THE TANGLE OF LONDON'S TRAFFIC.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 13235, 21 July 1906, Page 5 (Supplement)

THE TANGLE OF LONDON'S TRAFFIC.

"But' for the admirable police work at congested; points, and ; the . inexhaustible good temper of the London driver, and his amazing skill, London would be impossible ! But what London needs is imagination, initiative; resource, "inventiveness, and experiment in its too numerous governors, and the abolition of its Orientalised police bureaucracy,, who find transient and per functory diversion on the road to superannuation, in looking upon London as if it were a province of Bengal or a vilayet of Bulgaria, instead of Being, as it more truly is, a suburb of Battersea, and incidentally, of course, the greatest city in the world"" Thus writes the Right Hon. John Burns, M.P., in discussing the Royal Commission on London Traffic, ;in the June number of the Pall Mall magazine.

"The chief necessity, pressing and inexorable, is the rapid extinction of the London omnibus. ... In their place London needs, and in the next ten years should get, five hundred miles of electric conduit tramways, similar to, and improvements upon, the London County '. Council tramways, that last year carried 170,000,000 people, and are as pleasant to passengers and as beneficial to staff as they are profitable to the ratepayers.

"The disappearance of the omnibus, and the incoming substitution of the tramways, will reduce the large sum recommended. for the large avenues; and I believe experience may prove that, beyond improving crossroads and crooked corners, there will nob be the- suggested expense.

-" We must, of course, always except the wide roads which ought to have been the rule in new suburbs, and the land for which ought automatically to he acquired on easy terms, or compulsorily ceded as land was developed.

"At one©, as I suggested years ago, the transit area of the London County Council should be the police area, arid a radius of twenty-five miles from Charing Cross, if only to save the ; suburbs from the slums and; squalor that otherwise await them.

'■:" Everywhere the tramway *is : emerging i triumphantly from its ordeal, of persecution ' and obstruction. . "'. . Now that it has ! entered the profitable stage of its existence I believe that : this year will see £100,000 profit, and an addition of thirty miles to its mileage. - . . {. But accompanying'V the rapid spread':•of tramways there must, go a vigorous handling of other forme of vehicle. • ■• """ ***?" , r :;w?:v,»

; "The fixed lines ;of electric tramways have already raised the .standard of 'traffic ■regulation,'.improved'-the.' character and cleanliness of districts through which they pass, and have diminished considerably (the cost of scavenging the tramway route. " For housing, pleasure, trade, health, i and the; reduction of time -wasted by the mere size of cities tramways ; are the only as they are: the cheapest and 'best remedy and solution." \