Nicholas Boys Smith is the founding chairman of Create Streets and an author of their new report, Move Free.
In 1884, the 30-year-old son of a gardener from Walthamstow changed history. Working in Coventry with his uncle and cousins, John Kemp Starley, invented the safety bicycle with its chain drive, 26-inch wheels and diamond-shaped frame. Put on sale the following year, it rapidly eclipsed and then surpassed previous bicycle designs that had been essayed over the previous 60 years. Penny Farthings had been as ridiculous and impractical as they looked, the prerogative of the bold and the ‘boy racer.’ However, the 1890s was the age of the international ‘bike boom.’
Innovation often comes in bursts. In the very same year that John Kemp Starley was working on his revolutionary bicycle, in Germany, Carl Benz was designing the first workable internal combustion motor car which was unveiled in 1885. And thus, not just in the same decade but within the same few months, were born the twin inventions with the potential to liberate the road-weary traveller from the physical constraints of his own legs or the monetary constraints of needing to pay for a horse.
Of these two seismic inventions, the safety bicycle took off more quickly. There was no 1890s ‘car craze.’ In 1900, there were probably only 100 cars in Britain. This was because the bike was cheaper and less disruptive of existing streets. It was also born more fully formed. Within a few years, improvements created a bicycle that, other than the lack of gears, was to all intents and purposes technologically identical to the machine we ride today. The car had a lot more evolution to do and was a lot more expensive. If the emblematic bicycle rider of Edwardian literature was the middle-class commercial traveller or office clerk, the quintessential Edwardian driver was Mr Toad of Wind in the Willows, young, rich and abrasive, careless of others and thoughtless for their safety. In 1914 when the armies of World War I marched to war, they travelled by train or marched on foot. Only their generals had staff cars.
However, the success of the ‘slower burn’ invention, the car, has been far more radical and profound for our towns and cities. Bedazzled by the speed with which cars could get from City A to City B, town and city governments began to redesign not just inter-city trunk roads, but intra-city streets to be primarily for cars, not carts, bikes or people. City roads were widened and straightened, curves were splayed and old buildings demolished so that they might be replaced with wider roads for cars and places to park them.
Modernist, one might better say ‘traffic-modernist,’ architects, provided intellectual justification. Hypnotised by the joy of driving on empty 1920s roads, and sometimes sponsored by car manufacturers, they proposed that historic towns and neighbourhoods should be razed to the ground. Most famous was the Swiss architect, Le Corbusier, who, funded by the car producer, Gabriel Voisin, dreamed of sweeping away the blocks and boulevards of Paris and replacing them with 60-storey concrete towers, zoned by social class and linked by fast roads in open parkland. As he put it; ‘the technocratic elite, the industrialists, financiers, engineers, and artists would be located in the city centre, while the workers would be removed to the fringes of the city.’
Urban streets and squares essentially designed for walking or riding should be replaced with flyovers, and city centre motorways segregated from pedestrian walkways and underpasses. Thanks to the car, the city was going to change profoundly and for ever. Fortunately, Paris was spared this fate but many cities were scarred with urban motorways, flyovers and road-widening on acid, ripping up old streets and replacing them with habitation blocks and estates. (Though, it is worth noting that typically the streets destroyed were those of the poor whilst those of the rich were deemed less worth of ‘regeneration.’)
Now most people increasingly think that the ‘big road’ approach to city design was wrong and undermining not just of urban beauty but of our health and prosperity as well. Are they right? After all, we got much richer during the twentieth century. Maybe we could have done even better?
It is a timely question and a very political one. How we move about, what it costs, and who can tell us where to go or not go are very legitimately matters of public interest and political debate. Only this weekend, the government published the results of its review into Low Traffic Neighbourhoods which found, not surprisingly, although there have been mistakes, most Low Traffic Neighbourhoods are popular and have improved air quality. It was too early to reach a confident view on their effect on the local economy.
Create Streets’s latest report, Move Free, steps back from the specific questions of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods to ask how we should best get about our towns? What is best for our personal and collective prosperity? What best encourages the agglomeration effects that help cities thrive and drives economic growth? What makes us happier and healthier? And what boosts our personal freedom?
We have five main conclusions.
Cars are great. Cars are awful. Cars can boost liberty. Cars can destroy it. Cars can help the economy. Cars can undermine it. It is largely a question of where. They add most value in areas of lowest density. They add least and do most harm in areas of higher density. When it comes to freeing up our streets, our advice to decision-makers is: add choice and let people decide with their hearts and heads; think about place not just about movement; and find gradualist ‘win-win’ processes for improving places with the consent, even with the active leadership, of local neighbourhoods. All the evidence suggests that voters will thank you.