‘Motorways in London’ and Transport Planning

Motorways in London proposes a substantial reduction in the planned motorway network in London, and its redistribution away from the centre, but it is argued that the book does not justify its case by the measurements presented, and pays too little attention to amenities and compensation. The article is largely concerned with problems for transport planning arising from the book and the official transport and planning documents of 1968 and 1969. The latter's land use and transport model is criticised for its neglect of the economic implications of its ‘suppression’ of trips where networks are overloaded. The model parameters should be required to conform to observed distributions of journey lengths, especially those to work, based on workplace data and recognising the influences, inter alia, of variations in income and levels of skill. A key question in making present models better reflect the long-run interaction between transport and land use is predicting journey-to-work lengths. A model to explain their past change is proposed, based on Census data, measuring the effect of changes in job opportunities, housing demands, and population shifts.