Great Western Coffee Shop

Sometimes you find interesting nuggets during the daily grind.

Recent offering from DfT https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/land-use-and-transport-planning-dft-science-advisory-council-paper/land-use-and-transport-planning-dft-science-advisory-council-paper (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/land-use-and-transport-planning-dft-science-advisory-council-paper/land-use-and-transport-planning-dft-science-advisory-council-paper) interesting in it self at first, but have been gripped by the reference within it to the Buchanan report; Traffic in Towns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_in_Towns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_in_Towns). Not often government reports are republished as Penguins. Same era as the Beecing report. Seems a prescient view of what was to come.

Not sure my eyeballs would stand 250 odd pages on the Internet Archive, but the Penguin might be of more interest in the second-hand market.

Newbury is an example quoted.

Better get back to earning a crust.

I have a copy of the Penguin version. Not cheap, even as a second hand rather foxed copy, but well worth a read.

The main thing I took away from it was Buchanan’s view that if you took the whole roads budget, doubled it, and spent all of it on Leeds, you’d still only be able to accommodate about half the journeys people want to make by car. For the rest, you’d need public transport…