During the past five years the world has been brought face to face with the fact that carriages can be built which will travel along the roads with safety and comfort, carrying comparatively heavy loads, at a rate of speed which, if it does not rival that of an express train, is sufficient to make the way without rails quite capable of giving us all we want in the matter of fast short-distance transport. This fact makes it certain that the road is once more destined to play a great part in our national life. Already men of all kinds are beginning to talk about the roads, to ask as to the state of the roads, and to inquire into such questions as gradients, surface, width, straightness. When ordinary men travelled by the railway only and merely used a little section of road, hardly more than five or six miles long, to get to the nearest station, the road played a very small part in their lives. Now that travelling along fifty, or even a hundred miles of road is becoming common, and that the return to the road is almost accomplished, the old interest in the highway is, as I have said, reviving, and men are once again beginning to see the importance of the road.
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PAST AND PRESENT
II
Of course the road never really lost its national importance. It was only that the quickness of railway travelling and the slowness of horse-transport made the road suffer a temporary eclipse—though while it lasted of a very complete kind. The old lawyers declared that title deeds were 'the nerves and sinews of the land.' In a very much more striking and real way the roads are 'the nerves and sinews of the land.' It is they that bind village to village, and town to town, and thread the centres of population as beads are threaded on a string. A moment's reflection will show the vast importance of the part that has been, and must always be, played by roads in our national life. Though the country is covered by a network of railways, we do not, unless we are station-masters, live on the railways. The road is, as it were, the first wife of the nation, and though some sixty years ago the husband took a new wife home, he never discarded the first, and she has in reality always remained nearest to him, and has always held his home. Nothing can take that away from her. We live on the roads, and they are part and parcel of our daily lives. We look down the road for the home-comer, or the new-comer. Our gates open on the road. The road is always with us. The motor-car and the bicycle have restored to us a full remembrance of the fact. While railway travelling was so immeasurably quicker and easier than road travelling, we were forced to give up the pleasure our fathers had taken in the road, for mankind in general cannot or will not lose time. Now, however, the road has been revived. To go back to the marital and polygamous metaphor, just employed, the motor-car has given the road a crown of price that has once again made her find favour in the eyes of her lord and master. The second wife has come to look old-fashioned and dull, and the first wife, never really rejected, renews her claims. No one can deny that from the point of view of beauty this return to the road is a gain. We only know England when we know her roads. The English roads are like wood-fringed rivers that run twisting and turning through our villages and towns. No one can travel down fifty miles of an English road without coming upon a hundred beautiful and unexpected things, and seeing those things in the best possible way and as they ought to be seen. When we see scenery from the railways, or, at any rate, the near-at-hand scenery, we are, as it were, looking at the brocade of the landscape on the wrong side. We see the pattern awry and upside down. We cut across the roads, not wind down them. We see the old church or the old manor-house not in a picture composed by centuries of usage and of kindly human courtesies. Things as seen from the railway are for the most part set on wrong, face the wrong way, and as it were 'grate on the sensitive ear with a slightly mercantile accent.' The coalshed or the chimney of the heating apparatus is turned towards us in the train, and not the best line of gables or the old lych gate.
III
Perhaps it will be said that all these prophecies as to a return to the road are of very doubtful value, that the motor-car can never really beat the railway, and that as soon as the present fad has passed away, the railway will return to its old ascendency. I do not agree. The autocars will not, of course, rival or destroy the railways. The present railways will always continue to do the heavy and long-distance traffic of the country, while fast mono-rail electric railways will carry the express passenger traffic. Rather the motor-car will feed and immensely increase the demand for express trains and long-distance journeys. The motor-car will not so much injure the railway as call a new kind of traveller into existence. Cross-journey traffic with its many changes, suburban traffic and short-distance traffic may suffer, but it will be amply compensated for by a great increase in the demand for long-distance tickets. The fact that will assert itself directly we have a proper supply of easy, quick, and comfortable motor-cars available, is the fact just named—i.e. that we live on roads and do not live on railways. The circumstance that a motor-car can stop at the garden gate if we live by a highway, or drive up the carriage-drive and draw up level with the porch if we live within lodge-gates, and take a man direct to the door of his office, or of his friend, or wherever he wants to go to, is bound to make the motor-car beat the train for all short-distance work. Let us take a concrete example. A British householder living in the middle of Kent—say thirty miles from the coast—is going to take his family to the seaside for the usual three weeks. At present the procedure is as follows: When the boxes- are corded and the children and nurses 'collected,' they are packed into carriages or an omnibus and taken to the local station on a branch line. There the party and its impedimenta are put into the railway for twenty minutes or so—i.e. till they reach the main-line station. Here the babies and the bicycles are taken out, and after a wait of perhaps half an hour are repacked into the main-line train which carries the party to Bathington West. Here there is another breaking of bulk and temper, and the family is got into cabs and omnibuses and driven to the hotel or lodgings. To accomplish this journey there have been no less than three gettings in and out. If, however, it were possible for the householder to engage a light motor-car for himself and his wife and eldest daughter, a motor-brake for the children and servants, and a light steam-van for the luggage, bicycles, buckets and spades, and perambulators, which would load up, not against time, but quietly at the front and back doors, and unload at the hotel or lodgings, what a vast deal of fuss and worry would be saved! Even if the journey, conducted at twelve miles an hour, took two hours and a half, it would hardly be so long as the time required for (1) driving two miles to the local station, say twenty minutes; (2) getting tickets and arranging luggage, &c., fifteen minutes; (3) going in local train to Buffling Junction, say twenty minutes; (4) waiting at Buffling Junction to catch express, thirty-five minutes; (5) going from Buffling Junction to Bathington in express, thirty-five minutes; (6) getting out luggage, &c., at Bathington, twenty minutes; (7) losing time owing to late trains—say, twenty minutes in all. That is two hours and forty-five minutes—and who can say that I have exaggerated the delays and friction incident to an ordinary sea-side journey?
IV
But if, as I firmly believe, the roads are going to come back to their old importance, certain facts will at once become apparent. Directly we use the roads for personal and rapid transport mankind in general will begin to find out what the bicyclists found out long ago—namely, that our roads are very ill-fitted for the purposes for which they are designed. To begin with, they are usually too narrow. Next, they are rough in surface, and on the hills very badly 'graded.' Lastly, in certain cases, although this would not often be necessary, a mile or two might be saved by a short cut. I do not propose, of course, that all these improvements should be made at once—and most assuredly all the improvements must be made with a due preservation of the beauty and charm of our country roads and the districts they traverse—but, no doubt, as soon as the importance of the roads, so long overshadowed by the railways, revives there will be a great and pressing cry for highway improvements. It must not be supposed that in urging the improvement of the roads I am thinking merely of the convenience of the drivers of motor-cars. I believe that the improvement of the roads and their restoration and revival would be of the greatest possible national benefit. We all deplore, and rightly deplore, the decay of the village, but nothing would so quickly and soundly help the village as the resurrection of the road. If the men of the villages within the ten-mile radius of London could jump into a motor omnibus or brake and be carried to London for a penny, as they could be, we should have greatly helped to solve the housing problem. The simplicity of arrangement by which a man in the village could enter the omnibus at his own door and be carried straight to his work would greatly facilitate living in the country and working in town. But if this is to happen, as happen it ought, we shall at once have to deal with the disagreeable fact that London and most of our great towns are exceedingly difficult to approach by road. Almost all the high roads out of London run through a narrow neck, which is perpetually being blocked by traffic. A good example is Hammersmith Broadway. The Hounslow Road on the west and the great Hammersmith Road to the east sides of this Broadway are large and in every way adequate roads, but their size is rendered useless by the narrow half-mile of the much misnamed Broadway. This is not a solitary instance. In a word, if the roads are really to become great arteries of traffic under a system of automobile transport the authorities will have most seriously to consider the approaches to London. London, we hold, ought to be entered by at least eight great roads of uniform breadth, and the narrow necks like Hammersmith Broadway should be entirely abolished. It would be a very costly improvement, but it would be worth accomplishing.
V
It is easy to make out (1) that our roads are going to be vastly more used in the future than in the past, (2) that they have been neglected and cannot carry the increased traffic without great and unnecessary inconvenience being caused to the public, (3) that we ought to improve them. The difficult thing in a complicated political and social community like ours is to suggest how the roads are to be reformed. On the whole I incline to the belief that the plan proposed by the Roads Improvement Association (45 Parliament Street, S.W.) will prove the most practical.
Unfortunately, space does not permit me to state their proposals, but I strongly advise all those interested in the subject to send for the documents issued by the Association and study them in detail. They involve radical changes, but are by no means unpractical, and I believe would go far to solve the problem.
But excellent as these proposals are they will of course be of no avail unless public opinion is awakened on the subject. That it will be awakened I cannot doubt, when motor-cars become cheaper, when the prejudice against them has died out completely, and when men find, as they soon will, that it is more economical to keep a motor-car, not only than a carriage and pair, but than a horse and trap.
VI
I have already mentioned how an improvement in the roads and the use of self-propelled carriages and carts will have a centrifugal effect on our great cities, and act as a very important factor in putting a stop to the increase in that urban congestion which has marked the last few years. This will of course be a great national benefit, but the dispersal of the town population will be by no means the only gain. Better roads and cheap and fast traction along them should help, and I believe will help, in the creation of a large number of small proprietors and small tenants—a change which all rural reformers desire. The small farmer, whether owner or occupier, will find it easier to get a living if and when the roads are good and easy of use. Competent observers of French life declare that the splendidly made and well-kept roads of France have greatly helped to keep the French peasant on the soil. For example, the Commercial Agent of the United States at St. Etienne, reporting in 1891 to his Government, wrote as follows:—
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IN DAYS OF YORE
I believe this to be no exaggeration. The peasant's difficulty is always in finding ready cash to use in getting his goods to market. But if the roads are really good and do not wear horse and cart unduly, it is wonderful how cheaply a peasant with even the poorest of horses and the shakiest of carts can get his goods to market. If on the other hand the roads are stony and heavy and the gradients difficult, the man who cannot afford to keep good horses and carts and renew them often, is quickly beaten out of the market. Good roads give a very large amount of that fair field and no favour which we all desire for the small agriculturist.
VII
There is one more practical point to which I very strongly desire to draw attention. A great many eager eyes are at the present moment being cast upon the roads by the promoters of electric tramways, light railways and so forth. The keen-sighted business men who conduct these enterprises have already realised what the public has not, that all the world and his wife live on the road, and that the roads are indeed, as I have said, the nerves and sinews of the land. Very naturally then, they are striving to obtain the right to lay their lines along the roads, and so obtain the great profits that arise from place to place traffic. Now I entirely admit that, prima facie, there is no objection to these plans. They are, indeed, I believe, in themselves useful, and, carried out under proper conditions, there is io reason why they should not confer great public benefits while paying good dividends to their shareholders. But we must see to it that proper conditions are observed. And the first and most vital of these is that no company must be allowed to lay any tram or other line along a road unless they agree at their own charges to increase the width of the metalled surface of the road by the width of the largest car which they propose to place on the road—say eight feet. If this condition is not insisted on, we shall see our roads, already far too narrow, seriously reduced. To lay rails and then to run huge cars, often in double lines, as between Kew and Hammersmith, is in effect to produce a most material narrowing of the road. When a road is given over to a tramway company without any increase in its metalled surface, it becomes at once distinctly less valuable for ordinary traffic. By allowing tram-lines to be laid without any corresponding widening of the roads, as has been done hitherto on our suburban roads, we are positively going back, actually making our roads less open to traffic than they were. No doubt it will be said that to demand this increase of the metalled road surface is to lay on the tramways a burden greater than they can bear. I cannot agree. To begin with their prospective profits are very large. Next, the extra expense would not be very serious, because to increase the metalled surface by eight feet could in the case of most of our country main roads be accomplished without buying more land. There is always a strip of land on each side available for widening. To level and metal, and then lay the lines there, would not be very much more costly, and certainly much more convenient to the public, than to tear up the existing road and put the lines there. I venture then to suggest that no local authority should be empowered to give its consent to any scheme for laying lines along its roads unless the company proposing the scheme agreed to widen the metalled surface by the width of its cars. Provision might of course be made for a dispensing power in exceptional and peculiar cases. No one would want to shave off the façade of an Elizabethan manor on one side or of a Georgian red-brick house on the other in order to comply with the suggestion just made. It can be applied reasonably and yet adequately. The great thing is to apply it and to prevent our roads being narrowed by the tramway companies, who, as we see by the recent applications in Surrey, are intent upon laying their lines in the rural roads within the thirty miles radius of London. The schemes are excellent in themselves, and under proper conditions deserve all encouragement, as tending to disperse the metropolitan population, but care must be taken that roads with tramway lines along them are made wider, and not in effect narrower than before. I note and admit the objection that I am proposing in some cases to hand over the roadside greensward to be metalled. Of course such a loss of pleasant walking ground must be regretted, but it is, it seems to me, a case in which public utility must be the dominant consideration.
- ↑ In this chapter I have resumed portions of articles dealing with our roads written by me in The Spectator.