THE DESIGN OF THE HIGHWAY 185 



scene. This is not a matter of planning and beautifying a few major 

 highways; it is a matter of paying over- all attention to urban areas 

 to insure that wherever vehicles penetrate, in back streets as much 

 as in main streets, they do not ruin the surroundings for people. 



I think there is only one principle whereby progress can be made. 

 This is gradually to create, inside towns and cities, subareas where 

 considerations of environment are paramount and take precedence 

 over the movement or parking of vehicles. These might be termed 

 "urban rooms." It is here that people will live and work and have 

 their being, and their environmental needs may well limit the 

 amount of traffic to be admitted. The concomitant of urban rooms 

 is to have a corridor system (or highway network) onto which longer 

 movements of vehicles from locality to locality are concentrated, 

 leaving the urban rooms to deal only with their own traffic. 



The network as I have described it is essentially a facility for 

 movement. Nevertheless it can be a well-designed utility. There 

 are several aspects to this. It should be good to look at for those 

 people in whose field of view it falls. This includes people who have 

 to live with it in the sense that their dwellings or offices overlook it; 

 and the people who use it when driving or riding in vehicles, whose 

 requirements may be quite different. It should be so sited that it 

 does not carve up areas that by any rights should be homogenous 

 units. It should not be so out of scale with the surroundings that it 

 destroys all sense of urban cohesion. The need to keep it in scale 

 may even be a crucial limiting factor on the amount of traffic that 

 can be handled. 



Within the areas which I have described as urban rooms there 

 will be much traffic circulating. Once again, it is only part of the 

 problem to have beautiful circulation routes. The basic question 

 is to see how people can live at close quarters with the motor vehicle. 



To this end it seems essential to work toward a code of environ- 

 mental standards. I see this as merely another step in the long 

 struggle to upgrade the quality of urban surroundings, in which 

 process the definition of standards has played a major role. Over- 

 crowding in dwellings, bad sanitation, lack of ventilation, dampness, 

 lack of daylight and sunlight, insufficient play spaces for children 

 all these are matters where steady social progress has followed the 

 setting up of standards. I submit that we now need to follow in 

 the same tradition by defining the standards of danger, anxiety, 

 noise, fumes, vibration, and visual intrusion that are to be regarded 



