Professor Buchanan Treads Carefully

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30948, 3 January 1966, Page 1

Professor Buchanan Treads Carefully

Professor Colin Buchanan, the British town-planning expert commissioned by the Christchurch City Council to consider the city’s master transportation plan, arrived at the week-end feeling ven aw are of the responsibilities of his task.

“This is obviously ground one has got to tread fairly carefully on,” he said. “I know there are people here with sincere viewpoints of their own on this matter. My job is to make as objective a judgment as I can.”

Professor Buchanan went to the heart of the problem immediately. “It’s a question of balancing the convenience of traffic against the importance of a public park,” he said. “I gather that this is one of the hot issues here. “One doesn’t let a motorway encroach on urban park land except in a case of dire necessity. There was a major encroachment on Hyde Park seven or eight years ago. It was one of the jobs that was done quietly, just like the plane trees that were removed at Westminster in the middle of the night.” Professor Buchanan said all town-planning problems were difficult; many of them were insoluble. “It is difficult to see how a city of this size can deal with traffic without a network of motorways,” he said. “If the traffic cannot be canalised on to a major road and kept out of other areas, then you have to use other already-develop-ed roads. Conflicting Uses “It’s a matter of sorting out the conflicting uses of streets. Already I have seen that your city streets serve two functions. They are used for access to shops and

offices, and they also carry traffic travelling longer distances." Professor Buchanan said motorways were extremely difficult to incorporate into a city. It was partly a matter of where they could be sited, and partly a matter of money. A motorway was much more acceptable if it could be sunk beneath the ground. "The big difficulty,” he said, “is where they intersect. The interchanges take up a tremendous amount of room. A motorway is an infernally difficult thing to put in. It is so wide and so destructive. A motorway that goes overhead could be quite graceful, but it is so destructive in other ways that its intrinsic beauty would tend to be overlooked.

Siting Motorways Professor Buchanan said it was very often not the appearance of the structure of a motorway that produced an aesthetic problem; it was where the motorway had been sited. The Embarcadero motorway along the seafront at San Francisco cut off the hinterland from the waterfront. and anyone seeing it for the first time would immediately think it should never have been built.

The Schylkill expressway at Philadelphia, on the other hand, was built in a cutting, and even though it skirted a park it was not obtrusive because. the park continued right across the top of it. Obviously, he said, motorways in cuttings were more expensive than motorways on the surface. “1 don’t think one can get out of these problems cheaply,” he said. “The Philadelphia expressway would have been quite unacceptable on the ground or in the air.”

He said people very often seemed to have schizophrenia about motorways. They did i not want to have them, and at the same time they did not want to limit traffic—which would have to be done if motorways were not provided. Low Density Professor Buchanan said other means of transport would not be practicable for Christchurch. “The motor-

car is the most ingeniously convenient form of transport yet invented,” he said. “For a tube or any other form of railway a city would have to have a heavy concentration of people to make it economic. “In Christchurch you have a low-density, scattered, suburban type of development which would not produce loads big enough to justify the cost. Low-density development positively invites the use of cars " Professor Buchanan was busy studying the Christchurch problem in his hotel yesterday afternoon before going on a drive round the

city with the City Engineer. Mr P. G. Scoular. He is also looking at the City Planning Study Group’s alternative proposals. After a fortnight in Christchurch he will spend a week in Dunedin on a similar problem, then go to Wellington at the invitation of the Wellington City Council, and make a brief visit to friends in Auckland before returning to London.

He hopes to give his opinion on tlie Christchurch master transportation plan before [he leaves the city. Professor Buchanan is professor of transport at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, and author of the widely praised town-planning book. “Traffic in Towns.”