Traffic Jam

Before the Roman came to Rye or out

to Severn strode, The rolling English drunkard made the

rolling English road.

With this couplet, G. K. Chesterton hymned the traditional British inability to get from place to place by a direct route. About the only straight roads on the island are those laid out atop old Roman roads like famed Watling Street, which makes a 160-mile run from London to Wales. In the days of gas rationing, austerity and fewer cars, it was possible for the lucky few to speed across country or through cities with ease. But last week, its inadequate road net jammed with 8,000,000 cars, 1,500,000 motorcycles and uncounted millions of bicycles, Britain was locked in a death struggle with a foe long familiar to the U.S., and even more deadly in densely settled Britain: the traffic jam.

Blitz Blessing. By actual clocking, the average speed possible for motorists to get across town ranges from 6 m.p.h. in Glasgow to 10 m.p.h. in London. At Worcester, where a dozen main roads converge on a single narrow bridge, lines of cars and trucks stretch as far as the eye can see. The Queensferry bridge over the River Dee--on the main route from the north in Wales--is barely wide enough for two lines of vehicles, and five-mile traffic jams are normal. The last piece of major road construction in London was built 50 years ago. A brand-new cloverleaf at nearby Chiswick, nearing completion after two years' work, is already conceded to be inadequate.

Getting off the jammed main routes is no help, for the idea has occurred to everybody else too. The narrow back streets of cities are further narrowed by parked cars and blocked by garbage trucks and moving vans. In big cities the blitz was a traffic blessing, for bombed-out areas made excellent parking lots. But office blocks are going up on the bomb sites --bringing more cars into the center of town and simultaneously eliminating places for them to park. Creeping toward home from work in the rush hour, Londoners must often leave their cars a 20-minute walk from their front doors.

Blinking Lights. In addition to traffic, British motorists face a horror largely unknown in the U.S.: the driver whose car displays, front and back, the big red L sign that stands for "learner." Disregarding double lines, painted arrows, blinking lights, rules of the road and the prospect of dismemberment and death, many L drivers whip past trucks on hills and blind curves, weave nonchalantly from lane to lane on the few big throughways. Picnicking on Sunday, drivers blithely leave their cars parked in the path of traffic. Last month 515 Britons died in traffic accidents; 23,277 were injured. The British death rate per auto-miles-traveled is 66.6% higher than in the U.S.

L drivers are not necessarily beginners. With only 850 examiners to deal with the flood of applications for licenses (last year a record 1,345,832 applied), there is a constant backlog of a quarter-million unlicensed drivers. The L-plate army is growing. In less than two years nearly half the 2,000,000 Britons who took driver's tests flunked them, many for the second and third time. All Britain cheered last month when 39-year-old Derek Brown passed his test: he had been driving with L plates for 22 years and failed twelve previous exams.

Chins Up. Despite the growing clamor that something be done, the government refuses to give road building the top priority granted other capital investments.

Some $280 million a year is allotted to modernize the nationalized railway system, but with two-thirds of the traveling public using cars and buses, the government plans to spend scarcely half that amount per year on road building and repair.

Last year, with appropriate fanfare, the government opened Britain's first true throughway, the Preston Bypass. Costing $11 million, and free of road crossings, traffic lights, pedestrians and speed limits, it is four lanes wide--but runs only eight miles. On the first day, motorists zipped along at high speeds, then ground to a halt: so much traffic piled up at each end of the bypass that it took drivers a half-hour to get off the stretch they had traversed in eight minutes. Seven weeks later a sudden cold snap buckled the concrete bypass like a crumpled cooky, and it had to be rebuilt. The throughway's designer confessed: "We hadn't thought of frost."

Even angry debate in Parliament has failed to stir the government to any real action on traffic. Urging a chins-up attitude, Transport Minister Harold Watkinson last week imperturbably told M.P. critics that "traffic congestion is at least a sign of an expanding and lively economy. Do not let us regard it, therefore, in too tragic a manner."

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