Cars in towns defended

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33064, 3 November 1972, Page 6

Cars in towns defended

Delegates from local authorities throughout Britain have been urged by the directorgeneral of the British Automobile Association (Mr A. Durie) to think twice before banning cars from cities.

Speaking at a municipal corporations conference, Mr Durie said that such a policy would be shortsighted and naive. “Shut the car from your central shopping areas, and sooner or later your traders will be putting up their shutters,” he said. There were no tenable arguments for banning cars from urban areas, he said. “Regulation: yes. But denial: no. Pedestrian precincts and restraints: yes. But without car-parks to balance the equation: no.” Mr Durie said that in times of transport crisis it was always the car that came to the rescue. “Without the car, office and factory productivity would slump, absenteeism from schools would rise, and traders in city and town central - shopping areas would find their takings dwindling. “It is the platform of our

economy and an essential feature of town life.”

1 Trade and commerce depended increasingly on redevelopment and the provision of roads and parking space to meet the needs of modern transport, Mr Durie said.

“In far too many of our urban conurbations old communities are withering and decaying because they are being abandoned by car-owning householders seeking higher environmental standards.

“Do we really believe that narrow, terrace-housed streets, lined with the parked cars of their occupiers, whose standards of living have soared in recent years, form the kind

of environment which should be preserved?” he asked. “And if such streets should be retained because of some historic or archaeological interest, would not life in them become immeasurably better if much of the traffic, which should not be there at all, was syphoned off along modern highways?

“The redevelopment of these decaying areas is a pressing social need, and there is not the slightest doubt that this environmental task begins with people, including the cars they own, traffic and roads.”

The car user, said Mr Durie, would only be attracted back to public transport if offered comfort and convenience of an acceptable standard, faster door-to-door journey times, and when fares compared favourably with the cost of running a car.

The form of public transport must be adapted to the pattern of traffic. In urban areas, the cumbersome bus was an anachronism which must be replaced by smaller, more manoeuvrable vehicles more in keeping with the traffic conditions of today. Of the car’s influence on family life. Mr Durie said that it had added new dimensions to the lives of millions of people.

“It is pointless and nonsense to say that the car is a terrible menace and that it should be banned from wide areas. It enables millions of people to escape from drab industrial conurbations to the most beautiful parts of our country, and the environmental pleasure thus created far outweighs the unhappiness of - those who claim that desecration is being caused,” said Mr Durie.

“Equally, the car must not be allowed to ruin beautiful areas and unspoiled countryside by careless and uncontrolled access. This is where compromise comes into the equation.

“Whatever the sociologists may say or whatever the economists may postulate, the car has been and is the greatest liberating force for millions of people • this country has ever known.

“There will always be those who are ready to use every opportunity to raise their voices in condemnation of the car as the prime destroyer of civilised living. However, it is because of the car that our living is so civilised. It has had a lasting, positive influence in enchancing our standards of living, particularly in family life.”