CHAPTER V
POLITICAL INFLUENCES
The Factor of Cost Resulting in the “Strangling of Communication”: Congestion which Leads to Decay: A Great Modern Problem: The Compulsory Acquisition of Land: Old Roads Serving New Objects.
So far we have been considering the material conditions of the Road: the physical circumstances which determine its trajectory. But these alone do not completely account for its trace in practice or theory. There is another category affecting this, the political or moral category: the various effects of society in modifying what, but for them, would be the formula of least effort. These political causes of modification are of less effect than the physical, but they merit a brief mention.
The political factors modifying the trajectory of a road (that is, the factors due to man’s social action and not to material causes alone) are three in number. Firstly, the factor of cost—which is, the economic tendency to avoid as far as possible the destruction of old economic values in the making of a road; secondly, legal restraints against the Road’s following its line of least resistance; and thirdly, the presence of a variety of objects to be served, which variety again interferes with the simple rule of finding the trajectory of minimum effort.
The first of these political factors, the factor of cost, you find even in the primitive road, which avoids the cultivable land if it can, or crosses it at the narrowest point available, and you find it at the other end of the scale in our complicated modern world, where the Road tends to avoid the destruction of economic values in highly concentrated town life and thus keeps narrow when it is established, and also fails to develop new communications. The effect of this political restraint is constant throughout history, great in all periods, but increasing cumulatively with the increase of wealth and the economic development of society. There follows from this a most interesting historical phenomenon, which I shall deal with at greater length in my second section—“The English Road”—because it would appear to be upon the point of recurring in this island. That phenomenon is the “strangling of communications” in the old age of a wealthy state from the very effect of its wealth. It is a paradox of profound effect which you get over and over again in the history of great mercantile cities: their wealth—which should be their best advantage in developing and changing communication—crystallizes them. Their ways are laid out for a particular phase of traffic. The land on either side of the streets becomes enormously valuable. The traffic changes in character. New ways are demanded by the new conditions, but they are not built because the compensation required for disturbance terrifies the reformer. There follows a phase during which you have heavy congestion of traffic, and then, unless reform comes in time, a succeeding phase of decay.
It is very rare in the history of great urban centres to find the problem tackled at the right moment and solved: to find governors of sufficient daring to take the economic plunge. The Government of Napoleon III did so to some extent in the case of modern Paris (though it left a great number of congested streets unrelieved), and there are not a few modern Italian towns where similar action has had its effect: for instance, Bari. But the general rule in history is that a city having reached its highest point of wealth becomes congested, refuses to accept its only remedy, and passes on from congestion to decay.
How strong the influence is you may observe in one particular historical example where its influence is more clearly discovered than in any other—that is, the example of the City of London after the Great Fire of 1666.
Here was the finest opportunity for rebuilding that ever a Government had. It might have done what was done at Turin and laid out a new city altogether. Two men of genius, Sir William Temple and Sir Christopher Wren, produced magnificent plans with broad ways, round places for the crossings, and a carefully thought-out scheme of transverse streets. Vested interest and economic peril proved too strong for them. The city was rebuilt on its old lines with narrow lanes and alleys, courts, tortuous trace, the mark of all which it carries to-day.
There is a good side to this, of course. No one can regret the conservation of tradition. Everyone who knew the old Paris mourned for the antiquity which was swept away under Napoleon III, and even in our slight changes in modern London we are shocked at the desecration they involve. I confess that I myself have never got over the loss of Temple Bar, though I only knew it as a child. If this were the main motive at work one would criticize less strongly the hesitation to make our town streets meet the modern great change. But it is not the main motive. The main motive is a blunder in the science of economics. It is the idea that the destruction of a number of imaginary economic values (“imaginary” because they form no part of the total real wealth of the State), to wit, the urban site values, is in some way an expenditure of real wealth. So far is this from being the case that there is perhaps no example in all history of a congested street-system being reformed without the wealth of the city increasing after the change.
Of the minor political questions which confront us to-day in England this stands in the first rank. If we do not reform our main roads we shall handicap ourselves against our competitors, but if we do not broaden and change our town streets we may rapidly strangle and atrophy our most vital centres of commerce.
The effect of the second point, legal restraint in modifying the line of least resistance, will be found under two forms: the first is negative; the lack of public powers of coercion for the acquirement of land by which a road should pass. The second is positive; legal restraint against the road through ownership or privilege.
This political factor in the modification of roads, the negative and positive effect of legal restraint, works in an opposite fashion to that we have just examined. The older, the wealthier, the more complex a civilization the less this modifying factor is present. Thus in England for many centuries we had no compulsory power in the hands of public authority for the making of a new road. Such powers are, as we shall see when we come to the story of the English Road, a comparatively modern development. On this account the Road was, until modern legislation brought in a new system, compelled to follow existing established ways. It could not even be broadened, let alone a new trajectory enforced; and the only compulsory powers in the hands of the authorities were those permitting the levying of labour, and later of money, for repair.
The same is true of the second form of legal restraint, though in lesser degree. Privilege (such as the deflection of an old line of road by Act of Parliament in order, for instance, to add to the privacy of a park—there were not a few examples of this some generations ago) and the positive legal restraint imposed by existing right of ownership obviously decay pari passu with the development of public powers for driving new roads or broadening existing ones.
The third political factor modifying the trajectory of roads is that of a variety of objects imposed upon communications by varied social uses. As society grows more complex and at the same time wealthier, as new centres of population arise, new forms of travel and new needs to be satisfied by travel, the simple formula of the line of least effort from one point to another suffers increasing modification. You have to consider not only the line of least effort between two terminals, but the due weight to be given to intervening points which do not lie precisely upon that line. As a rule, of course, these new centres exercise their pressure or attraction automatically, and you get a deflection arising not from plan but from gradual necessity. The same thing happens with new needs (as, commerce replacing arms), but it is curious to note how slowly the modification takes place.
We have a good example of this along the south-eastern coast of England. Our ancestors felt no attraction for living in the neighbourhood of the sea. To use the shore as a recreation and the sea air as a remedy is quite a modern idea. The result is that all the old roads connected with the sea as a terminal ran perpendicularly to the coast, uniting a port to the inland country. There is not a main road in England over one hundred years old and leading from the sea which does not start from a port. For good communication connecting up a line of ports laterally there was little need. The result is that to this day, when the south coast has become one long line of great watering-places, many of which are fully developed modern towns on a very large scale, there is still no complete lateral communication. Many of the port bridges, as I point out elsewhere in this essay, are but recently established, many sections of the line are served by imperfect, ill-kept pieces of road; in one or two places it fails altogether (as round Selsey), while in others it is built up (as at Romney Marsh) of patchwork—old lanes running criss-cross to each other haphazard to make the modern line.