Professor Rueben Smeed was one of the founding fathers of traffic engineering. He started life as a mathematician and following a doctorate in aeronautical engineering he became involved in aviation research during WW2. In 1947 he moved to what became the Transport Research Laboratory where he did groundbreaking work into accidents and postulated the theory that average traffic speeds in central London would never rise above 9 mph because as soon as they did traffic would re-route to rebalance the network. This theory, which has proved remarkably robust, was used to demonstrate that more advanced traffic signals could increase capacity but they would not increase speeds.
In 1967 Prof Smeed returned to academia and in 1975 I was fortunate to be one of the students that attended what must have been just about the last lecture that he gave. The good professor, with more than a twinkle in his eye, explained to us eager young embryonic traffic engineers that the car offered little advantage to mankinds’ mobility. He explained that if we added the time spent travelling by car to the time that we spent working to pay for the car and divided this into the distance travelled by car we got an average speed of four miles an hour or walking speed.
The implication (remember that twinkle in the eye) was that we would all be better off, live longer and eliminate pollution if we dumped the car and got a bike or walked. I am sure that this wouldn’t work in places like America where cars are surgically implanted at birth and towns and cities designed accordingly, but try applying the concept to your own life, you might just be surprised.
Peter Guest
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