The Road

by Hilaire Belloc

They know from experiments made what materials and foundation may be best, what minimum width suggests itself (I have occasionally heard the minimum width of 100 feet suggested); but whatever the detailed practice, when the experts set to work on the new motor roads it must be with these five main provisions before them. There are minor considerations. You have, with the new traffic, to consider a gradient somewhere between the old road gradient and the railway gradient. There, again, it is for experts to determine what the maximum useful gradient should be. The trouble in our present road system is that in any trajectory you will have one or two places where the new traffic is perilous. There are even exceptional points in England where it is almost prohibited by excessive gradients.

Another point in connection with such great arterial roads is the capital one of exit from the great urban centres. It is of little use to relieve traffic, to diminish the strain and expense of energy connected with it, and the peril, and all the rest of it, between two urban centres if the exit and entry from and into each are blocked.

Now, the trouble here is a purely economic trouble. Urban sites have a special value, even in the outskirts. They are not, as a rule, sites to which anyone is attached, but the cost of buying them up has made reformers hesitate to drive the arterial ways which are so urgently needed. Once your great road has reached the inner ring of a large town its traffic disperses and there is no need for continuing its dimensions. But the new system can be of no real service if, on the approach to a great town, we retain the narrows and guts which disfigure, for example, the western road out of London. It might even be said that from the political standpoint it would be better to begin with the assurance of good exits and entrances than with the planning of the Road as a whole.

At present we have, in the particular case of London, one, and only one, good entry. That is the entry from the north-west. All the others are hopelessly congested.

iv

There will occur in connection with all this discussion of the necessity for a modern change in the Road the point of ways and means. Somebody must pay. How shall the payment be made? It has already become a matter of politics. Pretty well all that can be said upon it has been said, but as yet there is no agreement. I would maintain (very tentatively, hardly as more than a suggestion) that we shall never get a satisfactory settlement until we found ourselves upon three main principles:

(1) The making of a few great arteries, coupled with the making of proper exits from the great towns and of by-ways round the urban centres, is a national concern. You cannot, in the present state of society, regard it as local, nor even as chiefly concerning the direct users of the Road, for even these, who are apparently the people upon whom the burden should most justly fall, develop by their travel the district through which they pass.

I suggest, therefore, that you must start in this case with the fundamental principle of a national fund, and a national fund not proceeding from ear-marked receipts alone, but also drawn from general taxes.

(2) The second principle which I should suggest is that in so far as you tax travel for the purposes of this fund you should tax it not by any complicated combination of weight, power, fuel, and so forth, but through some one factor alone, otherwise you will be perpetually remodelling your scheme and as perpetually causing a grievance.

Now, the most obvious factor is fuel. One way and another, the fuel a man uses for his machine is the nearest test to the use he makes of the Road. A heavy weight needs more fuel, great speed and consequently greater wear and tear needs more fuel, and greater horse-power needs more fuel. The curves are, of course, not parallel. You can get equal speeds between heavy and light for nearly the same consumption of fuel. One type of machine will do more harm to the road surface for every gallon of fuel than another, and so on. But if you want to have easy revenue simplicity in taxation is vital: surely the taxation of fuel is the simplest and most direct method. It is easily collected. It does away with all chance of confusion. It can be imposed at source and in bulk, and it has that invaluable quality which has been often lost sight of in the last two generations: that it is paid gradually and at will and yet paid inevitably. So long, of course, as a false distinction is maintained between the commercial and the private use of vehicles you will have gross anomalies and injustice. To draw the line between economic waste in the use of the modern internal combustion engine and what is part of the general and normal life of the community is impossible. It would be better were the distinction to be wholly removed. We do not ask a man who takes a ticket from Birmingham to London whether he is going for fun or folly, for business or necessity. Men pay the same price for the ticket whatever the motive of their journey. It is an absurd anomaly as things now stand that the man who travels in a little Ford car from one town to another with, say, two members of his family—and travels therefore much more cheaply than he could upon the railway—should pay the rent of a house for the privilege of having his car, while the heavy vehicle of a tradesman who is distributing advertising matter—sheer economic loss to the community—should tear up the road for nothing.