TransportinCitiesRestrospectivez V1.0

Traffic in Towns: A Retrospective
Feb 2103
Contents
Executive summary ............................................................................................................................................... 1 Background ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 1 Theoretical basis ............................................................................................................................................................................. 1 Lineage (what the report built on and into) ..................................................................................................................................... 2 Reports critics ................................................................................................................................................................................ 2 Implementing Traffic in Towns ........................................................................................................................................................ 3 Conclusions .................................................................................................................................................................................... 3 1. Background ................................................................................................................................................ 5 1.1 1.2 2. 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3. 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 4. Urban reconstruction and environmentalism in post-war Britain ...................................................................................... 5 Colin Buchanan and Traffic in Towns .............................................................................................................................. 6 The problem ..................................................................................................................................................................... 8 Theoretical basis .............................................................................................................................................................. 9 General considerations .................................................................................................................................................. 12 Lineage (what the report built on and into) .................................................................................................................... 13 Reports critics ............................................................................................................................................................... 16 Land use / transportation studies ................................................................................................................................... 18 Town and Country Planning Act and Transport Act 1968 .............................................................................................. 19 Policy transfer ................................................................................................................................................................ 20 Buchanan layout in practice ........................................................................................................................................... 23 One level up: the South Hampshire Study ..................................................................................................................... 25
Working principles and general conclusions ......................................................................................... 8
Implementing the Buchanan Report: motorising the city ................................................................... 18
Conclusions ............................................................................................................................................. 28
NOTES................................................................................................................................................................... 31 REFERENCES ...................................................................................................................................................... 36
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Executive summary
With the 50th anniversary in 2013 of Sir Colin Buchanans landmark publication, Traffic in Towns, a timely retrospective is underway to revisit the core themes, issues and solutions and understand the effectiveness of 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 report exhibited 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 land management practices. From the late 1950s, the UK had experienced a steady growth in vehicle ownership. Licensed motor vehicles in Britain doubled in number between 1950 and 1960 (from 4.5 to 9.4 million), while the road network remained modest in size and scale. As traffic in Britains towns and cities grew worse, public anger was rising against the perceived failure of government to tackle the issue. While long-term planning for motor traffic in urban areas was firmly on the political agenda by the early 1960s, few transport schemes were in the pipeline and the government was well aware 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 Traffic Management Unit to carry out a special investigation into the nature of urban traffic. Rather than setting up a large committee representative of all interests concerned, the Minister asked Colin Buchanan to join the department and lead a team to undertake the study. An engineer, architect and planner, Buchanan entered imperial service in Sudan before joining the British Ministry of Transport in 1935. Buchanan was allowed to hand-pick the nine members of his interdisciplinary team 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 nearly 18,000 copies in four months before being republished the following year. The high quality report produced a suite of options for towns and cities to consider and resulted in urban areas taking on radical new planning approaches 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 ever produced by Her Majesty's Stationery Office (HMSO) to be privately published in paperback (by Penguin in 1964). Its long-term impact may have derived at least as much through the adoption of Traffic in Towns as the transport planning manual for generations of graduates and post-graduates in transport and planning as it did through direct impacts on government policy. Theoretical basis The overarching concept providing the theoretical context for Traffic in Towns is that transport planning and the building of highway systems are part and parcel of a much wider subject. Buchanan believed in the idea of towns as accumulated investment of centuries.
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Railway development in the 19th century allowed for a considerable loosening of urban structures, but suburban development at the time tended to cluster around railway stations and their catchment areas. It was only in the early part of the 20th century, when cars and heavy-goods vehicles arrived with their ability to provide a door-to-door transport service that the scene was set for a great physical expansion of urban areas. By the second part of the 20th century car ownership became a mass phenomenon as cities began to expand 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 a variety 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 symmetrical spider's-web plan with the town centre lying at the centre of and the other main concentrations of activity disposed asymmetrically around it. Traffic in Towns argued that the road network should depend on the disposition 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 The report 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 Englishspeaking world. 4. The traffic problem is related to three variables the standard of accessibility (or degree of usage of motor 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 of accommodating traffic. Any urban community faced with traffic congestion can adjust these variables in a number of ways but as said, to contain the anti-environmental effects of traffic, environment standards should be set. 5. Environmental management techniques traffic calming and speed reduction to protect the environmental 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 parts of the world during the late 1920s and 1930s. By the early 1960s, different towns and cities had already begun to experiment with the introduction of hierarchical traffic networks, multi-storey car parks and trafficfree 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 John Kain, argued that Traffic in Towns had substantially overestimated the future levels of car ownership and use in cities by mirroring and sometimes exceeding the US estimates of the time. A second critique endorsed by many transport planners in the 1970s, was that the concept of environmental areas 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-speed traffic. The report may have well underestimated the intrusive effects of noise 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 including motorcycles, bicycles, buses, and pedestrian movement as an adjunct to the car, rather than as a serious alternative to it. A fourth critique was that the transport models developed in the 1960s worked on the basis of two demandled 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 ownership was not universal and the people who lost most from such a strategy were precisely those who already had the greatest travel problems, namely children, the elderly, the poor, and women, who together formed a majority, not a minority. Implementing Traffic in Towns Following its publication and despite the interest it generated, successive governments to a large extent declined to implement the reports recommendations. By and large during the first half of the 20th century, town planning, highway engineering and public transport 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 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 the Transport Act which came into force the same year. They both called for the treatment of transport planning as 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 and environmental management, which were to become a fixture in the planning lexicon for the next two decades. Perhaps more importantly, in the report Buchanan effectively presented a fundamental code for urban layout, setting out idealised relationships between circulation and built form that informed much of the policy guidance issued in the following two decades. Some of its basic principles still survive in current design guidance and practice. Nearly 25 years later, Transport in the Urban Environment (1997) still recommended the use of the concept of environmental capacity to ascertain the capacity of road links. Conclusions As noted by Malcolm Buchanan, fifty years after the publication of Traffic in Towns we have attempted to absorb the forecast traffic growth by improving the inherited urban road networks, building some bypasses and relief roads, controlling parking and used traffic management to get the maximum capacity from the road network, while also attempting to minimise the adverse effects on other road users and frontages. Many town 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, but countless numbers of businesses, retailing and jobs have decentralised. Hospitals, schools, and
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warehousing have sought economies of scale by concentrating into larger units in out-of-town or edge-oftown locations, often close to motorway interchanges. Housing has also spread out at lower densities in estates organised so to be served by the car. As a result, some of the problems that Buchanan foresaw have now become even more difficult to handle. Towns and cities have dispersed on such a huge scale and with urban structures laid out neither for full use of the car nor for service by public transport that it has proved difficult to provide the good, cheap public transport that the Traffic in Towns team assumed would come to the rescue when car access had to be restricted. Some of the reports concepts including the segregation of traffic and elevated roads now appear dated and the impacts of which may well have been perverse, this should come as no surprise for a report written fifty years ago. In most respects Traffic in Towns retains great relevance to current policy issues. In particular:

placing the local environment at the centre of transport issues; emphasising the need for integrated transport and land use planning and defining much of the modern framework for delivering that; and the range of policy responses espoused in 1963 remain remarkably similar today, despite the 50 year period.
Transport in Cities aims to produce a vision or blueprint of what the key issues will be facing cities and city transport worldwide over the next 50 years, and the best ways to tackle them. Transport in Cities will seek to set out a new, modern version of Traffic in Towns, one that replaces the focuses on minimising the negative impacts of cars on local life and looks at how to most effectively grow the great economic engines of the 21st century cities. The challenges for Transport in Cities will be many and varied, not least the challenge of living up to its illustrious predecessor.
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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 way traffic and transport problems were conceptualised; the conclusions it drew, and how it informed both planning theory and practice. Finally, the last section teases out key messages in terms of the reports legacy, 50 years on. The publication of the Traffic in Towns report in 1963 marked a watershed in planning thinking. The report exhibited a common-sense approach towards major strategic issues that not only had a deep effect on the development of transport planning, but also pose important questions related to contemporary urban land management 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 rationing and the Suez crisis held it back, but thereafter it rose very quickly. In 1939 the number of licensed motor vehicles in Britain stood at just over three million, but by 1950 the number had increased to almost 4.5 million. Between 1950 and 1960 this figure doubled (from 4.5 to 9.4 million), while the road network remained modest in size and scale. What little new road building had occurred up until this time centred on the construction of bypasses and trunk road developments near urban areas. A National Plan for a motorway system 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 economic productivity. The government-sponsored Road Research Laboratory estimated in 1959 the costs of congestion at 250 million, some five times the annual roads budget. There was, of course, nothing new in the problem of traffic per se. London had already experienced severe traffic jams in the mid-1850s, but most towns and cities possessed a street pattern that had originated in medieval or Victorian times, which proved unsuited for motorised transport. Partly because of this, road casualties were heavy. While the ratio of vehicles to deaths on the road had diminished from its height in the 1930s, in absolute numbers deaths and injuries were increasing [2]. As traffic in Britains towns and cities grew worse, public anger was rising against the perceived failure of government to tackle the issue. In 1956 alone, nine parliamentary debates were held on road conditions and by 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 few years, traffic had to be catered for using existing road capacity. In 1960 Ernest Marples, the Transport Minister of the Macmillan Government set out the London Traffic Management Unit. This experimented with the extensive use of parking meters and implemented a number of major one-way street schemes (eg the Tottenham Court Road/Gower Street scheme). Eager to introduce bolder urban traffic strategies to be rolled out nationwide, the Minister announced to the press his intention to carry out a special investigation into the nature of urban traffic. Rather than setting up a large committee representative of all interests concerned, the Minister 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. Born in India, he entered imperial service in Sudan before joining the British Ministry of Transport in 1935. After the war ended, he joined the new Ministry of Town and Country Planning and from the late 1940s became increasingly interested in the integration of land use planning and transport policy [5]. In 1958 he published Mixed Blessing: the Motorcar in Britain, one of the few books at the time available on the problem of reconciling 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 the study. The small interdisciplinary team included nine people; among them architects, engineers, planners and 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 way virtually free from departmental interferences. The recommendations of the steering group were published as a 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 motor transport 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 manin-the-street could readily understand and illustrated with colour drawings prepared by a well-known townscape artist, the report proved an immediate hit with the public. In four months it sold nearly 18,000 copies and was republished the following year as a Penguin paperback. The report made headline news; the Peterborough conservative column in the Daily Telegraph deemed it equivalent in significance to the Beveridge Report of 1942, while the modernist Architectural Review declared it perhaps the most important planning 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 to consider and resulted in urban areas taking on radical new planning approaches in the immediate aftermath and over the following 20 years. These in turn caused a transformation in the appearance of some towns and cities and have created their own legacies, physical and attitudinal, towards town planning more generally [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 20 century town planning manual. This articulates a vision for planned settlements comprehensive of land reform, transport infrastructure, residential and commercial developments, greenbelt and amenities. By the same th token, Traffic in Towns can be described as the last town planning handbook of the 20 century. The analysis of the causes creating congestion brought the authors to call for a radical rethink of the way cities were designed, and ultimately a change in the scope and structure of the planning system itself. After Buchanan, 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 enough complexity.
th
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2. Working principles and general conclusions

The theoretical context for Traffic in Towns is that transport planning and the building of highway systems are part and parcel of a much wider subject, namely the form and organisation of urban areas. Buchanan believed in the idea of towns as accumulated investment of centuries and in the early 1960s was writing: 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 form and organisation of urban areas now seems to be looming up the world over as the supremely important social problem of the future. [] This brings us right into the realm of political theory involving a whole range of thorny questions concerning the rights and freedom of individuals and the ownership and tenure of land. [10] 2.1 The problem
th
The arrival of railways in the early part of the 19 century allowed for a considerable loosening of urban structures. However suburban development at the time tended to cluster around railway stations and their th catchment areas. It was in the early part of the 20 century, when cars and heavy goods vehicles arrived with their ability to provide a door-to-door transport service, that the scene was set for a great physical expansion of urban areas. In the interwar years, several battles were fought against ribbon development and urban sprawl [11]. This was the period when containment policies such as the introduction of greenbelts and th countryside conservation policies were originally conceived. But it was only in the second part of the 20 century, when car ownership became a mass phenomenon and affluence grew, that cities began to expand outwards as never before [12]. In 1961 Buchanan commented: A transport, and to some extent a social revolution has been taking place before our very eyes, but by some mischance it has remained virtually undocumented. [13] Having recognised that the basic influence of the motor vehicle is towards urban dispersal, the report assumed that there were advantages in maintaining urban compactness, and in resisting low density development. If cities could not accommodate the growth in population experienced, new settlements with social and physical infrastructure should be provided. In this sense the report was in line with the broad land use planning context of the time, as for example set out in the Barlow Report (1940) and the Greater London Plan prepared by Abercrombie in 1944 [14]. In the Introduction to Traffic in Towns, it is noted: The issue is not starkly between high-density flats and low density suburbs it is desirable that towns should have some of both but whether to abandon or maintain the degree of compactness and proximity which seem to contribute so much to the variety and richness of urban life. [] There could be no question of a simple 'solution' to the traffic problem. Indeed we found it desirable to avoid the term 'solution' altogether, for the traffic problem is not so 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 the light of events. [15]
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2.2
Theoretical basis
In order to maintain cities compact and address the urban traffic problem, the report laid out five key principles. 1) Traffic is not a mysterious event; rather transport is a function of land uses. In other words, people undertake journeys for a variety of reasons and these can be better understood by looking at trip origins and destinations. These will inevitably tend to be buildings of some sorts, if for building we accept a wide definition that includes depots, rail stations, waste facilities etc. It follows that the patterns of movement are closely related to the manner in which land uses are arranged. Travel patterns increase the demand for certain land uses over others but the opposite is also true; by rearranging land uses, travel patterns can be altered. However with the exclusion of redevelopment and expansion areas, this latter option is clearly difficult to achieve. In the case of areas undergoing comprehensive redevelopment and where activities and movement are intense, Traffic Architecture provides a concept whereby buildings and their access-ways can be designed in an integrated fashion. Multilevel buildings and the vertical segregation of pedestrian from vehicles will allow for multimodal highly accessible development.
Figure 2.1 Example of traffic architecture (Pen Centre Philadelphia)
Source: Traffic in Towns, p. 46.
At lower densities, some parts of town will also change their outlook. Residential areas will have premises facing onto public squares and pedestrian areas, while turning their back on the most heavily used traffic routes.
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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 the other main concentrations of activity disposed asymmetrically around it. With an increase in the number of vehicles, heavy traffic flows tend to develop on the radial routes. As a result, orbital ad hoc connections between the radials, and eventually complete inner and outer ring roads are built to divert traffic 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 is rather that this should not be taken as a standardised model. A primary road network of highway standard should be developed to serve urban areas and neighbourhoods, where environmental standards are set and through traffic cannot penetrate. In the same way that corridors serve rooms, the pattern of the network should depend on the disposition of the environmental areas and the kind and quantities of traffic they generate. 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 distributor roads, and then down to local roads that give access to buildings. When this concept is applied on a large scale, a whole area of the city takes on a cellular structure consisting of environmental areas set within an interlocking network of distributor highways. Figure 2.4 Hierarchy of distributors and cellular structure
The principle of the hierarchy of distributors. Access roads not shown.
Example of environmental areas and the pattern of the network
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 historic towns, are able to accommodate. As in the case of traffic architecture, the report is explicit in relation to the value of conservation. Asking to make no compromises, it points to the fact 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. [16] The traffic problem can be seen as related to three variables: the standard of accessibility (or degree of usage of motor 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 of accommodating traffic. Any urban community faced with traffic congestion can adjust these variables in a number of ways but as said, to contain the anti-environmental effects of traffic, environment standards should be set. The three variables were brought together in a rough and ready law stating that: within an urban area as it stands the establishment of environmental standards automatically
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4)
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 applied to protect the environmental standards in whole areas of towns. General considerations
2.3
It is clear that Buchanan believed that far more investment was required in roads and in transport more generally. 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 dealing with increased traffic in urban areas [18]. It can thus be argued that Traffic in Towns was primarily a demonstration of choices. The report proposed, on the assumption that environmental standards are maintained, a sliding scale of accessibility. If a city wanted a great deal of traffic in decent environmental conditions then it had to be willing to face very extensive and costly reconstruction. But if it did not want to change the urban form much, then it could still have decent environmental conditions provided it was content with much less traffic [19]. The report was clear on the fact that those were not technical matters, but choices for local communities and their elected politicians to make. In this sense it could be claimed that the enduring popularity of Traffic in Towns was, at least partially, due to the fact that it meant all things to all men. The planners saw it as an argument for rolling back the frontiers of the car and saving our towns from the road building required to accommodate it; the public transport professionals saw it as requiring better public transport; 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 to explore and illustrate the choices that would arise in each town as a result of planning to accommodate different levels of provision for car use. In conducting the exploratory studies in the four exemplar towns, the authors examined the ways in which different levels of highway investment could be used in each to construct road networks that would draw the extraneous traffic from the environmental areas within which an acceptable balance between environmental quality and accessibility was to be struck. Unsurprisingly the road networks required to cope with both the growth in car ownership and the traffic to be diverted around the environmental areas turned out to be large, expensive and unwelcome in many of the towns they were intended to improve. Grand scale redevelopment schemes such as Glasgow town centre may have improved the environment because they were less polluted and more secure, but proved unwanted and disliked 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 biological context and applied it to human surroundings. It recommended the setting of environmental standards as an absolute requirement, taking precedence over any other consideration. This contradicted the basic assumption 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 built environment were not possible, restrictions on car use were required, together with good, cheap public transport [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 as being at least 20 years off. It accordingly concluded that everything points to the immediate importance of parking policy and recommended that local authorities should retain complete control of the amount of parking space provided, its location and the charges levied [23]. Traffic in Towns also supported the use of subsidy for public transport so that this could offer considerable financial advantages over the use of cars. In 1962, Beeching was working on his proposals to cut back the rail network and therefore the subject was excluded from the remit given to the Traffic in Towns team. The previous year, the Jack Committees inquiry into 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 in Towns it was suggested that fare reductions were the major improvement worth offering to those who might be tempted from their cars. In the 1960s trams had only recently been closed down in favour of buses, so the option of reinstating them was not seriously considered. The team also looked for innovative forms of transport, such as travelators and tracked hovercraft but did not identify anything likely to challenge the supremacy 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 of transport modes and elevated floors for pedestrians had already been discussed by planners in many parts of the world during the late 1920s and 1930s. By the early 1960s, different towns and cities had already begun to experiment with the introduction of hierarchical traffic networks, multi-storey car parks and trafficfree 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 advocated by 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 of precinct 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 creation of 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 the precinct principally as a means of diverting traffic, with the decisive factor being road traffic flows, Buchanan took the idea one step further. As Tripp and Abercrombie had imagined, the environmental areas would be of different character and the level of traffic would vary according to their function (residential, shopping and industrial) but it would be environmental capacity, a completely new concept rather than traffic flows, which would 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 of New Towns built in 1950s and the 1960s. Traffic in Towns describes the central area of Cumbernauld, a New 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 level hierarchical 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 densities Buchanan advocated the application of the Radburn layout. Radburn, planned in the late 1920s in the US by Clarence Stein and Henry Wright in New Jersey, was explicitly designed to separate traffic by mode, with a 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 the conscious grouping of schools, community facilities and shops within easy walking distance of housing in a way 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 neighbourhood unit as a physical means of creating social cohesion [29]. Nonetheless, during the 1950s and 1960s, the concept has been widely applied in New Towns and Town Extensions, as a framework for the provision of essential social facilities in reasonable proximity to housing. Greenhill, a suburb of Sheffield, developed in the early 1950s, was one of such scheme and an early notorious British example of the Radburn layout (see Figure 2.7).
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Figure 2.6 Radburn layout
Source: Stein (1958).
Figure 2.7 The Radburn principle applied in the UK: Greenhill, Sheffield
Source: MSN map (2012)
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The Radburn layout is credited with incorporating some of the earliest cul-de-sacs in the United States and had a profound influence on residential design all over the world. For example, the British New Town of Milton Keynes was built around a grid of one-kilometre square superblocks. In Australia, the Radburn layout was used in the planning of some of Canberra in the early 1960s, in particular Charnwood, Curtin and Garran. It was also used in the Melbourne suburb of Doncaster East, in an area known as the Milgate Park Estate. 2.5 Reports critics
At the time of its publication, a powerful critique to the report came from two economists, Michael Beesley and John Kain [30]. They argued that Traffic in Towns had substantially overestimated the levels of car ownership and use in cities in future years. It was pointed out that while the report assumed the existence of a dense and fixed urban fabric, the levels of car ownership and use deployed to assess future needs were in line 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 the report. For example, it was noted that the Leeds case study contained figures related to levels of car ownership in twenty years that were 60 per cent lower than the reports general estimates. In other words, if a dense and fixed urban fabric is assumed, car ownership cannot rise as predicted because there would not be the enough space to accommodate all the vehicles. A second critique endorsed by many transport planners in the 1970s, was that the concept of environmental areas was inherently problematic; and that once applied in practice it was likely to lead to negative social outcomes [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-speed traffic. The application of the concept was also likely to lead to edge effects, whereby people living on the peripheral 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 its social ramifications. Rather, these were loosely defined in the report; the key factor being that traffic within them would be subordinate to the environment. As noted by Buchanan himself, the principle of a network draining all exogenous traffic out of environmental areas does imply that there is compartmentalism of the habitable areas of the city; this to a certain extent was seen as unavoidable. Yet in Buchanans view, this did not necessarily mean a rigid separation [32]. Elevated decks were designed precisely with the pedestrian in mind but have now fallen out of favour. The report may have well underestimated the intrusive effects of noise 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 including motorcycles, bicycles, buses, and pedestrian movement as an adjunct to the car, rather than as a serious alternative to it [33]. This is a well-rehearsed argument. From a standpoint of a later age, the idea to allow maximum penetration of vehicles into town centres may appear curious and alien but at the time this was a vision 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 demandled assumptions. Private car use would increase; therefore it was necessary to increase road capacity. And public transport must be provided for the people unable to use cars, although they would become relatively few in number. The point made was that even if household car ownership was high, it was not universal. In addition not all members of a household had access to a car at all times. The people who lost most from
such a strategy were precisely those who already had the greatest travel problems, namely children, the elderly, 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 extent declined to implement the reports recommendations. The Treasury deemed the solutions envisioned in Traffic in Towns too expensive, while the incoming Labour administration remained committed to public transport over private cars and found the report lacking in this respect. This said, the reports principles permeated much of the transport and planning policy and guidance that followed; and local authorities applied 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 months from the 1964 general election, it was not willing to commit itself to a massive road building program [36]. It therefore resorted to delaying tactics. In order for local communities to make an informed choice about the trade-offs available between accessibility and environmental quality, new land use/transportation studies had first to be carried out in each locality [37]. 3.1 Land use / transportation studies
In a joint Ministry of Housing and Transport Circular titled Traffic in Towns, local authorities were called upon to prepare land use/transportation studies. The government offered technical advice and provided financial help to those councils willing to undertake such work [38]. In total, 18 studies were produced throughout 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 vary in accordance with the new land uses. On one side of the equation there were the American-style homeinterview surveys; as it was recognised that the household was at the origin or destination of the bulk of all personal journeys. On the other side, there was the forecast related to the number and location of households, 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 per annum and assumed car ownership to grow twice that much, inevitably the results pointed to levels of investment that were completely unrealistic. But then the early 1960s were characterised by a great sense of optimism. In 1964 the Treasury for example set public expenditure to rise at least as fast as the GDP, with this expected to grow at around 4.5 per cent [39]. A study from the late 1970s compared the assumptions contained in the land use / transportation studies with what happened on the ground, and came to the conclusion 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 instances transportation studies were used to demonstrate that schemes already in the pipeline represented the right solution 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 of reshaping cities to give them a more modern outlook could still count on a broad base support. By the end of the decade the climate of opinion surrounding urban planning was changing quickly and the government increasingly began to spell out the need to restrain traffic in the larger towns and cities. Yet as noted by Starkie (1982), it would be wrong to assume that successive administrations were moving away from the urban motorway paradigm. On the contrary, at this time the intention was to build Buchanan-type primary networks. However, it was recognised that this would take time. The government first intended to complete its 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 for urban 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 inner cities, urban motorways were no longer a priority. By the end of the decade the level of spending of new road works was little more than half of what it had been in 1973/74, and as a proportion of all expenditure on local transport it declined from just over a third to about a fifth. One casualty was the plan for ambitious highways from transportation studies. But even long after proposals were abandoned, the analytical processes emerging 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 of Traffic in Towns, John Payton, the then Tory Minister, announced to the House of Commons his proposal to switch resources away from urban road construction [43]. As noted by Headicar (2009), what was significant in the governments response to the financial crisis of the mid-70s was not just that its spending plans were temporarily put on hold. Rather the whole trajectory of growth that had underpinned assumptions during the previous 20 years disappeared. Strategic planning in particular, the cutting edge of planning practice in the late 1960s and early 1970s, 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 public transport 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 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 the Transport Act, which came into force the same year. They both called for the treatment of transport planning as 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 the Buchanan report and the procedures and finance for urban renewal. It soon became apparent however, that the group could also lead the review of the development plan system [44]. The Buchanan report recommended the adoption of two new types of plan; a transportation plan and an implementation plan but the government was concerned with the overall level of complexity [45]. The group therefore proposed an urban 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 the blueprint approach that had dominated the development plans from the 1947 Act. To do so, it introduced the distinction between policy and strategic issues, addressed in Structure Plans, and detailed tactical issues to be dealt with in Local Plans. This two-tier system became the cornerstone of the land use planning system in many countries around the world and policies covering the management of traffic were included within the remit of development plans for the first time. The Transport Act 1968 put forward 5 key principles, all fully endorsed in Traffic in Towns: 1. Since local authorities are responsible for planning, they must be the authorities responsible for public transport.
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2. All transport matters for which local authorities are to be responsible the improvement of the local road network, investment in public transport, traffic management measures, the balance public and private transport must be focused in an integrated transport plan, which in turn is related to the general planning for each area. 3. Investment in local transport must be grant-aided by central government just as the investment in general 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 make sense in transport terms [46]. With regard to this latter point, under the 1968 Transport Act Passenger Transport Authorities were established for each of the seven conurbations to coordinate public transport provision in the metropolitan areas. 3.3 Policy transfer
Road hierarchy As noted by Gunn (2011) Traffic in Towns put in circulation a new conceptual vocabulary that included terms such as road hierarchy and environmental management, which were to become a fixture in the planning lexicon 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 that informed much of the policy guidance issued in the following two decades. Some of its basic principles still survive in current design guidance and practice. For example, the hierarchical approach to roads in the UK can be traced back to Transport in the Urban Environment (1997); a revision of official guidance (Roads and Traffic in Urban Areas (1987)), which in turn elaborated a series of principles set out in Traffic in Towns. [47] In Traffic in Towns, Buchanan subdivided distributors into primary, district and local distributors, which together 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 element at the bottom of the hierarchy.
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Figure 3.1 Illustration of different 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 is that conflicts tend to arise as a consequence of competing demands that cannot all be accommodated. It is therefore important to determine which of the various demands should be given priority. Road hierarchies perform 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 and intended use of roads: from strategic routes carrying heavier traffic flows at higher speeds with limited access, to minor roads designed for local traffic with frontage access. The basic underlining assumption is that the provision of access to sites and buildings and their immediate surroundings should, whenever possible, be separated from the provision for the through movement of motor vehicles. The legacy of the modernist application of this concept is that the old street, conceptualised as a multi-purpose space catering for a diversity of urban uses and transport modes tend to disappear [48]. In stark contrast to the contemporary preference for a shared space approach, Buchanans metaphor of urban rooms and corridors 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 regard to its use, the amount of pedestrian traffic it generates, the volume of vehicular movement to be allowed and the character of the adjacent buildings [49]. Buchanan suggested defining environmental areas and then providing a road network capable of serving them. But even without the construction of primary networks, the concept of environmental capacity offered a set of criteria that could be used as a traffic management measure to direct traffic between existing and improved streets. After the publication of Traffic in Towns, many local authorities followed this avenue and set up environmental areas. Most schemes included a mixture 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 Area Programme. Nearly 25 years later, Transport in the Urban Environment (1997) still recommends the use of the concept of environmental capacity to ascertain the capacity of road links. If the capacity of a street is exceeded, design features and traffic management are then required to restrict traffic flows and to control the type and speed of vehicles permitted in. It is interesting to note that official guidance dated 1997 still refers to Traffic in Towns for the definition of environmental capacity. Home zones, originally called Woonerf (Living Yard) and pioneered in the 1970s in the Netherlands, were themselves partially inspired by the concept of environmental areas [51]. Home zones work through the physical alteration of streets and roads in an area that force motorists to drive with greater care and at lower speeds. The Urban Task Force Report (1999) supported the introduction of home zones using tested street designs, reduced speed limits and traffic calming, and the Transport Act 2000 provided the first direct legislative 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. The Transport Policy White Paper published in July 1966 suggested that deliberate measures of traffic restraints were required to ensure that the volume of traffic entering congested areas was sensibly related to the capacity of the road system. It went on to suggest that: at present, a thoroughgoing parking policy is the best method of achieving this. This conclusion, already reached in Traffic in Towns, was then confirmed a few months later in the report Better Use of Town Roads [52]. To supplement the space available for public use, development control powers were commonly used throughout the 1950s requiring commerce and industry to provide minimum parking for visitors and employees. In a Planning Bulletin on Parking in Town Centres issued in 1965, the government encouraged authorities to take a comprehensive view of parking policies and their possible contribution to limiting traffic congestion, 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 parking authorities in the provincial conurbations, to submit Traffic and Transport Plans to the Ministry. These were to show how a balance between traffic and road capacity was to be achieved in the years immediately ahead. In the Circular, it was expected that control of parking would be the crucial instrument of traffic restraint and authorities were told that it was the total amount of parking space and the way it was used that had 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 in Towns, the Buchanan principles were applied extensively by town councils when these began to consider the development potential of their central areas and a renewed layout for vehicular and pedestrian movement. Local authorities could in fact use powers available under the 1947 Act to declare Comprehensive 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 design influences towards multi-level modernist decks and urban conservation were various and are therefore difficult to pin down. For example, after initial retailer and developer caution, the notion of open pedestrianised precincts was gradually accepted so that private developers increasingly took on such schemes [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, the principle is the same: pedestrianised and covered town centre developments with rear, subterranean service bays or roof-top serving. Perhaps Milton Keynes centre, with its futuristic outlook, comes closest to being traffic architecture [57]. In the design sense, the concept of a hierarchical highway network was readily accepted and implemented in practice in those situations where new developments were initiated. For example the New Town of Livingstone in Scotland, designated in 1962, has a Buchanan-type road network based on a four-level hierarchical system with different categories of roads fulfilling different traffic functions. At the upper level it comprises 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 major employment areas, through and commuting traffic, heavy goods vehicles and traffic to the town centre. The next level of road comprises a system of single carriageway District Roads, providing access from the Town Road system to the various residential, commercial and industrial areas and movement between them. The lowest level in the hierarchy of roads comprises single carriageway cul-de-sacs, providing access from the District Roads into the individual housing, employment or community sites. Such cul-de-sacs serve a maximum of 200 houses. Where this number has had to be exceeded, short loop roads are provided as an alternative [58].
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Figure 3.2 Livingstone Master Plan Report (1963) Phase 4 and Districts maps
Source: Idox plc.
In built-up areas and inner cities, only authorities that initiated development early (ahead of what has been described as the environmental backlash) managed to progress the construction of their urban motorway schemes. Leeds had its Inner-City Ring Road substantially completed by the end of the 1970s; Glasgow had by 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 of concentric ring roads of motorway standards. The inner one, also known as the motorway box, proved particularly contentious as it would have required the demolition of thousands of homes and the decanting of approximately 10,000 people. The technical arguments for and against the ring roads were presented at the public inquiry that preceded adoption of the plan. However, given the strenuous opposition, the motorways component 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 todays Aucklands 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 private sector developers. Examples include the Woodloes housing area in Warwick and the Eastern Kenilworth housing development in Kenilworth [60]. Environmental and traffic management techniques have been widely applied and new roads built to divert traffic from town centres. One example is offered by Norwich Cathedral 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 schemes implemented in towns such as Hereford, Abingdon, Oxford and many other small market towns. The one negative corollary of these schemes has been the need to spread the load of the diverted traffic on the immediately adjacent streets [61]. 3.5 One level up: the South Hampshire Study
A few months after the publication of Traffic in Towns, the government commissioned Colin Buchanan and Partners 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 of around 773,000 [62]. By the 1950s, the perception was that the development pressures that characterised the interwar years had resumed, and that with the exclusion of the New Forest, the whole of the costal belt was at risk of becoming a continuous sprawl of urban development [63]. In line with the findings of the South East Study (1964), the study brief asked consultants to consider accommodating a total growth of 300,000 by 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-use patterns that could only be served by private car, towards a pattern that could be serviced by public transport. The exercise of planning a sub-region so diverse in terms of its geography necessarily brought about a series 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 its associated infrastructure across local government boundaries. The South Hampshire Study, together with supplementary reports, was published in July 1966. In the report the study area is treated as a single corridor city-region. The plan proposed a loose grid structure, with growth areas located close to existing employment and service centres; close to the emerging motorway network, but also well served by the regions rail system and by buses. The study came to the conclusion that the area was growing at such a pace under market forces that, provided present trends continued, there was no need for planned intake of population, as spontaneous migration would add 130,000 people to its area by 1981. Figure 3.4 South Hampshire 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 development envisioned and the diagrammatic nature of the maps contained in the report a mixture of anti-urban and antigrowth sentiments. The study team attempted to pre-empt a misconception based on an erroneous understanding 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 local government boundaries. Local politicians had vested interests in preserving the separate identities of the historical settlements, and supported continued administrative fragmentation at the expense of any form of consolidation. The study proved to be far-sighted. The sub-region grew more or less as trends predicted; in 2001 the area had a population of around one million. Ironically the area became what has been described as the worst of both worlds: accommodating a similar quantum of development, but without the social and physical infrastructure capable of supporting it [67]. Without a comprehensive plan much of the development that occurred 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 public transport main routes and railway lines. Moreover, in many instances the facilities have come only after housing schemes were substantially completed and the lack of local services means these are in a highdemand. In rejecting the studys idea of a single metropolitan authority, local politicians seem to have allowed scattered 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 of Traffic in Towns we have attempted to absorb the forecast traffic growth by improving the inherited urban road networks, building some bypasses and relief roads, controlling parking and used traffic management to get the maximum capacity from the road network, while also attempting to minimise the adverse effects on other road users and frontages. In addition, 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, but countless numbers of businesses, retailing and jobs have moved out to shopping centres, retail and business parks. Similarly hospitals, schools, and warehousing have sought economies of scale by concentrating into larger units in out-of-town or edge-of-town locations, often close to motorway interchanges. 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 and cities have dispersed on such a huge scale (and with urban structures laid out neither for full use of the car nor for service by public transport) that it has proved difficult to provide the good, cheap public transport that 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 intrasuburban travel markets [70]. Recent studies suggest that the preference of the public for low density suburban locations is a common feature of many affluent societies [71]. Looking at Europe but also at developing countries in other continents, 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 of development 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 the challenges to be faced in retrofitting vast swathes of suburbs and in repairing urban sprawl. To date there are only a limited number of successful examples in different locations around the world where the degree of density 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 the only HMSO report to have been privately published in paperback (by Penguin in 1964). Its long-term impact may have derived at least as much through the adoption of Traffic in Towns as the transport planning manual for generations of graduates and post-graduates in transport and planning as it did through direct impacts 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
which, when applied to London, would soon have the traffic moving as sweetly as desired. Instead of which he got a whacking report on city planning. That emphasis on the options available provided plenty of scope for interpretation on the recommendations made. Again quoting Sir Colin: When the book was published, the Pedestrians Association praised it for being anti-car. At the same time the Royal Automobile Club made me a life member for a report that was so obviously pro-car! There are some things in Traffic in Towns that now appear dated and the impacts of which may well have been perverse, which should come as no surprise for a report written fifty years ago: Segregation of traffic, while addressing one of Buchanans key concerns about safety, is now being reduced across the UK and worldwide. That is partly in response to much improved driver behaviour, but also from the understanding that the safer drivers are made to feel, the more dangerously they tend to drive. Thus the shared space initiatives that take away priority and segregation for vehicles, makes drivers much more aware of what is going on around them; Elevated roads in urban areas, while efficient in terms of movement (at least up to a point) impose environmental costs on people that are no longer acceptable in the UK. There was less of this in Traffic in Towns, but elevated urban motorways did feature strongly in the early work undertaken by Colin Buchanan and Partners, the consultancy business set up in 1964 after Traffic in Towns; The Environmental Areas designed to protect residential areas from the negative impacts of through traffic may have perversely created areas that could only be served by car. Modern emphasis tends to be more about permeability of areas and the long cul-de-sacs are inefficient for walk, cycle and bus journeys The other key criticism perhaps came largely from the brief, but there was little consideration of how improved public transport could be used to reduce the growth in traffic demand. Traffic in Towns considered a number of mechanisms for controlling traffic including permits/licenses, road pricing and parking policies. With respect to public transport, although it mentioned the role of price subsidies, it did not go through how better public transport might reduce traffic demand growth through Park-and-Ride or bus priority over private cars.
In most respects Traffic in Towns retains great relevance to current policy issues. In particular: Placing the local environment at the centre of transport issues Emphasising the need for integrated transport and land use planning and defining much of the modern framework for delivering that The range of policy responses espoused in 1963 remain remarkably similar today, despite the 50 year period
Transport in Cities will seek to set out a new, modern version of Traffic in Towns. One that replaces the focus on minimising the negative impacts of cars on local life by examining how to most effectively grow the great economic and social centres of the 21st century: cities. In this, as in many other aspects, we are indebted to Traffic in Towns:
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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 illustrious predecessor.
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NOTES
[1] Early examples include the building of the Great West Road, opened in 1925, running from London to Avonmouth 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, available at: 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 nonfatal 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 the findings of a joint study group of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, the Treasury and the Ministry of Transport set up to examine the implications of the great expansion of the car population upon which 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 simultaneously he hired a joint UKUS consultancy team, Freeman Fox and Wilbur Smith, to conduct a traffic survey as a first stage in developing an American-style transportation study and plan for Greater London. The early 1960s, in effect, witnessed a flurry of governmental initiatives designed to deal with the effects of growing motorization. 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 the Buchanan report, the government published the South East Study (Ministry of Housing and Local Government, 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 worth noting that in the first page of the report, the scope of work is described as: to study the long term development or roads and traffic in urban areas and their influence on the urban environment. [7] Daily Telegraph, 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 Sir William 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. Among other actions, it recommended the expansion of National Insurance and the creation of the National Health Service. [8] See for example Hart (1992), Davies (1998), Taylor (2003); Hebbert (2005) and Tewdwr-Jones (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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the 1920s and 1930s because such a location reduced the cost of development for housebuilders and combined the attraction of cheaper land away from the city centre with high levels of accessibility. [12] To give a sense of the scale of the phenomenon, in the ten years between 1964 and 1973, annual average completion was slightly over 200,000; 54 per of this was private sector built and all virtually sited in fringe locations. In contrast between 1945 and 1969, planned development in the form of New Towns and official Town Extensions accounted for only 3.7 per cent of public and private housing built in England and Wales. A testament to the fact that planning policy and practices left behind the Statist approach of the 1940s, and were now firmly located within a mixed economy and a society increasingly intent on the pursuit of private affluence. See Hall et al. (1973) Vol. 1 and Ward (2004) p. 169. [13] See Buchanan (1961). [14] In 1937 Prime Minister Chamberlain set up the Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population. This was headed by the former Minister of Labour Sir Montague Barlow. The report produced, the Barlow Report, is often referred to as single most important policy document in British planning history. It assessed the increasing gap in development occurring in different English regions, and recommended a regional balance in the distribution of employment, planned metropolitan decentralization and the continuance of slum clearance programs. These all became key ingredients of the post-war planning doctrine. For more details, see Ward (2004). [15] HM Government (1963), par. 62 and 61. [16] HM Government (1963), par. 466. [17] HM Government (1963), par. 116. [18] The forecast used in the report were trend based and generated by the Ministry for Transport. The year 2010 was chosen by the Traffic in Towns team as it was estimated that around this period saturation of vehicle ownership may be reached. At the time of the report 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. Since the population did not increase as forecast, the total vehicles numbers proved not as great as the report suggested they would be but when expressed in terms of vehicles per head of population, the forecasts have proved pretty accurate. At the end of 2010 there were 34.1 million vehicles licensed for use on the roads in Great Britain, with just under 1.2 cars per household. See HM Government (1963), par. 46. and DfT (2011). [19] See Buchanan (1966). [20] See Buchanan, M. (2004). [21] See Hall (2004). [22] HM Government (1963), par. 457. [23] HM Government (1963), par. 452-453. [24] See Buchanan M. (2009).
[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.
PAGE 33
[50] See Appleyard (1981) cited in Hass-Klau (1993). [51] See Ward (2004). [52] See Transport White Paper July and Better Use of Town Roads: Report of A Study of the Means of Restraint 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 - First and 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-Jones and Williamson (2009), Tachieva (2010) and Phelps and Wood (2011).
PAGE 35
REFERENCES
APPLEYARD, D. (1981) Liveable Streets, Berkeley University Press: Berkeley. BANNISTER, D. (2001) Transport Planning, 2nd Edition, Spon: London. BEESLEY M. E. and KAIN J. F. (1964) Urban form, car ownership and public policy: an appraisal of Traffic in Towns. Urban Studies, 1964, 1, 174203. BOULTER, R. (2004) Where do walking and cycling fit in? Sustainable cities through urban planning, paper presented at the 4th Annual Land Transport Summit, unpublished. BRUEGMANN, R. (2005) Sprawl: a compact history, University of Chicago Press: Chicago. BRUTON, M. (1981) Colin Buchanan, in Pioneers in British Planning, (Cheery, G. ed.), the Architectural Press: London. BUCHANAN C. (1966) Key Note address presented at Our People and Their Cities Conference, Washington D.C. September 1966. BUCHANAN, C. (1961), Conservative back benchers speech, (presented 28 June 1961), unpublished B/BCD/12. BUCHANAN, C. (1962) Towns and Traffic, Automobilismo e automobilismo industriale, A.C.I, Italy 1962. BUCHANAN, C. (1964a) The Expanding Cities, (paper delivered at Melbourne Symposium: Living with the Motor Car), B/BCD/13. BUCHANAN, C. (1964b) Fragment, unpublished. BUCHANAN, C. (1983) Traffic in Towns an Assessment after Twenty Years, Built Environment 9:2 93-98. BUCHANAN, C. (2001) I Told You So, an autobiography, unpublished. BUCHANAN, M. (2004), More or less Traffic in Towns? Transport n.157, Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers 27-41. BUCHANAN, M. (2009) Have we reached the end of Traffic in Towns?, Traffic Engineering and Control, 50:1, 17-20. CHARLESWORTH, G. (1984) A history of British Motorways, Thomas Telford, London. CLARKE, R. (1978) Public Expenditure, Management and Control, Macmillan, London. CULLINGWORTH, J.B. (1976) Town and Country Planning in Britain, sixth ed. , G. Allen & Unwin: London. DAVIES, H.W.E. (1998) Continuity and change: the evolution of the British planning system, 1947-97, Town Planning Review, 69:2, 135-52.
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DELAFONS, J. (1998) Reforming the British planning system 1964-5: The Planning Advisory Group and the genesis of the Planning Act of 1968, Planning Perspectives, 13:4, 373-87. DEPARTMENT FOR TRANSPORT (2011) Vehicle Licensing Statistics: 2011, HMSO: London. DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORT (1987) Roads and Traffic in Urban Areas, HSMO: London. DUNHAM-JONES, E., WILLIAMSON, J. (2009) Retrofitting suburbia: urban design solutions for redesigning suburbs, Wiley, Chichester. GLASS, R. (1948) The Social Background of a Plan, Routledge and Kegan Paul: London. GOLD, J. (2007) The practice of modernism: modern architects and urban transformation, 1954-1972, Routledge: London. GUNN, S. (2011) The Buchanan Report, environment and the problem of traffic in 1960s Britain, Twentieth Century British History, 22:4, 521-42. HALL, P. (1973) The containment of urban England / Vol.1, Urban and metropolitan growth processes; or Megalopolis denied, Allen & Unwin for PEP: London. HALL, P. (2003) The Buchanan Report: 40 years on, in Transport n.157, 7-14. HART, T. (1992) Transport, the urban pattern and regional change, 1960-2010, Urban Studies, 29: 3-4, 483503. HASS-KLAU, C. (1993) The Pedestrian and City Traffic, Sir Colin Buchanan (Foreword), John Wiley & Sons Ltd: London. HEADICAR, P. (2009) Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain, Routledge: London. HEBBERT, M. (2005) Engineering, urbanism and the struggle for street design, Journal of Urban Design, 10:1, 39-59. HILLMAN, M (1983) The wrong turning: twenty years on from Buchanan, Built Environment 9:2 104-113. HILLMAN, M. HENDERSON, I., WHALLEY, A. (1973) Personal mobility and transport policy, Political and Economic Planning Broadsheet London. HM GOVERNMENT (1963) Traffic in Towns: a study on the long term problems of traffic in urban areas, London, HMSO. KEEP, M., RUTHERFORD, T. (2011) Reported Road Accident Statistics, House of Commons Library: HMSO. MACKAY, W. (1997) Transport in the Urban Environment, Institution of Highways & Transportation: London. MACKINDER (1979) The predictive accuracy of British transport studies - a feasibility study, Transport Research Laboratory: London.
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MARRIOTT, O. (1969) The Property Boom, Pan: London. MARSHALL. S. (2005) Streets and Patterns, Spoon Press: London. MINISTRY OF HOUSING AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT (1964) South Hampshire Study: report on the feasibility of major urban growth, prepared by Colin Buchanan and Partners, HMSO: London. MINISTRY OF HOUSING AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT (1964) The South East Study 19611981, HMSO, London, 1964. MINISTRY OF HOUSING AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT and MINISTRY OF HOUSING (1964) Joint Circular Traffic in Towns 1/64, unpublished. MINISTRY OF TRANSPORT (1963) The Transport Needs of Great Britain in the Next Twenty Years, London, 1963. PHELPS, N.A. (2012) An anatomy of sprawl: planning and politics in Britain, Routlegde: London. PHELPS, N.A., WOODS, A.M. (2011) The new post-suburban politics?, in Urban Studies 48: 2951-2610. PLOWDEN, S. (1972) Towns Against Traffic. Andre Deutsch, London. STARKIE, D. (1982), The Motorway Age: Road and Traffic policies in post-war Britain, London, Pergamon Press. STEIN, C.S. (1958) Towards New Towns in America (2nd edition), Liverpool University Press: Liverpool. TACHIEVA, G. (2010) A sprawl repair manual, Island Press, Washington. TAYLOR, N. (2003) The aesthetic experience of traffic in the modern city, Urban Studies, 40: 8, 1609-25. TEWDWR-JONES, M. (2011) Urban Reflections: Narratives of Place, Planning and Change, Policy Press, Bristol. TRIPP H. A. Town Planning and Road Traffic. Edward Arnold, London, 1942. URBAN TASK FORCE (1999) Towards an Urban Renaissance, Routledge: London. WARD, S. (2004) Planning and Urban Change, second ed. Sage: London. WARD, S. (2007) Cross-national learning in the formation of British planning policies 1940-99: A comparison of the Barlow, Buchanan and Rogers Reports, Town Planning Review, 78: 3, 369-400.
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Traffic in Towns: A Retrospective

Working principles and general conclusions ......................................................................................... 8

Implementing the Buchanan Report: motorising the city ................................................................... 18

Colin Buchanan and Traffic in Towns

2. Working principles and general conclusions

Figure 2.1 Example of traffic architecture (Pen Centre Philadelphia)

Source: Traffic in Towns, p. 46.

Figure 2.2 Example of Radburn style precinct

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

Figure 2.3 The basic spiders web plan

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

The principle of the hierarchy of distributors. Access roads not shown.

Example of environmental areas and the pattern of the network

subsidy of public transport.

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

Lineage (what the report built on and into)

Figure 2.6 Radburn layout

Source: Stein (1958).

Source: MSN map (2012)

3. Implementing the Buchanan Report: motorising the city

Figure 3.1 Illustration of different types of roads within the hierarchy

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

Buchanan layout in practice

Source: Idox plc.

Figure 3.3 Norwich Cathedral Close

Source: Traffic in Towns (1963)

Source: Ministry of Housing and Local Government (1966)

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