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From International Socialism, No.23, Winter 1965/66, p.32.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Homes, Towns and Traffic
John Tetlow and Anthony Goss
Faber, 45s.
This short and beautifully produced book, with drawings and photographs dovetailed into the text, takes the reader elegantly and succinctly through the history of town planning, focussing upon the planner’s response to the challenge of traffic. The book has the merit of putting fashionable words such as adorn the smart Sundays in solid perspective: ‘Pedestrian precinct,’ ‘Regional Planning’ and ‘Buchananism’ are given a refreshingly critical once-over. The net result, which is important as it is genuinely educational, is that more people, having come to the end of it should be able to evaluate current planning. It reflects the healthy and new spirit in planning which seeks to involve the community and not steamroller it.
With the current emphasis on and speed of redevelopment of the city centres, it is critical that the underlying issues are spelt out as clearly as they are here. For example, the logic of the motor car is for motorways, large car parks and low density; and our present urban life with its continuous personal contact and hence high density is irreconcilable with this. It is a sad reflection that local authorities would rather pay £100,000 for a traffic survey, which can only measure movements and wishes in terms of the present transport structure, than run a genuine forward-looking traffic experiment. It would be a breakthrough for Grossman, who should pronounce on this issue shortly, and the Oxford City Council, to stop their agonising about Christ Church Meadow, and instead temporarily ban all private cars from the centre. As a town with an intense but localised congestion problem, and a relatively concentrated industrial zone, Oxford could make a handsome beginning. Traffic research is a little like the old debate about central heating and old people – who it was assumed, would dislike it. Yet when central heating was installed old people preferred it – so long as it was both adequate and cheap enough to run. Given a genuine choice town dwellers like old people can act as useful critics. The point is, however, that they are not. Until we begin to test new ideas as controlled schemes, any proposal of radical change sounds like visionary wanderings. With local authorities able and willing to spend research money, is it too much to ask that some show courage rather than conformity in their research?
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Last updated on 8.10.2007