Prediction - Trust Annual Report 1976
After some fifteen years of motorway building, the consequences can be observed and firm deductions made about future trends. These show that the vast increases in traffic predicted by the Road Construction Units, omits to mention the one factor which can be quantified. The determining factor is the capacity of towns to accept traffic, and not as the RCU's maintain, growth of population, anticipated car ownership and so on. Thus if traffic approaching London on the M3, leaches the levels of predictions in 1995, London will have reacted long before, by increasing the number of double yellow lines, traffic lights, one way systems, restricted turning movements, reduced parking spaces and higher charges and taxes.
The traffic capacity a London being more or less fixed at the present level, movement can only be maintained by traffic control and restriction of the number of vehicles allowed to enter congested zones. The same conditions will apply at the other end of the M3 at Southampton. The restraints which have to be applied, to maintain the life of the cities, effectively controls the amount of traffic using the motorways. It is astonishing that these factors are ignored by the road planners. The confusion and unreality of present road building policies, unrelated to need, has arisen because authorities have adopted the procedure of regarding urban and country roads as separate entities. It is time their close inter-relationship was understood and the effects calculated.