Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Hell is a gyratory system . . . so we want our cities back
- Views from Britain on our one-way past

We put in traffic lights and stop signs in order to make our streets safe. We convert from two-way streets to one-way streets in order to permit cars to move more rapidly down them. And in almost all cases these decisions are made not on the basis of a broader systemic understanding of the traffic network as a whole, nor from an explicit philosophy as to what the basic underlying values and priorities should be, but always piecemeal, ad hoc, and one of the time. All of which renders the networks of most of our cities ripe for rethinking and redesign. Here is one view from London.

Hell is a gyratory system,
so let’s celebrate the return of cheerful anarchy to our roads


- Stephen Bayley, from The Times

It is the end of the road for the detested one-way street. Transport for London, perhaps the biggest manager of one-way systems in the world, at last acknowledges a truth painfully proved by harrowed pedestrians, bruised bicyclists and infuriated drivers: one-way systems do not work. Cities have been wastefully sacrificed to the false gods of efficiency and rationality. Now we want our cities back.

After a consultation in 2006 Tottenham Court Road — and soon Piccadilly, Pall Mall, Gower Street and the notorious Wandsworth one-way system (a congealed eternity of hot metal and annoyed people) — will return to two-way traffic. So a ruinous experiment is under final notice after 50 years of fuming. A culture that thought speed a measure of success and volume a measure of prosperity is being driven down the off-ramp.

This is a powerful metaphor for the new, more liberal, reasonable, responsible, lightly governed future that we are told awaits us. Certainly the one-way past created absurdities we could do without.

What is more existentially exasperating than a No Entry sign? This graphic of universal urban frustration was standardised by the League of Nations in 1931 (the year that the same ineffectual busybodies merely tut-tutted about the Japanese invasion of Manchuria).

Roads are not natural; they are inventions. And sealed roads to carry heavy traffic are inventions as typical of the 19th century as the typewriter and the diesel engine. MacAdam created the information superhighway of Victoriana. One-way streets were the final, and now obsolete, refinement of the road as a communications medium. They remain as dread memorials to vanished concerns, alien values and hopeless, irrelevant targets.

The concept began with good intentions. Albemarle Street in Mayfair became uni-directional in 1808 when crowds attending Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s lectures at the Royal Institution made traffic-planning necessary. But the modern theology of traffic management dates back only to 1963 when Colin Buchanan, a town planner, published his ruinously influential report Traffic in Towns.

Wheeled traffic has been successfully mingling in towns and cities since the Etruscans, but Professor Buchanan took great exception to the idea and intended, with great athletic earnestness, to separate people and cars, the better for us to prosper by accelerator. The official attitude to cars in 1963 was curiously similar to Victorian ideas about prostitution: a mixture of acceptance and disgust.

With a fixity of purpose perhaps inviting Freudian interpretations, Buchanan wanted flyovers, clearways and pedestrianisation. Out went the clutter of accumulated townscape. Towns were to be cleansed of intimacy, hazard and surprise. In came Mr and Mrs Citizen swooping at high speed along urban motorways in a bizarre dystopia where your Cortina “saloon” would drive you to a Ballardian destiny in a tower block (where unspeakable crimes might be perpetrated).

In towns, the false god of the one-way street was an agent of change that proved catastrophic. This, of course, was the very moment that other visionaries thought it wise to, quite literally, decimate the railway system in the interests of “economy”. The M25 between Junctions 8 and 9 northbound on a Monday morning is their memorial. And the hell of Wandsworth, Vauxhall Cross or Hammersmith is Buchanan’s.

One-way systems are wrong because they are counterintuitive and seek to impose a spurious logic on human behaviour, something always at its most interesting when irrational. There is surely something very nasty in the concept and expression “gyratory”. It suggests circles of Hell and invites the conjoined idea of futility and an endless quest for an impossible goal.

To enter any gyratory system — often survivable in a car, more precarious on a bike, but suicidal on foot — is to go on bargaining terms with urban aggression and the one-dimensional solutions of the traffic engineer. In pursuit of something that looks good on a graphic, but does not work on the ground, sinister gyratory systems generate millions of unnecessary miles and thousands of tons of pollution.

And people hate them. Best to reinstate the Darwinian struggle of the two-way street and re-create cities that respond to the cheerful anarchy of individual purpose, not a chilly master plan. This is a prospect pleasantly hinted at in a new exhibition. The architectural publisher and bike evangelist Peter Murray has created a series of enamel plaques mocking London’s one-way system. Of Fitzrovia he says it “fails in its aspirations to speed the traffic, but succeeds in confusing cyclists and traffic alike”.

One-way was designed to “reduce congestion”. In true conformity with the Orwellian model, it did the opposite. One-way ? “Wrong way, go back” as the signs say on US freeways. I’m glad to say we are.

# # #

About the author:
Let me quote the author directly from his website you can find at http://www.stephenbayley.com/: "Stephen Bayley was once described as ‘the second most intelligent man in Britain’. This is controversial and very possibly untrue, but what is indisputable is that – as the author of more than ten books, nearly thirty exhibition catalogues, countless articles, broadcasts and newspaper columns – he is one of the world's best known commentators on modern culture. Tom Wolfe said of him “I don't know anybody with more interesting observations about style, taste and contemporary design.”

Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article7097837.ece

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3 comments:

  1. While I certainly do agree with the proposition that putting ease of mobility before people was immensely misguided (in retrospect), I am less certain that one-way streets are the source of all problems.

    Just because a street has one-way traffic does not necessitate that it will accommodate greater speed and volume. These are design issues that we can control. Plus, one-way vehicle traffic on streets is immeasurably easier for other road users to 'navigate' (no need to look in every direction at each intersection), so one-way traffic can in fact be safer....

    Naked streets (or shared spaces) can work equally well with one-way or two-way traffic. The point is that we should no longer be prioritizing traffic 'circulation' - we should be focusing on 'quality of life'.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Adhiraj JoglekarTuesday, 20 April, 2010

    From: Dr Adhiraj Joglekar
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jY0VeiJ1fz8

    This link will take you to my compilation on contraflow bus lanes. Few
    things worth pondering over-

    The hell is not so much caused by one-ways as it is by one ways on 4
    lane roads that are now part of a gyratory system. For example,
    Hammersmith has a massive gyratory system of one ways with roads up to
    6 lanes wide in one direction. Of course there are massive footpaths
    and people like me cross roads daily without feeling unsafe due to
    presence of strategically placed pedestrian refuges (interestingly in
    recent past they have even closed pedestrian subways, on this very
    gyratory).

    It thus is not about pedestrians, the gyratory affects car
    drivers the most as one missed turn and you do a mile long circle and
    somehow have to be the correct lane when you attempt to get in to the
    desired side lane. When big roads are converted to one ways, these
    problems are to be expected.

    The only valid reason for such adventures
    is inclusion of with flow and contraflow bus lanes (which means its
    one way only for cars but really is still two ways for buses and their
    users) which other wise would never be accommodated easily due to lack
    of sufficient width on typical British dual carriage ways. On other
    hand, one ways on smaller / narrow inner streets that have parallel
    roads in close proximity with side lanes connecting them at numerous
    places are perfect for one-ways - they make travel far safer for
    everyone on inner city streets.

    I would take this report with a pinch of salt as if removal of one
    ways leads to loss of bus lanes, I doubt it will be a good change for
    anyone but the car user.

    Cheers

    Adhiraj

    ReplyDelete
  3. Simon Norton, Cambridge UKWednesday, 21 April, 2010

    I feel concerned that if we move towards a dogma that one way streets are bad we are throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Yes, gyratory systems designed to increase traffic speeds at all cost are bad, but I believe that there are also good one way systems.

    Piccadilly is mentioned as a street in London where one way operation is to be abolished. Well at present it's already two way for buses and cyclists as it has a contra-flow lane for these classes of traffic. If this is abolished bus speeds can only go down, and cyclists will have a continuous flow of cars as well as the existing more sporadic flow of buses to contend with.

    Many main London streets are about 4 traffic lanes wide. How about allocating 1 lane in each direction for buses and cyclists, 1 for general traffic movement and 1 for unloading. This will favour sustainable travellers and provide for essential movements, but it can only be achieved by means of a one way system.

    I would also suggest the following ideas to keep extraneous traffic out of lesser streets (which don't carry buses).

    1. Any traffic lights at intersections between main and lesser streets would be for cyclists and pedestrians only. Vehicles wishing to turn into, out of or across a main street network would have to await a gap in the traffic. This would mean that any time savings from faster speeds on the lesser streets would be offset by time delays waiting to join or cross the main roads.

    2. Traffic lights crossing a bus lane would be separate from those crossing the general traffic lane, and would be set to green for the bus lane whenever a bus was due. One presumes that there aren't enough buses for this to cause a problem in scheduling.

    3. Time restrictions for goods traffic and congestion charging would be used to ensure that the volume of general traffic wasn't too much for the system to handle under the above constraints.

    In effect, for people movements, buses and non-motorised transport would be treated as the "default" mode, and cars and taxis would be treated as modes intended to fill specific niche requirements. I would expect that the reduction in car traffic would be sufficient so that goods movements was actually easier than it is now.

    Simon Norton

    ReplyDelete

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