence of deliberate limitation, more cars trying to move into, or within our cities than could possibly be accommodated.[7]
Already the growth of vehicle ownership in America had not been held back by congestion in urban areas; they observed that congestion in Britain's smaller land mass might limit the use of cars but probably not affect people's desire for ownership as they became more affluent and hoped to try to use their cars. They saw the day coming when most adults would take the car "as much for granted as an overcoat", and value it as an "asset of the first order".
There would also be pressure to house a growing population and disperse more population away from overcrowded cities. However, dispersing the population around the countryside would be synonymous with urban sprawl, and would defeat one of the reasons for car ownership, to get out into the countryside. Having examined the road network in Los Angeles and Fort Worth, Buchanan wished to avoid their dehumanising effects and their creation of pedestrian "no-go" areas.[8] He also wished to ensure that the heritage within British towns was respected:
The American policy of providing motorways for commuters can succeed, even in American conditions, only if there is a disregard for all considerations other than the free flow of traffic which seems sometimes to be almost ruthless. Our British cities are not only packed with buildings, they are also packed with history and to drive motorways through them on the American scale would inevitably destroy much that ought to be preserved.[9]
The rise of traffic congestion would waste people's time, who would soon have to spend time sitting in traffic, in addition to their time spent in sleep, work, and leisure. Already, the average speed in many cities had fallen to 11 miles per hour (18km/h), and congestion was costing the British economy £250 million in wasted man hours.
Yet the motor car was also inextricably linked to the economy, with 2,305,000 people working in the motor trade, or 10 percent of the labour force. It had already eclipsed the railway, and would become more prominent in the movement of goods and the workforce. The expansion of public transport would not provide an answer on its own.
However, the noise, fumes, pollution and visual intrusion of the cars and ugly traffic paraphernalia would overwhelm town centres, while vehicles parked on streets would force new hazards onto children at play.
Safety considerations should move to become foremost in the design of streets; three quarters of all injury accidents were occurring within towns (although most fatalities happened on open roads). They feared that future generations would think that they were careless and callous to mix people and moving vehicles on the same streets.
The report warned against trying to find a single "solution":
We have found it desirable to avoid the term 'solution' altogether for the traffic problem is not such much a problem waiting for a solution as a social situation requiring to be dealt with by policies patiently applied over a period and revised from time to time in light of events.[5]
Recommendations
Gracechurch Shopping Centre, Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham. An example of the new style of 1960-70's pedestrian precinct, separated from the historic road network, but at the cost of demolition of the earlier town shopping parade
The report[5] signified some fundamental shifts in attitudes to roads, by recognising that there were environmental disbenefits from traffic, and that large increases in capacity can exacerbate congestion problems, not solve them. This awareness of environmental impact was ahead of its time, and not translated into policy for some years in other countries, such as Germany or the US, where the promotion of traffic flow remained paramount[10] The scale of traffic growth envisaged would soon overtake any benefits that small-scale road improvement would offer, which would anyway divert attention from the large-scale solutions that would be needed. These solutions would be very expensive and could only be justified if they were comprehensively planned, including social as well as traffic needs. However, the report saw no turning back from people's new-found dependence on the car, and thought that there would be limits to how much traffic could be transferred to railways and buses.
Towns should be worth living in, which meant more than just the ability to drive into the centre. Urban redevelopment should look to the long term, and avoid parsimonious short-termism. The report asked how bold the planners could be, when restricting access to town centres and controlling traffic flows:
It is a difficult and dangerous thing in a democracy to prevent a substantial part of the population from doing things they do not regard as wrong. ... The freedom with which a person can walk about and look around is a very useful guide to the civilized quality of an urban area ... judged against this standard, many of our towns now seem to leave a great deal to be desired ... there must be areas of good environment where people can live, work, shop, look about and move around on foot in reasonable freedom from the hazards of motor traffic.[11]
The report recommended that certain standards should always be met, including safety, visual intrusion, noise, and pollution limits. But if a city was both financially able and willing, it should rebuild itself with modern traffic in mind.
However, if circumstances meant that this was not possible it would have to restrain traffic, perhaps severely. This was revolutionary and ran counter to the wisdom of economists, who assumed that environmental standards could be set off against other considerations once they had been priced.[1]
Planners should set a policy regarding the character being sought for each urban area, and the level of traffic should then be managed to produce the desired effect, in a safe manner. This would result in towns with a lattice of environmentally planned areas joined by a road hierarchy, a network of distribution roads, with longer-distance traffic being directed around and away from these areas, rather like an interior would be designed with corridors serving a multitude of rooms.
It recommended the selective use of bypasses around small and medium-sized towns to alleviate congestion in the centres, even though local businesses might complain at the loss of through-trade; the predicted increase in traffic would become more than an unmitigated nuisance in the future. However, it rejected a slavish use of ring-roads around large towns. As the detailed plans of these schemes often demanded far more land for junctions and wide roads than would be acceptable, it would be better to place restrictions on the volume of traffic that could access the area in these cases.
Where restrictions were needed, this could often be achieved through some combination of licences or permits, parking restrictions, or subsidised public transport. However it recommended that the road user should not be denied too much access, and that restricting through congestion charging would not normally be the right approach, unless and until every possible alternative had been tested:
We think the public can justifiably demand to be fully informed about the possibilities of adapting towns to motor traffic before there is any question of applying restrictive measures.[12]
Above ground multi-storey car park near Kilmarnock centre, one (visually intrusive) solution to the problem of accommodating cars next to retail redevelopment
Innovatively, the report recommended that some areas should change their outlook; rather than facing onto the street, shops could face onto squares or pedestrianised streets, with roof top or multi-storey parking nearby. Urban areas need not consist of buildings set alongside vehicular streets, instead multiple levels could be used with traffic moving underneath a building deck, with snug pedestrian alleys and contrasting open squares containing fountains and artwork.
Schemes would need to be carefully considered when they incorporated historic buildings, but such schemes could not be applied to small areas. However, obsolete street patterns were already becoming frozen for decades by piecemeal rebuilding. Whilst these grand schemes would be expensive, the income from vehicle taxes could represent a regular source of income to draw from.
This approach differed from the shopping mall concept, which was designed for the car on greenfield or out of town sites, and did not address the development of the existing urban landscape.
Examples
The report looked at a range of scenarios based on real towns, and suggested treatments that would balance the desire to enrich people's lives through car ownership while still maintain pleasant urban centres.
London (Oxford Street area)
Oxford Street, in London's West End "epitomizes the conflict between traffic and environment". The mixing of traffic and pedestrians had created "the most uncivilised street in Europe".[13]
The report had considered running car parks, through-traffic and access roads in shallow cuttings underground while raising the shop levels over four pedestrianised storeys 20 feet (6 metres) above it. However they concluded that this had already become impractical — for a generation at least — because of piecemeal redevelopment. Should this practice continue, the only choice would be ultimately to curtail vehicular access to the street.
Leeds, as a large city, was too large to accommodate all the potential traffic, and it should instead attempt to curtail access, particularly private vehicles being used for commuting. Leeds embraced the approach and adopted the motto Motorway city of the 70s after it built an Outer Ring Road, a sunken part-motorway Inner Ring Road and a clockwise-only 'loop road' enclosing a part-pedestrianised city centre with several business and shopping centres. The protection and redevelopment of the city centre came at the cost of the large landtake required for the network of corridor roads and interchanges, predominantly at ground level, which required extensive demolition and severed the previous urban and suburban communities.
Newbury – a small town
Newbury was chosen as an example of a small town that could be redeveloped following this pattern, with vehicles easily integrating into the urban scenery. But the report warned that the commitment and scale of work required would be hitherto unheard of. The concept was mainly ignored for 25 years until the A34Newbury bypass was proposed, alongside extensive pedestrianisation and road changes within the urban areas. The new roads dramatically reduced the impact of motor vehicles on the town, especially heavy goods vehicles,[14] and accompanied the reinvigoration of Newbury which had managed to retain its historic core.[15] When completed in 1998 the actual bypass followed approximately the same route as the original proposal,[16] but encountered such protest from so many quarters that all other UK road schemes were soon stalled. As a result, the government and Highways Agency changed its policies and assessment criteria to evenly balance predictions of schemes' environmental impact with their economic, community and safety benefits[14]
Norwich – an ancient town
Norwich, as an ancient town, could retain its historic areas but this would be at the cost of reduced vehicular access.
Response and legacy
The RAC recognised that some conclusions were unpalatable, and controversial, but overall they welcomed the approach. However, they thought that restrictions on vehicular traffic would be acceptable to the motorist if they could see the government determined to build capacity in urban areas. The Pedestrian Association cautioned that "the Judgment of Solomon" would be needed to decide how to implement the ideas in the report.[17]
The Parliamentary transport committee welcomed the report, as it offered an alternative to simply building more roads or providing more public transport. Thus it gained political currency, with the report forming the blueprint for UK urban planning for the next few decades.
In doing so, it gave acceptability and confidence to a number of proposals and innovations that soon became common in the UK landscape:[8]
urban clearways, flyovers, and the widespread used of single yellow and double yellow lines to limit the intrusion of vehicles in town centres
separation of pedestrians and traffic, with clearly defined kerbs and pedestrian barriers
Buchanan later proposed a development for Bath using the same approach to reduce traffic in the historical city centre by way of underground routes; this provoked such a storm of local protest that "Buchanan's Tunnel" was never built.[8][18]
The recognition that road congestion could not be addressed just through new road programmes influenced the way that traffic problems would be addressed in future; there would now be a switch towards "transport studies" which should consider multi-modal solutions, i.e. both road and public transport options, including park and ride. However, in the absence of a central commitment to public transport the perspective was skewed in favour of road building for many years to come. By 1970 the government had committed to spend £4 bn on road schemes to "eliminate congestion" over the next 15 years.[10]
However, this switch to a multi-modal approach took some time to become widely accepted, and meanwhile many grand road schemes were being planned. By 1970 there were plans to spend £1,700 million on multiple Ringways and elevated radial roads across London. Robert Vigars, the chairman of the Greater London Council's Planning committee, reported that the plan for a part-buried Ringway 2 to supersede the South Circular Road between the A2 and A23 would necessitate the destruction of several thousand houses, but it was:[19]
...not just a traffic solution but a plan for the very people whose areas it passes through. It means creating living standards for them, so that they can live, breathe, shop and eat free from the menace of traffic congestion in their local streets. This was putting Buchanan into action ... We are satisfied that the total planning and environmental gains greatly outweigh the local difficulties.
Criticisms
As towns were developed according to the Buchanan blueprint, several issues emerged.
Some of the grand plans that were called for have had a poor reputation in their implementation; to be able to predict future trends, mix social development, transport skills, and economic regeneration while performing slum clearance has often been beyond the capability of the local planners. Public accountability required by local government officers was sometimes stretched, with accusations of corruption involving private sector developers and contractors who put the plans into action. The cost inflation of schemes conspired with fluctuation of the property market, and its subsequent collapse in the early 1970s, left many plans incomplete. When economic conditions improved conservation had once again become fashionable and confidence in the need for these centrally-controlled grand plans had evaporated.[20]
Uncompleted Motorway Junction on the M23 towards London. Work stopped in the 1970s
The courage needed to develop the schemes required a lot of political will, and that would sometimes falter. By failing to identify cheaper alternatives when the financial case weakened, "do-nothing" often became the default action. For example, the extensive plans to develop a series of orbital and distribution roads into central London resulted in the construction of the A40(M) Westway, the M41 cross route and A102(M) Blackwall tunnel. However, the wide impact of these schemes caused such controversy during the 1970s that many associated road schemes ran into concerted opposition. After the 1973 oil crisis, remaining schemes fell into limbo, casting a planning blight over the affected areas for a decade or more until they were finally laid to rest. The recognition of environmental factors was also lacking in the 1960s; the report's considerations were more about the human environment, rather than the natural issues which have tended to confound some subsequent road proposals.
More latterly, the policy has been accused as being one of "predict and provide", or of building new roads in a congested network that generate even more traffic, rather than just meeting existing demand. This is to partly misrepresent the policy recommendations; although neither traffic generation and the deterrent effect of congestion, nor the mechanisms by which a business would choose to (re-)locate his premises was understood at the time, the report strove to strike a balance for situations when capacity demands could not or should not be met. Buchanan later claimed that radical urban surgery was almost the opposite of what he was proposing:[1]
...in spite of all the effort, it was widely misinterpreted … the Report was a description of the choices open, from 'do nothing to whole hog', with the advantages and disadvantages set out.
In some schemes, the separation of different types of road users would often be taken to extremes: by moving motor vehicles onto dedicated routes, their interaction with pedestrians or cycle routes might occur less often but would do so at higher speeds than before, thus creating an environment that was far more hazardous or intimidating for those not in cars. New towns like Milton Keynes could avoid this by placing motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians on separate levels and routes. However, their interaction would be a particular problem in established towns, especially in the transition to suburban areas where separation would be more ambiguous and inconsistent. In the search for low traffic casualty rates, urban planners now look to detailed road designs and traffic calming to counteract this effect, reducing vehicle speeds, or taking the more dramatic step of eliminating separation and mixing all road users together through shared space planning.
At the heart of many of the new schemes was architecture of poor quality or poor design, and a poor understanding of the effects of the new road network. As warned by Buchanan, the detailed implementation of many of these schemes critically affected their success or failure. Subsequent research has shown that more is needed than a pedestrian centre with glass shop fronts, accompanied by a hope that people will come and social life flourish.[21] One of the recommendations, that of integrating low-level roads with developments on top, has been largely ignored; the costs and commitments needed for multi-level developments have been prohibitive in old town centres, especially when cheaper alternatives or out of town sites have presented themselves. New developments were often made in a fashionable modernist or brutalist style which rapidly dated, while the planners had not fully considered the social or economic factors that could lead to urban decay. The corridor or distribution roads would often have minimal overpasses or grade separation, with communities separated, or blighted by noise and fumes. Drivers would refuse to be neatly compartmentalised into "travelling" along the corridor roads and "living" on the local roads, leading to businesses closing outside the prime sites.[22]
Actual traffic growth has not been as extreme as envisaged in the report (although Buchanan did warn that he had selecting the more pessimistic projections). In 1963 36% of households had a car, by 1998 this had grown to 72%, considerably less than predicted.[23] This pattern of inaccuracy was a frequent problem with early transport schemes, which often overestimated vehicle ownership by about 20%, leading to a suspicion that the schemes were often motivated by a feeling that they were important for "modernisation" for their own sake.[10]
Influences
Darlington, a modern interpretation of a pedestrian centre with restricted car access
The design of modern town schemes has been informed by the earlier policy decisions – and mistakes – in Britain, Europe and further afield. Auckland, for example, commissioned a plan from Buchanan for its road policies.[22]
By the mid 1970s it was evident that the previous focus on road traffic element was not enough; transport schemes were forced to widen the study area to include land use changes, and the effects of public transport, which continued to decline in popularity. This came to a head in 1976 when Nottingham rejected plans for new urban highways in favour of another (later also rejected) scheme to place access restrictions on cars entering the city centre. Instead, authorities' efforts were put to work improving the forecasting models, adjust local traffic management to squeeze more out of the current road system, directing heavy lorries away from minor roads, or subsidising public transport, which was now carrying fewer passengers and becoming uneconomic. The roads programme was scaled back to half its previous size mainly because of poor public finances, and urban regeneration became much more locally driven through "Strategic Plans".[10] Although many public policies and transport planners have promoted the creation of capacity-oriented solutions, organisations such as The Urban Motorways Committee (1972) adopted the need to respect the urban fabric. This movement has developed into a recognition of the need to effectively manage the demand for transport.[24]
Subsequent government planning policy on sustainable development adopted as consequence of the 1992 Earth Summit means that the concepts of vehicle restriction first mooted by Buchanan are slowly moving to the forefront of UK government policy. This has placed emphasis on alternatives to the private motor car, but has also embraced other techniques of restriction. Smeed's report of 1964 had proposed congestion charging as technically feasible, although Buchanan's recommendation had largely dismissed it. It took four decades for it to become politically acceptable in the UK, although this was not without controversy.[25]
Buchanan's concept of segregated zones or precincts, as pedestrian or local vehicular areas, was derived from Assistant CommissionerH. Alker Tripp of Scotland Yard's Traffic Division. Buchanan's articulation of this concept encouraged the planners of the Dutch towns of Emmen and Delft, who were developing the concept of the woonerf, or living street, and decades later this was fed back to Britain, as the "home zone".[26]
Cities in the USA slowly came round to respond to the problems that Buchanan identified in 1963. A notable example is the elevated freeway system built in the late 1950s to provide extra capacity for Boston's traffic, which, at enormous financial cost, was demolished and rebuilt underground many decades later thus creating road capacity, urban pedestrian space, and reuniting displaced communities.[27]
Transportation planning is the process of defining future policies, goals, investments, and spatial planning designs to prepare for future needs to move people and goods to destinations. As practiced today, it is a collaborative process that incorporates the input of many stakeholders including various government agencies, the public and private businesses. Transportation planners apply a multi-modal and/or comprehensive approach to analyzing the wide range of alternatives and impacts on the transportation system to influence beneficial outcomes.
The London congestion charge is a fee charged on most cars and motor vehicles being driven within the Congestion Charge Zone (CCZ) in Central London between 7:00 am and 6:00 pm Monday to Friday, and between 12:00 noon and 6:00 pm Saturday and Sunday.
Traffic calming uses physical design and other measures to improve safety for motorists, pedestrians and cyclists. It has become a tool to combat speeding and other unsafe behaviours of drivers in the neighbourhoods. It aims to encourage safer, more responsible driving and potentially reduce traffic flow. Urban planners and traffic engineers have many strategies for traffic calming, including narrowed roads and speed humps. Such measures are common in Australia and Europe, but less so in North America. Traffic calming is a calque of the German word Verkehrsberuhigung – the term's first published use in English was in 1985 by Carmen Hass-Klau.
Road pricing are direct charges levied for the use of roads, including road tolls, distance or time-based fees, congestion charges and charges designed to discourage the use of certain classes of vehicle, fuel sources or more polluting vehicles. These charges may be used primarily for revenue generation, usually for road infrastructure financing, or as a transportation demand management tool to reduce peak hour travel and the associated traffic congestion or other social and environmental negative externalities associated with road travel such as air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, visual intrusion, noise pollution and road traffic collisions.
Congestion pricing or congestion charges is a system of surcharging users of public goods that are subject to congestion through excess demand, such as through higher peak charges for use of bus services, electricity, metros, railways, telephones, and road pricing to reduce traffic congestion; airlines and shipping companies may be charged higher fees for slots at airports and through canals at busy times. Advocates claim this pricing strategy regulates demand, making it possible to manage congestion without increasing supply.
The Singapore Area Licensing Scheme (ALS), was a road pricing scheme introduced in 1975 to 1998, charged drivers who were entering downtown Singapore, and thereby aimed to manage traffic demand. This was the first urban traffic congestion pricing scheme to be successfully implemented in the world. This scheme affected all roads entering a 6-square-kilometre area in the Central Business District (CBD) called the "Restricted Zone" (RZ), later increased to 7.25 square kilometres to include areas that later became commercial in nature. The scheme was replaced in 1998 by the Electronic Road Pricing.
A home zone is a living street as implemented in the United Kingdom, which are designed primarily to meet the needs of pedestrians, cyclists, children and residents and where the speeds and dominance of cars is reduced. Quiet lanes are a similar concept in rural areas.
In economics, induced demand – related to latent demand and generated demand – is the phenomenon whereby an increase in supply results in a decline in price and an increase in consumption. In other words, as a good or service becomes more readily available and mass produced, its price goes down and consumers are more likely to buy it, meaning that quantity demanded subsequently increases. This is consistent with the economic theory of supply and demand.
Pedestrian zones are areas of a city or town reserved for pedestrian-only use and in which most or all automobile traffic is prohibited. Converting a street or an area to pedestrian-only use is called pedestrianisation.
The car-free movement is a broad, informal, emergent network of individuals and organizations, including social activists, urban planners, transportation engineers, environmentalists and others, brought together by a shared belief that large and/or high-speed motorized vehicles are too dominant in most modern cities. The goal of the movement is to create places where motorized vehicle use is greatly reduced or eliminated, by converting road and parking space to other public uses and rebuilding compact urban environments where most destinations are within easy reach by other means, including walking, cycling, public transport, personal transporters, and mobility as a service.
A living street is a street designed with the interests of pedestrians and cyclists in mind by providing enriching and experiential spaces. Living streets also act as social spaces, allowing children to play and encouraging social interactions on a human scale, safely and legally. Living streets consider all pedestrians granting equal access to elders and those who are disabled. These roads are still available for use by motor vehicles; however, their design aims to reduce both the speed and dominance of motorized transport. The reduction of motor vehicle dominance creates more opportunities for public transportation. Living Streets achieve these strategies by implementing the shared space approach. Reducing demarcations between vehicle traffic and pedestrians create a cohesive space without segregating different modes of transportation. Vehicle parking may also be restricted to designated bays. These street design principles first became popularized in the Netherlands during the 1970s, and the Dutch word woonerf is often used as a synonym for living street.
Shared space is an urban design approach that minimises the segregation between modes of road user. This is done by removing features such as kerbs, road surface markings, traffic signs, and traffic lights. Hans Monderman and others have suggested that, by creating a greater sense of uncertainty and making it unclear who has priority, drivers will reduce their speed, in turn reducing the dominance of vehicles, reducing road casualty rates, and improving safety for other road users.
Activity centre is a term used in urban planning and design for a mixed-use urban area where there is a concentration of commercial and other land uses. For example, the central business districts of cities (CBD) are also known as “Central Activities Districts” (CAD) (also known as Downtown in North America or "Central Activities Zone" in the United Kingdom in recognition of the fact that commercial functions are not the only things that occur there. The term activity centre can also be used to designate an area for mixed-use development, whatever its current land use happens to be.
Sir Colin Douglas Buchanan CBE was a Scottish town planner. He became Britain's most famous transport planner following the publication of Traffic in Towns in 1963, which presented a comprehensive view of the issues surrounding the growth of personal car ownership and urban traffic in the UK.
The Smeed Report was a study into alternative methods of charging for road use, commissioned by the UK government between 1962 and 1964 led by R. J. Smeed. The report stopped short of an unqualified recommendation for road pricing but supported congestion pricing for busy road networks.
Road protests in the United Kingdom usually occur as a reaction to a stated intention by the relevant authorities to build a new road, or to modify an existing road. Reasons for opposition to opening new roads include a desire to reduce air pollution and thus not wishing to incentivise increased or sustained car usage, and/or a desire to reduce or maintain low noise pollution by not having or increasing the use of motor vehicles in the area of the planned/proposed road. Protests may also be made by those wishing to see new roads built, changes made to existing roads, or against restricting their use by motor traffic.
An automotive city or auto city is a city that facilitates and encourages the movement of people via private transportation, through 'physical planning', e.g., built environment innovations and 'soft programming' e.g., social policy surrounding city street usage.
According to a "Global Driver Satisfaction" survey conducted by the navigation app Waze in 2015, Metro Manila had the "worst traffic on Southeast Asia". Emerson Carlos, MMDA assistant general manager for operation has mentioned that in 2015, motor vehicle registrations in Metro Manila peaked at around 2.5 million.
Road building was central to planning policy for much of the 20th century in Bristol, England. The planned road network evolved over time but at its core was a network of concentric ring roads and high-capacity radial roads.
A stroad is a type of thoroughfare that is a mix between a street and a road. The word stroad is a pejorative portmanteau of street and road, coined by American civil engineer and urban planner Charles Marohn in 2011, as a commentary about paved traffic structures in the United States. The term has also been applied to various traffic situations in Canada.
Buchanan, Colin (1963). Traffic in Towns: A Study of the Long Term Problems of Traffic in Urban Areas - Reports of the Steering Group and Working Group appointed by the Minister of Transport (Report). London: HMSO.
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