5i8 



NA TURE 



[September 19, 1901 



itself to us : this is whether the need for rapid cornmunicalion 

 between town and town may not eventually be supplied by high- 

 speed motor-cars on roads specially prepared for them. Mr. 

 Wells in his interesting forecast in the Fortnightly Review seems 

 to think that the time is not far distant when all passenger traffic 

 will be carried on special roads on motor-cars. That the advan- 

 tages of carrying your family and loading up your belongings at 

 your own door, in your own or a hired car, and transporting 

 them without any change or handling of your baggage right up 

 to the point where your journey ends, will be so great that even 

 for comparative long journeys travellers will prefer it to the 

 railway, and that our railways will eventually be relegated to 

 carrying minerals and heavy goods. But, without going so far 

 as Mr. Wells, it does seem probable that if only a few pa.ssengers 

 require to travel between two business centres such as Manchester 

 and Liverpool, and to occupy only half the time from door to 

 door at present taken by the railway and the tw^o terminal cab 

 rides, it might be better to provide one of Mr. Wells' improved 

 roads on which private owners could run their own cars, paying 

 toll for the road, and on which a public service of cars would 

 provide for those who did not own cars themselves. 



I now propose to deal at somewhat greater length with what 

 I think is a most important problem in locomotion, viz. that 

 caused by the congestion of street traffic in our towns and by 

 the undoubted difficulties which exist in carrying our workers to 

 and from their homes in the country to their places of employ- 

 ment in our towns. A large proportion of the workers who 

 during the latter half of the last century lived and worked in the 

 country are now working in towns, although some of them still 

 live outside in order to obtain the advantages of lower rents and 

 of a healthier life for their families, and this last class is likely 

 to increase largely. Those who have been responsible for 

 the enlarging and improvements of our towns have done so 

 much to make town life preferable to country life that 

 the country is gradually being depopulated. The results 

 we see in the increasing difficulties which the town 

 authorities find in dealing with the water and sewerage 

 questions, and in the increasing mass of vehicular street traffic, 

 which makes some of our cities veritable pandemoniums. 

 Luckily it seems that we are likely through the skill and energy 

 of our engineers to meet these difficulties in more than one way. 

 The cycle, which commenced as an amusement and went on as 

 a fashionable craze, has now settled down into being the poor 

 man's horse. The number of our working population that use 

 the cycle for going to and from their work is already very large 

 and is steadily increasing, and their use of the roads must be 

 considered. Then came the motor-car, developed in France to 

 such an amazing extent, and which seems now likely to be de- 

 veloped to an tqual extent in this country. After many years 

 of objecting to the use of the overhead trolley system, our town 

 authorities .seem now to have determined that the only way of 

 relieving street traffic is by an enormous development of elec- 

 trical tramways, and on all sides we find the large towns rivalling 

 one another in the extent of the tramway systems which they 

 have either acquired or are laying down for themselves. It 

 seems opportune now to point out that a great deal of mischief 

 may accrue by this indiscriminate use of tramways, and for those 

 who are considering these matters I bring forward a few facts 

 which are worthy of notice. Of course, in new countries, or in 

 new towns in old countries, vihere the roads are rough and bad, 

 anything in the nature of a tramway using rails is an improve- 

 ment on a roadway ; but when we are dealing with cities which 

 already possess well laid out and well paved streets on which all 

 kinds of wheel traffic can be carried on with a minimum of roll- 

 ing resistance, it seems wrong from an engineering point of view 

 to break up the surface of these streets for the purpose of lay- 

 ing tramways, and for the following important reasons : Trafiic 

 carried on a roadway by vehicles, whether horse-drawn or by 

 cycle or motor-car, differs from traffic carried on rails chiefly in 

 that the former vehicles possess an important power, viz. that of 

 overtaking, which is not possessed by the latter, that is 

 to say that vehicles on the plain road surface can over- 

 take a stopping or a slower vehicle going in the same 

 direction without interfering with other vehicles, whereas 

 on rails the vehicles going one way must always remain 

 in the same relation to one another, so that the speed of vehicles 

 on rails must always be regulated by that of other vehicles going 

 in the same direction. Street tramways, for instance, must stop 

 to set down and take up passengers: this limits the speed 

 average and the number of vehicles per mile of track, for if there 



NO. 1664, VOL. 64] 



be not sufficient intervals between the vehicles they would have 

 to stop and start nearly simultaneously. Thus the carrying 

 capacity of the best modern electrical tramway is limited by 

 this want of overtaking power. I have made careful inquiry 

 from those who have great experience in tramways not only in 

 this country but in America and on the Continent, and I find 

 that it is generally admitted that the maximum carrying capacity 

 of an electrical tramway in one direction is 40CO passengers per 

 hour carried past any given point. I find that a full-gauge 

 suburban or metropolitan railway crowded to its fullest extent 

 cannot carry more than l2,oco passengers per hour. Now most 

 of us have often seen large crowds taken away from a point of 

 attraction by omnibuses and horse-drawn vehicles, and have 

 noticed that the crowded omnibuses almost touch one another 

 and yet can go at a fair rate of speed. In this case at eight 

 miles per hour speed 14,000 passengers can be carried from a 

 given point per hour. 



Up to the present a public motor-car service has not yet been 

 installed of any magnitude to enable us to compare the carrying 

 capacity of motor-cars with that of horse-drawn omnibuses, but 

 owing to the reduced length of motor-cars compared with that 

 of omnibuses, and on account of their greater speed and greater 

 control, motor-cars can now be built to deal with great crowds • 

 at an even higher rate per hour than that noted above. It 

 appears ceriain, therefore, that alihough the provision of 

 electrical tramways is undoubtedly an economical means oi 

 carrying passengers, yet that these tramways cannot be laid 

 in existing thoroughlares without considerably reducing the 

 total road carrying capacity at times of heavy pressure of 

 traffic, and as it appears likely that either for the daily 

 transport of the workers to and from their homes to places 

 of employment, or for taking great crowds out into the 

 country for pleasure purposes, a motor-car service carried out 

 on well-made roads will compete favourably with, and in many 

 ways may be preferable to, tramway service. 



It must be remembered that the laying of tram rails not only 

 blocks ordinary traffic, but in our most crowded streets it intro- 

 duces dangers to all wheeled vehicles not on rails, motor-cars, 

 and cyclists by the skidding of the wheels when they cross the 

 line of rails, and these dangers are daily causing, and are still 

 likely to cause, very serious accidents. 



The increased road and street traffic and the development of 

 new means of road locomotion have made imperative some 

 modification of our existing system of roadway administration. 

 Cycles, motor-cars, electrical tramcars, have been invented and 

 put on roads which are maintained and worked exactly as they 

 were seventy years ago at the commencement of the railway era, 

 when the population of the United Kingdom was half its pre- 

 sent figure, and that of the large towns one-tenth of the present 

 figure. During the 150 years previous to the railway era the 

 ancient tracks were gradually improved into tolerably efficient 

 roads for coach and wagon traffic, but after the introduction of 

 railways there was .a complete cessation of improvement, as for 

 fifty years after the railways staited the old roads were equal to 

 the farmers' and local traffic which the railways left for them ; 

 but for the last twenty years the roads near to the great towns 

 have been inadequate, and now that the cyclist and motor-carist 

 travel over the whole of the roads of the country the neglect of 

 our ancient roadway system is very apparent. 



Although the urban populations have so greatly increased, the 

 old coaching roads are still the only ones that exist ; no main 

 roads parallel to the old ones or alternative to them have ever 

 been made. Towns which are now joined by railways grew out 

 of small rows of houses built facing the main road ; in fact, 

 in many cases the road made the town. During the early 

 part of the railway era, when the roads were so little 

 used from coaching falling into disuse, encroachments on 

 the roadway took place in and near the towns, such roads 

 being now actually narrower and less suitable for traffic 

 than in the coaching days : so that these towns which owe 

 their existence to these roadways now put every impedimeiit 

 and hindrance to their use by the travelling public. What is 

 needed is that towns situated on our main through roads should 

 provide alternative routes, so that through travellers could, if 

 they desired, avoid the crowded streets of the town. One 

 method of providing such relief roads would be by by-laws 

 providing that all building estates should set aside land for main 

 roads. The building estates which are developed around our 

 great towns never provide a road which can be used as a main 

 line of thoroughfare, although by their very act of building 



