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A solution is needed to address our traffic jam pain

May 08, 2018

Can anyone solve the issue of traffic congestion on the motorways? Source: Pixabay

There were no motorways in the United Kingdom (also known as Freeways here in Australia), just after the last war, or until about another 20 years later. If you have ever been to England, and driven along some of the non-motorway roads there — that’s what it was like then, on even the most important highways. You have to remember that traffic was much lighter in those days, so there was no great call for improvement, plus of course, it costs an enormous amount of money to build a new super-highway, especially as they were all trying, at government level, to pay off the cost of re-building everything that had been destroyed by the Germans!

To make the traffic even lighter than it might have been, petrol was still rationed for some time after hostilities ceased, and the car manufacturers were still not up to full speed with their efforts to provide us all with transport again. One good thing, Doctor Beaching hadn’t thrust his dagger into the heart of the English railway system as yet, so there was a fairly efficient means of transport available, which could often prove quicker than going by car. Of course, there were always the buses.

In those days a trip from Bristol to Torquay in South Devon, a distance of a 158km by road, could quite easily take you eight hours, especially during the heavy holiday season between May and September. This works out to an average speed, after various stops along the way, of about 20km/h! I remember travelling that road several times in summer and spending more time waiting in traffic jams to get through Taunton, Exeter, or any one of the many towns sprinkled along the route than I did in making actual progress! Nowadays, travelling along the M5, the trip can be done in about two hours, and in much greater comfort, in the modern cars of today!

Eventually, the authorities got started and at first ‘all roads led to Rome’, or, more accurately, all motorways led from/to London, with the M1 heading north, M2 south-east, M3 cutting across the south coast towards Devon, the M4 replacing the A4 to Bristol and the M5 to Birmingham and beyond, making a map of England take on the appearance of a giant spiders web, especially when the intricate patter on intermediate motorways started to be built, leading not from London, but from all sorts of other points, cutting across the initial pattern of prime motorways. In the early days the motorways only boasted two or three lanes each way, separated by a simple grass verge. As traffic increased, due to the popularity of the system, many of the roads had extra lanes added, making in some cases as many as five or six lanes in each direction, with the protection of crash-barriers in between, added later.

The one problem the motorway designers have been unable to find a cure for is the method of getting off them once you are on! At every motorway ending there is (especially during busy periods) a long queue of traffic waiting to get off, and get on their way. What is badly needed is a system of filtering, so that you don’t come up against a sudden change from a five-lane motorway to a two-lane city street. Someone needs to figure out how you thin the traffic on the motorway gradually, while reducing the number of lanes available, then perhaps put a large roundabout at the end of each, leading into a well laid out set of city streets, to whisk the traffic away as soon as possible, perhaps with no exits to other streets for a kilometre or so, before the final filtering starts.

I’m no expert on motorway design (is there such a person?), but I can’t help feeling there must be an answer somewhere, otherwise a beautiful system, which works so well in all other ways, is going to fizzle out and die, simply because of the ‘experts’ not being able to work out how to get rid of those ‘end of motorway’ bottlenecks.