Anticipations | Page 7

of
the congested towns of our epoch may ultimately be very greatly relieved, but for the

next few decades at least the usage of existing conditions will prevail, and in every town
there is a certain nucleus of offices, hotels, and shops upon which the centrifugal forces I
anticipate will certainly not operate. At present the streets of many larger towns, and
especially of such old-established towns as London, whose central portions have the
narrowest arteries, present a quite unprecedented state of congestion. When the Green of
some future History of the English People comes to review our times, he will, from his
standpoint of comfort and convenience, find the present streets of London quite or even
more incredibly unpleasant than are the filthy kennels, the mudholes and darkness of the
streets of the seventeenth century to our enlightened minds. He will echo our question,
"Why did people stand it?" He will be struck first of all by the omnipresence of mud,
filthy mud, churned up by hoofs and wheels under the inclement skies, and perpetually
defiled and added to by innumerable horses. Imagine his description of a young lady
crossing the road at the Marble Arch in London, on a wet November afternoon,
"breathless, foul-footed, splashed by a passing hansom from head to foot, happy that she
has reached the further pavement alive at the mere cost of her ruined clothes."... "Just
where the bicycle might have served its most useful purpose," he will write, "in affording
a healthy daily ride to the innumerable clerks and such-like sedentary toilers of the
central region, it was rendered impossible by the danger of side-slip in this vast ferocious
traffic." And, indeed, to my mind at least, this last is the crowning absurdity of the
present state of affairs, that the clerk and the shop hand, classes of people positively
starved of exercise, should be obliged to spend yearly the price of a bicycle upon a
season-ticket, because of the quite unendurable inconvenience and danger of urban
cycling.
Now, in what direction will matters move? The first and most obvious thing to do, the
thing that in many cases is being attempted and in a futile, insufficient way getting itself
done, the thing that I do not for one moment regard as the final remedy, is the remedy of
the architect and builder--profitable enough to them, anyhow--to widen the streets and to
cut "new arteries." Now, every new artery means a series of new whirlpools of traffic,
such as the pensive Londoner may study for himself at the intersection of Shaftesbury
Avenue with Oxford Street, and unless colossal--or inconveniently
steep--crossing-bridges are made, the wider the affluent arteries the more terrible the
battle of the traffic. Imagine Regent's Circus on the scale of the Place de la Concorde.
And there is the value of the ground to consider; with every increment of width the value
of the dwindling remainder in the meshes of the network of roads will rise, until to pave
the widened streets with gold will be a mere trifling addition to the cost of their
"improvement."
There is, however, quite another direction in which the congestion may find relief, and
that is in the "regulation" of the traffic. This has already begun in London in an attack on
the crawling cab and in the new bye-laws of the London County Council, whereby
certain specified forms of heavy traffic are prohibited the use of the streets between ten
and seven. These things may be the first beginning of a process of restriction that may go
far. Many people living at the present time, who have grown up amidst the exceptional
and possibly very transient characteristics of this time, will be disposed to regard the
traffic in the streets of our great cities as a part of the natural order of things, and as
unavoidable as the throng upon the pavement. But indeed the presence of all the chief

constituents of this vehicular torrent--the cabs and hansoms, the vans, the
omnibuses--everything, indeed, except the few private carriages--are as novel, as
distinctively things of the nineteenth century, as the railway train and the needle telegraph.
The streets of the great towns of antiquity, the streets of the great towns of the East, the
streets of all the mediæval towns, were not intended for any sort of wheeled traffic at
all--were designed primarily and chiefly for pedestrians. So it would be, I suppose, in any
one's ideal city. Surely Town, in theory at least, is a place one walks about as one walks
about a house and garden, dressed with a certain ceremonious elaboration, safe from mud
and the hardship and defilement of foul weather, buying, meeting, dining, studying,
carousing, seeing the play. It is the growth in size of the city that has necessitated the