there are seventy-four goods stations in London, all intercommunicating, and the excellence of railway arrangements is therefore fully established.

Thus the remedy for railway congestion cannot possibly be either in the enlargement of goods stations nor in their reduplication.

The evil which has been demonstrated to persist under all these different conditions is platform mileage-that is, the element of distance.

The remedy must therefore take some form in which this factor is reduced to its minimum.

In the meantime it must be impressed on the reader that the cost of these faulty and wasteful methods comes out of his pocket, and will continue to come out of his pocket until the remedy is applied.

Indeed, as has been truly said, all three factors, time, space, and energy, must be reduced to their scientific minimum if any solution of this problem is to be achieved.1

The question of street traffic is intimately bound up with railway arrangements, and it is impossible to consider the one without considering the other.

Wherever there is a multiplicity of goods stations there will be congested streets. There will be no need to illustrate this point with regard to London, where there are seventy-four goods stations, but the appended illustrations of Chicago traffic, where there are eighty-six goods stations, is confirmatory.

The suggested remedy put forward by the Royal Commission on London Traffic for this street congestion was the making of two broad avenues, each from four to five miles long, north and south, and east and west, and crossing each other close to the Mansion House. It was estimated that they would cost about £30,000,000. A reference to the diagram (p. 68) of

1 See Mr. A. W. Gattie's speech, House of Commons, May 25, 1914.

Chicago will show that this proposed solution could be no solution at all.

The cost, moreover, of this magnificent nonsense would have been nearer £300,000,000 than £30,000,000,

Fig. 11.

unless the Government were proposing to confiscate property of fabulous value, wholesale. Apart from these considerations, no living man would have seen the completion of the scheme.

This idea has been abandoned, but it is necessary to insist upon the fact of its having being seriously considered, to show in what an amazing state of muddleheadedness on this subject the " trusty and wellbeloved" gentlemen selected by His Majesty were. What they recommended, however, was not so surprising as what they omitted to recommend.

The question of the relation of goods-traffic-vehicles to street congestion was practically left untouched and this notwithstanding the fact that the commission had received the most valuable evidence on the subject from Mr. Edgar Harper.1

It is true that, with an almost pathetic confidence in human nature, they enjoined people to load their goods in their own back-yards, if any; or if they had no back-yards, and they were compelled to load in the streets, to be as quick as possible about it.

This was the sum total of their conclusions on one of the most important subjects of the day.

The Royal Commission having reported that an independent permanent tribunal should be called into existence to receive and examine all possible remedies -to do, in fact, what they themselves had been called together to do and had failed to accomplish-Mr. Asquith at once vetoed their recommendation, despite the fact that it received the support of the London County Council, the authority chiefly concerned.

He substituted for this proposed traffic board a brand-new branch of the Board of Trade, and placed it under the control of Colonel Sir Herbert Jekyll, K.C.M.G., a superlatively privileged official. The

1 Formerly Chief Statistical Officer to the L.C.C., and now Chief Valuer to the Inland Revenue.

function of the proposed new department, which was called the London Traffic Branch of the Board of Trade, was to examine into all reasonable schemes and report upon the same to Parliament.

This body was in existence for over eight years, and has now been abolished as useless. It absorbed a large amount of public money in the shape of salaries, it did nothing but bring into existence a large number of Blue Books containing much repetition, and it consistently derided the only scheme which gave any rational promise of success.

Having regard to the close connection between goods transport reform and this particular question of congested traffic, it will be readily understood why the Board of Trade, so nervous of the one, should show such reluctance in dealing drastically with the other. For the Board soon realised that to grapple honestly with congested street traffic would inevitably bring about a genuine investigation of railway matters in general; and for this investigation the Board of Trade apparently has no stomach.

The title of this new body, "The London Traffic Branch of the Board of Trade," suggests to a tooconfiding public that a sub-committee of the twentytwo Privy Councillors forming the Board of Trade would take the matter under their consideration. As a matter of fact, this new traffic branch of the Board of Trade resolved itself into a single individual, who styled himself the Board of Trade. "L'état c'est moi."

In short, the fate of this tremendous question was placed by Mr. Asquith in the hands of one man, and that man an individual who might have been thought to be biased against reform by his former railway connections, who is now a railway director, and who met every effort to obtain an enquiry with a refusal and the reply: "I am the Board of Trade, so far as this matter is concerned." This anomaly was undoubtedly a fact. These vast public interests,

therefore, were confided to the care of an official, most certainly not of the first rank, a fact of which Mr. Asquith must have been fully aware.

The new authority abandoned the expensive scheme suggested by the Royal Commission for another which would prove a great deal more expensive, and would be absolutely inefficacious to remedy any of the evils it was called upon to rectify.

The one thing this new body did not do was to make any attempt to get at the root of the matter.

The new suggested remedy, which would create a perfect saturnalia of jobbery, was to build 120 miles of streets, but none of these streets were to go near Central London.1

Comment is superfluous.

It is quite true that there are only two alternatives : to widen streets, or to reduce traffic.

The first of these has been shown to be worse than no remedy.

The strange thing is that in the reduction of street traffic lies the whole secret of increasing trade.

At present the greater part of the traffic which lends such animation to our streets, and which no doubt tends to increase our agility as a race, is doing no useful work.

The only solution is, then, the reduction of traffic, and above all the reduction of slow-moving traffic.

Reduction of traffic is the only solution of the difficulty, but inasmuch as it involves the reform of railway terminal arrangements and inasmuch as the reforms are blocked by a subordinate official at the Board of Trade, who will not even permit an enquiry,

1 "The cost of providing one hundred miles of new streets and of improving twenty-five and a half miles of existing ones, within the metropolitan area, in addition to extensive widening of other existing roads, would, of course, be very large, but it is difficult to see how it can be avoided, if congestion is to be relieved and proper provision made for the needs of the future."-Blue Book, Cd. 5472, 1911, p. 32.