Traffic and Rebuilding

The London traffic problem is just one of those questions that appeal
very strongly to the more prevalent and less charitable types of English
mind. It has a practical and constructive air, it deals with
impressively enormous amounts of tangible property, it rests with a
comforting effect of solidity upon assumptions that are at once doubtful
and desirable. It seems free from metaphysical considerations, and it
has none of those disconcerting personal applications, those
penetrations towards intimate qualities, that makes eugenics, for
example, faintly but persistently uncomfortable. It is indeed an ideal
problem for a healthy, hopeful, and progressive middle-aged public man.
And, as I say, it deals with enormous amounts of tangible property.

Like all really serious and respectable British problems it has to be
handled gently to prevent its coming to pieces in the gift. It is safest
in charge of the expert, that wonderful last gift of time. He will talk
rapidly about congestion, long-felt wants, low efficiency, economy, and
get you into his building and rebuilding schemes with the minimum of
doubt and head-swimming. He is like a good Hendon pilot. Unspecialised
writers have the destructive analytical touch. They pull the wrong
levers. So far as one can gather from the specialists on the question,
there is very considerable congestion in many of the London
thoroughfares, delays that seem to be avoidable occur in the delivery of
goods, multitudes of empty vans cumber the streets, we have hundreds of
acres of idle trucks--there are more acres of railway sidings than of
public parks in Greater London--and our Overseas cousins find it
ticklish work crossing Regent Street and Piccadilly. Regarding life
simply as an affair of getting people and things from where they are to
where they appear to be wanted, this seems all very muddled and wanton.
So far it is quite easy to agree with the expert. And some of the
various and entirely incompatible schemes experts are giving us by way
of a remedy, appeal very strongly to the imagination. For example, there
is the railway clearing house, which, it is suggested, should cover I do
not know how many acres of what is now slumland in Shoreditch. The
position is particularly convenient for an underground connection with
every main line into London. Upon the underground level of this great
building every goods train into London will run. Its trucks and vans
will be unloaded, the goods passed into lifts, which will take every
parcel, large and small, at once to a huge, ingeniously contrived
sorting-floor above. There in a manner at once simple, ingenious and
effective, they will be sorted and returned, either into delivery vans
at the street level or to the trains emptied and now