unsurprisingly, London is all for the better for these projects having been canned in the 60's - very few massive roads cutting up neigbourhoods, and helped avoid the massive tipping into redesigning cities for single/low occupancy cars. it's so successful, that in 2022, 46% of households in greater London have *zero* cars. if you're curious what it what have looked like, go for a walk around Notting Hill and see how Westway has damaged the human environment and walkability.
See also Glasgow, where the megaproject did happen and the American-style M8 terminates directly in the center of the city. It's never quite caught up with good public transport options. I'd suggest trams if the massive cost and time overruns of the Edinburgh scheme hadn't put me off.
(There _is_ a subway in Glasgow, but due to tunneling difficulties and its age the trains are unusually small. It feels like a 2/3 scale model of the London Underground)
I disagree, and wish it had happened, but regardless, the biggest problem is they failed to invest in a plan B. For example, the options for folks outside of London wanting to get in are dire and could have been solved with several large car parks next to fast mass transit - the two Westfields are perhaps the best options there right now, and those are shopping centres not intended for such use and, ironically, located right next to the expressway projects that did happen (the Westway and the A12 respectively). Maybe CrossRail will help? Park and ride from Abbey Wood, perhaps?
I have a trip to London planned later this year and it's still a toss up between parking at Westfield Stratford or just driving into the city centre and paying the congestion charge.. whereas really it should be an easy choice by now.
You're celebrating the fact that people don't own something that they probably (judging by looking at other people) would find quite useful. Many, many people pay a lot of money every month to own their own private mode of transportation. So are these 46% really voluntarily abstaining or are they forced into abstinence?
I know that many, especially young, childless, people think they don't need a car. I know several such people that happily pay (and can afford to) quite a steep price for leaving their city, either by train, plane, or rental car. But they're not typical, I'd say.
In my case, our family car is moved only very little, say 10000km/a. There are some use cases where a rental car or train tickets just don't cut it - we would pay double the price and still have longer travel and additional complications (mental load is a real thing for parents).
Obviously, I am not driving through the city if I can avoid it. But every now and then I want to leave it/return to it. I consider ownership the best option here and I gladly pay for the parking space.
So in conclusion, I think that every city should make it trivial to rent a parking space in some garage. People that don't own cars might benefit from such additional storage space as well. I also don't think it should be more expensive than renting a very simple apartment. But instead, cities try to cram more and more people with less and less space into the same buildings.
And I would not be surprised if these road projects were designed with a much smaller and less densely populated city in mind.
Thank god this didn’t go ahead. It would have made london into a car centric hellhole, and I suspect traffic would still be terrible. I’ve never been to any large city where the traffic flows freely, regardless of how much road infrastructure there is.
It feels like building more infrastructure just causes people to use more of it, because the "cost" of using it goes down. Kind of similar to how having faster computers has just resulted in us creating more bloated software, instead of everything becoming snappier.
I am hoping that self driving electric medium sized buses giving a hybrid between public transport and uber would solve that. Move people away from car ownership.
Robert Moses was successful carrying out many projects like this in the 1960s to add urban highways in NYC and other northeast US metropolitan areas.
It's mostly a big tragedy. Neighborhoods sliced through, where highways created largely impermeable boundaries for pedestrians. And the swaths of destruction where eminent domain was invoked and then dense, culturally rich, bustling, thriving blocks and blocks were bulldozed and paved.
Even the most collectivist public-transit apologist should be celebrating Robert Moses. He greatly expanded the predecessor to the MTA, and secured its legacy by building the toll bridges and tunnels that subsidize the wildly expensive New York City subways, generations after the bridges and tunnels have been paid off.
The proposals for the inner ring are really astounding - it would have gone right through all sorts of lovely historical neighbourhoods, across nice local parks - right through many of the nicest inner suburbs in London. Every time I see the fortress-like sides of Southwyck House in Brixton I'm reminded of it. If it had gone ahead it really would be a completely different city today.
I do not like the way the text scroll just ‘jumps’ ahead when scrolling down after the header picture. The title has disappeared above your screen before you have time to read it. It reminds me of the Apple product pages, whereby your scroll is constantly hijacked by spinning pictures of laptops opening and closing.
The North Circular is a decent enough road if you don't live by it.
I happen to live just by the South Circular, and it's not really a ring road. You wouldn't use it to circumnavigate London, it's just a joined up set of separate roads (of various sizes) that happen to form a vague semi-circle.
Before WW2 there was a plan to dramatically extend the London Underground miles into the surrounding countryside, far beyond the metropolis. The depression paused that plan and WW2 and the impoverishment of the country ended it. I hope someone writes a similar article about the unfinished transport system that we call the tube.
After nearly 100 years we've come full circle and the Elizabeth line is opening, connecting Reading and the town's West on London to the city through to Shenfield - although perhaps still not on the scale they originally pictured.
Those proposals were extreme, specially Ringway 1, but getting around London is far worse than in Paris, which has the benefit of Haussmann's boulevards pierced after the upheavals of revolutions, and the Périphérique. Political stability entrenches vested interests and NIMBYism, like the fact much of London's choicest property is still owned by descendants of the feudal aristocracy and people don't own the land their houses are built on, they just lease them like medieval serfs would have, since land reform never happened in England.
At one point, there was even a proposal to build massive highways underground instead, but Paris' friable limestone (just as in London) and long history of undocumented quarries make any tunneling effort fraught.
> people don't own the land their houses are built on, they just lease them like medieval serfs would have, since land reform never happened in England.
I’m curious about this - are you referring to leaseholds? Because that seems to mainly exist for flats. If you have a freehold (like almost every house has) you definitely own the land.
> but getting around London is far worse than in Paris
not sure about this. every time i go to Paris i'm stuck in traffic. at least in London i've got at least 5 routes i could take. and this is exactly because there are no boulevards.
Interesting to read in the current context of the Silvertown tunnel currently being built despite complaints from both sides of the river and an admission from TFL that it may make traffic worse south of the river.
Not to mention the fact that cyclists can’t use the tunnel…
I wonder about whether the Silvertown Tunnel will make the average traffic worse but the worst case traffic better.
Currently, if the Blackwall tunnel closes, traffic basically grinds to a halt across a huge part of SE London. I was taking my dying bunny to the vet the other month and a trip that normally takes under ten minutes took forty due to the Blackwall tunnel being closed, even though I'm all the way back in Hither Green.
Nevertheless, I would have preferred they built one of the many proposed pedestrian/cycling bridges...
And this is why our governments love China so much. As Trudeau said:
"There's a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime."
And it is also a reason why governments and their pet projects, despite their claimed authority, are not actually serving those they purport to serve. Huge projects at public expense - eg the creation of the road networks we do have - don't necessarily serve people, but do serve corporations (eg automakers).
The dartboard should be done for the London tube/rail network. It easy to get into central London from periphery (say Bromley to Victoria is 20min by train, 1hr by car), but periphery to periphery is not good if you dont have direct train (eg Bromley to Greenwich is 45min by train, but 20 min by car). The situation is worse if you are carrying luggage and/or kids.
Whilst things like Westway are an abomination, the other parts of London's road structure are little better. I used to live just off the South Circular, which is a road system in notion only - there are almost no dual carrige-ways, and the route simply joins up a lot of suburban minor roads. The North Circular is somewhat better (unless you live next to it), but not much.
Couldn't you use Elon Musk's Boring Company to recreate the missing Ringways as underground tunnels?
I remember as an American overseas in 1975 that it was one of the most baffling aspects of driving in London. I don't know if they still do it but the rental car companies would offer to drive you from Central London to the beginning of the freeway. Assuming they took either a bus or the tube back.
I took a trip to Bournemouth to see a ham radio buddy and ended up being white knuckled the entire way. After our visit I ended up turning the car in and taking the train back into London!
[+] [-] bananapub|3 years ago|reply
so, yay.
obligatory jay foreman video on the topic: https://youtu.be/yUEHWhO_HdY
[+] [-] geogra4|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|3 years ago|reply
(There _is_ a subway in Glasgow, but due to tunneling difficulties and its age the trains are unusually small. It feels like a 2/3 scale model of the London Underground)
[+] [-] petercooper|3 years ago|reply
I have a trip to London planned later this year and it's still a toss up between parking at Westfield Stratford or just driving into the city centre and paying the congestion charge.. whereas really it should be an easy choice by now.
[+] [-] choeger|3 years ago|reply
I know that many, especially young, childless, people think they don't need a car. I know several such people that happily pay (and can afford to) quite a steep price for leaving their city, either by train, plane, or rental car. But they're not typical, I'd say.
In my case, our family car is moved only very little, say 10000km/a. There are some use cases where a rental car or train tickets just don't cut it - we would pay double the price and still have longer travel and additional complications (mental load is a real thing for parents).
Obviously, I am not driving through the city if I can avoid it. But every now and then I want to leave it/return to it. I consider ownership the best option here and I gladly pay for the parking space.
So in conclusion, I think that every city should make it trivial to rent a parking space in some garage. People that don't own cars might benefit from such additional storage space as well. I also don't think it should be more expensive than renting a very simple apartment. But instead, cities try to cram more and more people with less and less space into the same buildings.
And I would not be surprised if these road projects were designed with a much smaller and less densely populated city in mind.
[+] [-] bb123|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hansworst|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmlx|3 years ago|reply
singapore and dubai off the top of my head.
[+] [-] quickthrower2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] montroser|3 years ago|reply
It's mostly a big tragedy. Neighborhoods sliced through, where highways created largely impermeable boundaries for pedestrians. And the swaths of destruction where eminent domain was invoked and then dense, culturally rich, bustling, thriving blocks and blocks were bulldozed and paved.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses
[+] [-] settrans|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leoedin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nly|3 years ago|reply
Today houses built in the 30s in what were suburban towns, still 45-60 minutes out from central on the Tube, are going for $1.5M a piece.
[+] [-] Thlom|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tagersenim|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saaaaaam|3 years ago|reply
The stand-first vanishes when you scroll but the bottom of it is cut off so you have to scroll to be able to read it.
Then when you scroll a pop-up appears asking me to sign up to emails.
Absolutely not.
I gave up even trying to read the article.
[+] [-] nly|3 years ago|reply
Errr...the North and South Circular?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Circular_Road
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Circular_Road,_London
[+] [-] ddek|3 years ago|reply
The North Circular is a decent enough road if you don't live by it.
I happen to live just by the South Circular, and it's not really a ring road. You wouldn't use it to circumnavigate London, it's just a joined up set of separate roads (of various sizes) that happen to form a vague semi-circle.
[+] [-] teh_klev|3 years ago|reply
https://www.roads.org.uk/articles/glasgow
https://www.scottishroadsarchive.org/m8
There's a really good book on the subject matter by John Cullen who was one of the original engineers who worked on the project:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0955378109
[+] [-] sbisson|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickdothutton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aromasin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fmajid|3 years ago|reply
At one point, there was even a proposal to build massive highways underground instead, but Paris' friable limestone (just as in London) and long history of undocumented quarries make any tunneling effort fraught.
[+] [-] bb123|3 years ago|reply
I’m curious about this - are you referring to leaseholds? Because that seems to mainly exist for flats. If you have a freehold (like almost every house has) you definitely own the land.
[+] [-] kmlx|3 years ago|reply
not sure about this. every time i go to Paris i'm stuck in traffic. at least in London i've got at least 5 routes i could take. and this is exactly because there are no boulevards.
[+] [-] JamesBaxter|3 years ago|reply
Not to mention the fact that cyclists can’t use the tunnel…
[+] [-] cameronh90|3 years ago|reply
Currently, if the Blackwall tunnel closes, traffic basically grinds to a halt across a huge part of SE London. I was taking my dying bunny to the vet the other month and a trip that normally takes under ten minutes took forty due to the Blackwall tunnel being closed, even though I'm all the way back in Hither Green.
Nevertheless, I would have preferred they built one of the many proposed pedestrian/cycling bridges...
[+] [-] verisimi|3 years ago|reply
"There's a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime."
And it is also a reason why governments and their pet projects, despite their claimed authority, are not actually serving those they purport to serve. Huge projects at public expense - eg the creation of the road networks we do have - don't necessarily serve people, but do serve corporations (eg automakers).
[+] [-] meekaaku|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zabzonk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whywhywhywhy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] somewhereoutth|3 years ago|reply
Dismantling freeways, returning neighbourhoods. The harder it is to get anywhere by car, the more people will demand good public transport.
[+] [-] rmason|3 years ago|reply
I remember as an American overseas in 1975 that it was one of the most baffling aspects of driving in London. I don't know if they still do it but the rental car companies would offer to drive you from Central London to the beginning of the freeway. Assuming they took either a bus or the tube back.
I took a trip to Bournemouth to see a ham radio buddy and ended up being white knuckled the entire way. After our visit I ended up turning the car in and taking the train back into London!
[+] [-] Markoff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Areacking|3 years ago|reply
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