Traffic Culture: Some Thoughts by J. Michael Thomson

As a transport and traffic planner of nearly 40 years experience worldwide, I have never heard the expression "traffic culture". Nor have I heard the concept of culture mentioned in connection with transport. My ideas on the subject must therefore start from the very beginning.

Culture

Frankly, I find Dorothy Lee's definition of culture utterly meaningless. To me, it conveys nothing whatever.

To my perhaps simple mind, human activities may be broadly divided into two kinds: utilitarian and hedonistic:

utilitarian activities are done, not solely for pleasure, but because we need or want the result of the action; e.g. eating and drinking, toilet functions, dressing, working, travelling to work, taking exercise, attending church, mowing the lawn, reading text books, etc..
hedonistic activities have no utilitarian basis and are done purely with the objective of making life more pleasant and pleasurable; e.g. the arts, literature, games, sports, parties, etc..

Utilitarian activities are performed in a variety of ways in order to make them more pleasant (or less tedious); i.e. they have hedonistic frills; these frills are sometimes highly developed, e.g. in eating and drinking. Hedonistic activities are sometimes given utilitarian frills in order to gain something useful from otherwise purely pleasurable functions; e.g. charity balls and some sporting functions.

Culture, in its broadest sense, comprises all hedonistic activities and all the hedonistic frills (or aspects) of utilitarian activities. It thus covers a vast range of things. Some people may like to distinguish Culture (with a capital C) - i.e. music, painting, literature and other artistic or intellectual pursuits - from the borader definition of culture which, I think, is relevant to this conference.

Wherever there is culture, there are differences between people, especially between social classes and between nationalities. People everywhere perform much the same basic activities, both utilitarian and hedonistic; they take their meals, attend to their bodily needs, dress, work, travel, look after their homes and land, create families, make music, decorate, play games, and so on. But they do so in a bewildering variety of styles.

Cultural differences are differences of style, and they are found in almost every human activity.

Traffic Culture

Travel is a basic human activity. It includes all movement between individual premises (e.g. homes, workplaces) by whatever means.

Transport means the facitilities which are provided to help people to travel and to send goods. It is normally divided into infrastructure (fixed items such as roads, railway track, airports, ports) and traffic (the moving elements - including people - that use the infrastructure).

The term, traffic culture, is therefore a little misleading since it is clearly intended to cover the transport system, not just the traffic. Accepting the term, however, my definition of traffic culture follows from my definition of culture. Traffic culture comprises all those aspects of the transport system which are intended
to make the system less unpleasant and less injurious to everybody affected.

I will elaborate on this definition. First, nearly all travel is a utiliartian activity, with the object of moving from A to B. Only a tiny percentage of trips are made purely for pleasure. However, a great deal is done to make travel pleasurable. In terms of money, the cheapest forms of human transport are the bicycle and the cattle truck. But one must recognize that time is also a cost, which eliminates the bicycle for most longer journeys. In a city, however, - and this Workshop appears to be confined to city traffic - the most "efficient" way of meeting the demand for passenger traffic would probably be to prohibit all forms of transport except the bicycle and the cattle truck. This would be the cheapest solution in terms of money and, for many big cities, probably the cheapest practical solution in terms of time. It would also be the least objectionable solution for non-travellers, in terms of the amount of roadspace required, intrusion in residential streets, pollution, parking nuisance and accidents. But, of course, we do not use cattle trucks; we upgrade them - sometimes only slightly - and call them buses. And in practice, despite claims to the contrary, we minimize the number of cyclists by frightening them off the roads.

The utilitarian aspects of urban travel are cost, time and safety, which are all very important. The cultural aspects are mainly to do with comfort, convenience and pleasantness, for the users. But there are also cultural aspects for non-users, namely all the people affected by the presence of transport infrastructure and the many unpleasant impacts of traffic. These latter, non-user aspects are much more than the ugliness of a highway and the noise and filth emitted by motor vehicles. In the long run, the whole physical and locational structure of the city is shaped in response to its transport system. In many ways, the way of life of its people is influenced, directly and indirectly, by the transport system. Thus, everybody in the city is affected, both as a non-user and as a user, by the transport system.

The conflict over urban transport in big cities is essentially a conflict between cultural values. There is no engineering or economic difficulty in providing efficient transport for all existing trips by means of existing roads, supplemented in a very few places by an urban railway line. The difficulty arises simply from the fact that some people want the hoped-for convenience of the private car (and, for goods, of private haulage).

The conflict between cultural values - i.e. between the desire for convenience, which in practice often results in the inconvenience of congestion and parking frustration, and the cultural values of a beautiful, pleasant and agreeable city - is complicated by two other important factors. First, social class: the car lobby tends to be supported by the rich and powerful. Secondly, ignorance: very few people, including Ministers of Transport, really understand the profound dynamic relationships between the transport system and the pattern and quality of life - let us say, culture - of the city. They do not understand and apprecite the true cultural implications of trying to appease the desire for private transport.

Workshop

Level (a) concerns urban transport planning. It will surely be found that all the factors listed, except architecture, are fully taken into account by transport planners. However, the planners are not always supported by politicians. Bad decisions often result from ignorance and arrogance on the part of politicians and administrators. There are also some bad transport planners.

Level (b) aims to compare five European cities. The experience of these cities will be worth a discussion but must not try to draw conclusions by "comparing chalk and cheese". It is dangerous to compare cities of very different size, e.g. London and Lille. The size of the city centre is also of crucial importance to a transport solution; Milano, I believe, has a much smaller centre than London or Berlin. The post-War division of Berlin is obviously a special factor of great consequence for Berlin's transport system. In Athens, car ownership grew much later than in the other cities.

Level (c) is not well worded. My answer, however, is that all the important cultural values affected by the transport system can and should be taken into account. The planning phase is most important; whatever people say about sympathetic design and environmental alleviation, a highway is always a highway and there is no way that 100,000 vehicles a day can become a joy to behold. But there are also important ways in which the design and operation of the transport system can and should take account of cultural values.

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