15 ms·

London’s Lost Ringways

138 points by bananapear 4y ago

bananapub 4y ago
unsurprisingly, London is all for the better for these projects having been canned in the 60's - very few massive roads cutting up neigbourhoods, and helped avoid the massive tipping into redesigning cities for single/low occupancy cars. it's so successful, that in 2022, 46% of households in greater London have *zero* cars. if you're curious what it what have looked like, go for a walk around Notting Hill and see how Westway has damaged the human environment and walkability. so, yay. obligatory jay foreman video on the topic: https://youtu.be/yUEHWhO_HdY https://youtu.be/yUEHWhO_HdY
- geogra4 4y ago
  American cities were utterly destroyed by these kinds of projects.
  - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    There's no winning. You build highways and they screech about cutting up neighborhoods. You don't and they screech about the resulting sprawl as development becomes more diffuse. My pet favorite solution is more park & ride transition points on the outskirts and light rail in the dense areas but the cognitive dissonance it takes to argue that raised highways and highway pits cut through neighborhoods but not let out a peep when it's subway and tram lines doing the same should disqualify one from voting. As much as I hate the NIMBYs for insisting on violating other people's property rights you at least have to give them +1 for consistency. Looking back with hindsight we'd probably be better off if we had just built all the urban highways and rail lines (and other transit infrastructure projects) that have been seriously considered over the years.
    - inglor_cz 4y ago
      IDK where you live, but I live in a country with a lot of trams and trains (the Czech Republic), and the NIMBYs attack absolutely everything. It may take decades to overcome their resistance. One example of many: in the city I was born (Ostrava), there is a tram line planned since the 1990s (on the chance that anyone knows Ostrava here: Poruba VIII. obvod). That is not a very beautiful neighbourhood, rather a standard Communist high-rise zone with a lot of loud car and bus traffic through the main arteries. But the NIMBYs are absolutely relentless in attacking the tram project and anything even slightly connected (e.g. relocation of gas lines) in courts.
    - scratcheee 4y ago
      Rail lines have more than 10x the throughput though, so you need vastly less of them to do vastly more work. A city with enough roads for 100% car usage is approaching not being a city anymore, just an unending suburban hellscape, but a city with barely any roads and more rail than it really needs can still be a beautiful city. To add to that, underground railways exist in many cities, but underground road networks effectively don't. The throughput by volume dug out the ground is viable for a rail service, its totally non-viable to bury an equivalent throughput 20 lane highway underground.
    - egypturnash 4y ago
      but the cognitive dissonance it takes to argue that raised highways and highway pits cut through neighborhoods but not let out a peep when it's subway and tram lines doing the same should disqualify one from voting Here’s a thought experiment for you. You are on foot, perhaps with a kid in a stroller, perhaps with a dog on a leash, perhaps an armful of groceries. It is a gorgeous day for a walk. You have multiple destinations on the other side of several transit arteries: * a subway that passes under city streets with sidewalks, if you’re lucky maybe it goes under a park that’s between you and your destination * a light rail line with trains passing every few minutes, clearly visible, with lots of time in between to cross the tracks, if you’re lucky maybe the area around the line has some pretty plants and trees * an elevated highway with cars zooming along the feeder roads in its shadow, if you’re lucky there’s a crosswalk with pedestrian lights * a ground-level highway, 8-14 lanes of constant high speed traffic in both directions, if you are very lucky there is a pedestrian overpass no more than 2-3 blocks out of your way and you’ll only be inhaling exhaust for a little while Which one of these would you rather cross? Which one of these feels like an integrated part of the neighborhood, which ones feel like a raw open wound in the city when you try to cross them on foot?
    - Angostura 4y ago
      > You build highways and they screech about cutting up neighborhoods. You don't and they screech about the resulting sprawl as development becomes more diffuse. The green belt policy around London where you were prevented from developing was quite good at preventing sprawl for decades.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        Similar policies in Oregon now, which force increased density in existing (orm as an option, brand new) urban areas, rather than just spreading. Or at least, there were a decade ago. I hope they've survived.
    - brimble 4y ago
      > You don't and they screech about the resulting sprawl as development becomes more diffuse. Huh? Don't highways enable sprawl? The brand new neighborhood built way out "in the country" (not for long...) next to the brand new highway in Yates' Revolutionary Road comes to mind.
    - harg 4y ago
      > You don't and they screech about the resulting sprawl as development becomes more diffuse. Highways create urban sprawl, they don't prevent it. > the cognitive dissonance it takes to argue that raised highways and highway pits cut through neighborhoods but not let out a peep when it's subway and tram lines doing the same should disqualify one from voting. But a subway/tram line is completely different from a highway. Trains can move an order of magnitude more people/stuff, don't result in local air pollution, don't create a lot of noise, don't result in road accidents that kill people and destroy property. And that's even before you realise that a subway is underground so you don't need to tear apart neighborhoods to build them and you basically wouldn't know it's there.
- petercooper 4y ago
  I disagree, and wish it had happened, but regardless, the biggest problem is they failed to invest in a plan B. For example, the options for folks outside of London wanting to get in are dire and could have been solved with several large car parks next to fast mass transit - the two Westfields are perhaps the best options there right now, and those are shopping centres not intended for such use and, ironically, located right next to the expressway projects that did happen (the Westway and the A12 respectively). Maybe CrossRail will help? Park and ride from Abbey Wood, perhaps? I have a trip to London planned later this year and it's still a toss up between parking at Westfield Stratford or just driving into the city centre and paying the congestion charge.. whereas really it should be an easy choice by now.
  - bananapub 4y ago
    > I disagree, and wish it had happened, but regardless, the biggest problem is they failed to invest in a plan B. For example, the options for folks outside of London wanting to get in are dire and could have been solved with several large car parks next to fast mass transit encouraging more cars into the center is explicitly an anti-goal, so not sure why you wish these projects had been built? yes there should be more park and ride on the outskirts, but Stratford isn't really outskirts anymore, and wasting lots of land for parking in Stratford or White City instead of homes also seems a silly waste of their good connectedness. > I have a trip to London planned later this year and it's still a toss up between parking at Westfield Stratford or just driving into the city centre and paying the congestion charge.. whereas really it should be an easy choice by now. I guess that indicates the congestion charge could be higher.
    - Silhouette 4y ago
      I guess that indicates the congestion charge could be higher. The trouble with public transport advocacy is that it so often relies on the stick rather than the carrot as the main incentive. The better solution is almost always to provide attractive public transport options. If you can do that then people will use them anyway. If you don't do that then people will do what you don't want instead unless you totally prohibit it. And if you prohibit it then maybe they won't come at all. The catch is that providing good public transport is a challenge even in densely populated areas and for long distance travel. Our biggest cities also tend to be very old and that means layouts that are far from ideal for running an efficient public transport network. The other catch is that good public transport is never going to be cost-effective in smaller towns and rural areas. So doing it would require a massive commitment from both local and wider government and in the UK we don't have that. Politicians tend to be very good at talking about grand ideas but no-one is willing to say "We need to put your taxes up 5% to subsidise loss-making transport infrastructure so there's a sensible alternative to cars for everyone who doesn't live in one of the biggest cities." This is why I'm not sure emphasizing public transport is the right long term policy here. Better infrastructure to support small-scale private transport seems a more promising direction to look -- bikes, e-scooters, future electric vehicles designed for one or two passengers and light baggage, etc.
- pjc50 4y ago
  See also Glasgow, where the megaproject did happen and the American-style M8 terminates directly in the center of the city. It's never quite caught up with good public transport options. I'd suggest trams if the massive cost and time overruns of the Edinburgh scheme hadn't put me off. (There _is_ a subway in Glasgow, but due to tunneling difficulties and its age the trains are unusually small. It feels like a 2/3 scale model of the London Underground)
  - beardyw 4y ago
    I have distant memories of an on ramp coming down on the right hand / fast lane side. Am I right?
    - ilikejam 4y ago
      Yep. Charing Cross exit, J18 is on the right side.
- choeger 4y ago
  You're celebrating the fact that people don't own something that they probably (judging by looking at other people) would find quite useful. Many, many people pay a lot of money every month to own their own private mode of transportation. So are these 46% really voluntarily abstaining or are they forced into abstinence? I know that many, especially young, childless, people think they don't need a car. I know several such people that happily pay (and can afford to) quite a steep price for leaving their city, either by train, plane, or rental car. But they're not typical, I'd say. In my case, our family car is moved only very little, say 10000km/a. There are some use cases where a rental car or train tickets just don't cut it - we would pay double the price and still have longer travel and additional complications (mental load is a real thing for parents). Obviously, I am not driving through the city if I can avoid it. But every now and then I want to leave it/return to it. I consider ownership the best option here and I gladly pay for the parking space. So in conclusion, I think that every city should make it trivial to rent a parking space in some garage. People that don't own cars might benefit from such additional storage space as well. I also don't think it should be more expensive than renting a very simple apartment. But instead, cities try to cram more and more people with less and less space into the same buildings. And I would not be surprised if these road projects were designed with a much smaller and less densely populated city in mind.
  - klelatti 4y ago
    This argument doesn’t take account of the impact on others of the thing that stays in your garage most of the time. The environmental impact of manufacturing it, of creating infrastructure to carry it etc. We should absolutely celebrate lower car ownership in cities and work towards making it a viable option for more people.
    - choeger 4y ago
      I don't buy the infrastructure, except for parking, it's needed for logistics anyways. the environmental impact of manufacture is a red herring as it's pretty much impossible to spend money without a similar impact.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
leoedin 4y ago
The proposals for the inner ring are really astounding - it would have gone right through all sorts of lovely historical neighbourhoods, across nice local parks - right through many of the nicest inner suburbs in London. Every time I see the fortress-like sides of Southwyck House in Brixton I'm reminded of it. If it had gone ahead it really would be a completely different city today.
- Thlom 4y ago
  There were similar plans in Oslo and Bergen as well in the 60's that would have completely destroyed the cities.
  - dboreham 4y ago
    Today Oslo has major roads in tunnels under parts of the city. My impression visiting was that this is how you would solve the problem if you had infinite budget.
- nly 4y ago
  London was a hell hole in the 60s and nobody wanted to live there anyway. Today houses built in the 30s in what were suburban towns, still 45-60 minutes out from central on the Tube, are going for $1.5M a piece.
Areacking 4y ago
[flagged]
montroser 4y ago
Robert Moses was successful carrying out many projects like this in the 1960s to add urban highways in NYC and other northeast US metropolitan areas. It's mostly a big tragedy. Neighborhoods sliced through, where highways created largely impermeable boundaries for pedestrians. And the swaths of destruction where eminent domain was invoked and then dense, culturally rich, bustling, thriving blocks and blocks were bulldozed and paved. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses
- settrans 4y ago
  Even the most collectivist public-transit apologist should be celebrating Robert Moses. He greatly expanded the predecessor to the MTA, and secured its legacy by building the toll bridges and tunnels that subsidize the wildly expensive New York City subways, generations after the bridges and tunnels have been paid off.
  - wonder_er 4y ago
    noooooo!!!!! This is exactly wrong. He used the toll revenue to fund his own highway building projects, independent of state/local budgets. He fired everyone on his staff that advocated for rail network. He starved rail lines (that, at the time, were being used very heavily) in favor of road networks. He also rather hated black people and puerto ricans. I can only imagine you've heard things about Robert Moses written by the great fans of the man, who USUALLY were high-modernists who loved his big bridges and roads. his biography, "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of NYC" is the comprehensive evaluation of his life and legacy. He shaped the modern world 10x more than anyone else who has ever lived, and vastly for the worse.
JamesBaxter 4y ago
Interesting to read in the current context of the Silvertown tunnel currently being built despite complaints from both sides of the river and an admission from TFL that it may make traffic worse south of the river. Not to mention the fact that cyclists can’t use the tunnel…
- cameronh90 4y ago
  I wonder about whether the Silvertown Tunnel will make the average traffic worse but the worst case traffic better. Currently, if the Blackwall tunnel closes, traffic basically grinds to a halt across a huge part of SE London. I was taking my dying bunny to the vet the other month and a trip that normally takes under ten minutes took forty due to the Blackwall tunnel being closed, even though I'm all the way back in Hither Green. Nevertheless, I would have preferred they built one of the many proposed pedestrian/cycling bridges...
  - adwww 4y ago
    I shouldn't laugh, but that's a strong 30-50 feral hog vibes from your vet visit ha.
  - saaaaaam 4y ago
    To be fair the congestion in that area is also because of a significant number of the side roads across Lewisham/Greenwich having been closed to enable the low traffic neighbourhoods - much needed but making congestion awful as a consequence.
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
What a vision of an absolute nightmare.
fmajid 4y ago
Those proposals were extreme, specially Ringway 1, but getting around London is far worse than in Paris, which has the benefit of Haussmann's boulevards pierced after the upheavals of revolutions, and the Périphérique. Political stability entrenches vested interests and NIMBYism, like the fact much of London's choicest property is still owned by descendants of the feudal aristocracy and people don't own the land their houses are built on, they just lease them like medieval serfs would have, since land reform never happened in England. At one point, there was even a proposal to build massive highways underground instead, but Paris' friable limestone (just as in London) and long history of undocumented quarries make any tunneling effort fraught.
- bb123 4y ago
  > people don't own the land their houses are built on, they just lease them like medieval serfs would have, since land reform never happened in England. I’m curious about this - are you referring to leaseholds? Because that seems to mainly exist for flats. If you have a freehold (like almost every house has) you definitely own the land.
  - ealexhudson 4y ago
    Freehold didn't apply to much of London. Many areas are still technically owned by large landowners, Dukes and so forth. Not a huge amount of London, and not most of greater London, but definitely applicable to the Royal boroughs.
    - samizdis 4y ago
      You might find Guy Shrubsole's book, Who Owns England?, an interesting read. It deals with land ownership, so not directly with freehold v leasehold for householders, but it contains some startling statistics. There's a decent review of the book (from 2019) here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/28/who-owns-england-guy-shrubsole-review-land-ownership https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/28/who-owns-engla...
  - cnorthwood 4y ago
sbisson 4y ago
Ringway 2 would have been right behind my home. Instead I have an electric railway and a lot of trees…
bb123 4y ago
Thank god this didn’t go ahead. It would have made london into a car centric hellhole, and I suspect traffic would still be terrible. I’ve never been to any large city where the traffic flows freely, regardless of how much road infrastructure there is.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  I am hoping that self driving electric medium sized buses giving a hybrid between public transport and uber would solve that. Move people away from car ownership.
- hansworst 4y ago
  It feels like building more infrastructure just causes people to use more of it, because the "cost" of using it goes down. Kind of similar to how having faster computers has just resulted in us creating more bloated software, instead of everything becoming snappier.
  - Majings 4y ago
    Your feeling is generally observed to be correct. Induced demand [1] is a fairly well observed phenomenon. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Effect_in_transportation_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Effect_in_trans...
    - Sharlin 4y ago
      Exactly. Another related and very relevant economic concept is elasticity of demand [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand
    - Robotbeat 4y ago
      Induced demand doesn’t mean the additional infrastructure is useless. It just means it likely won’t reduce traffic. You’ll get greater population, more economic growth. More people able to get to where they want to go. And induced demand applies to all kinds of things, not just automobile infrastructure. So it should help you be more thoughtful about what infrastructure you want to actually build, but crucially it does NOT mean that the infrastructure is worthless.
zabzonk 4y ago
Whilst things like Westway are an abomination, the other parts of London's road structure are little better. I used to live just off the South Circular, which is a road system in notion only - there are almost no dual carrige-ways, and the route simply joins up a lot of suburban minor roads. The North Circular is somewhat better (unless you live next to it), but not much.
tagersenim 4y ago
I do not like the way the text scroll just ‘jumps’ ahead when scrolling down after the header picture. The title has disappeared above your screen before you have time to read it. It reminds me of the Apple product pages, whereby your scroll is constantly hijacked by spinning pictures of laptops opening and closing.
- saaaaaam 4y ago
  Yes the user experience on this site is AWFUL on mobile. The stand-first vanishes when you scroll but the bottom of it is cut off so you have to scroll to be able to read it. Then when you scroll a pop-up appears asking me to sign up to emails. Absolutely not. I gave up even trying to read the article.
Markoff 4y ago
To save you a click - there are no lost ringways in article, whole article is about UNREALIZED ideas, not about losing any existing ringways.
meekaaku 4y ago
The dartboard should be done for the London tube/rail network. It easy to get into central London from periphery (say Bromley to Victoria is 20min by train, 1hr by car), but periphery to periphery is not good if you dont have direct train (eg Bromley to Greenwich is 45min by train, but 20 min by car). The situation is worse if you are carrying luggage and/or kids.
nly 4y ago
> Today, London has only one ring road Errr...the North and South Circular? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Circular_Road https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Circular_Road https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Circular_Road,_London https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Circular_Road,_London
- ddek 4y ago
  err, kinda. The North Circular is a decent enough road if you don't live by it. I happen to live just by the South Circular, and it's not really a ring road. You wouldn't use it to circumnavigate London, it's just a joined up set of separate roads (of various sizes) that happen to form a vague semi-circle.
  - alexfoo 4y ago
    Also on the Eastern side there's only a ferry to connect the North and South Circulars. And that ferry has quite limited operating hours and capacity. It's also very slow. To avoid the ferry you either need to come West a bit and use the Blackwall Tunnel or go way East and use the outer ring road (M25) crossings at Dartford.
verisimi 4y ago
And this is why our governments love China so much. As Trudeau said: "There's a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime." And it is also a reason why governments and their pet projects, despite their claimed authority, are not actually serving those they purport to serve. Huge projects at public expense - eg the creation of the road networks we do have - don't necessarily serve people, but do serve corporations (eg automakers).
teh_klev 4y ago
Glasgow's M8 (incomplete) ringroad is famous for its ski-jumps to no-where and ghost junctions and sliproads. https://www.roads.org.uk/articles/glasgow https://www.roads.org.uk/articles/glasgow https://www.scottishroadsarchive.org/m8 https://www.scottishroadsarchive.org/m8 There's a really good book on the subject matter by John Cullen who was one of the original engineers who worked on the project: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0955378109 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0955378109
nickdothutton 4y ago
Before WW2 there was a plan to dramatically extend the London Underground miles into the surrounding countryside, far beyond the metropolis. The depression paused that plan and WW2 and the impoverishment of the country ended it. I hope someone writes a similar article about the unfinished transport system that we call the tube.
- Aromasin 4y ago
  After nearly 100 years we've come full circle and the Elizabeth line is opening, connecting Reading and the town's West on London to the city through to Shenfield - although perhaps still not on the scale they originally pictured.
rmason 4y ago
Couldn't you use Elon Musk's Boring Company to recreate the missing Ringways as underground tunnels? I remember as an American overseas in 1975 that it was one of the most baffling aspects of driving in London. I don't know if they still do it but the rental car companies would offer to drive you from Central London to the beginning of the freeway. Assuming they took either a bus or the tube back. I took a trip to Bournemouth to see a ham radio buddy and ended up being white knuckled the entire way. After our visit I ended up turning the car in and taking the train back into London!
somewhereoutth 4y ago
Is it now time to start digging these things (where they actually were built) up? Dismantling freeways, returning neighbourhoods. The harder it is to get anywhere by car, the more people will demand good public transport.

138 points by bananapear 4y ago

unsurprisingly, London is all for the better for these projects having been canned in the 60's - very few massive roads cutting up neigbourhoods, and helped avoid the massive tipping into redesigning cities for single/low occupancy cars. it's so successful, that in 2022, 46% of households in greater London have *zero* cars. if you're curious what it what have looked like, go for a walk around Notting Hill and see how Westway has damaged the human environment and walkability. so, yay. obligatory jay foreman video on the topic: https://youtu.be/yUEHWhO_HdY https://youtu.be/yUEHWhO_HdY

geogra4 4y ago
American cities were utterly destroyed by these kinds of projects.
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  There's no winning. You build highways and they screech about cutting up neighborhoods. You don't and they screech about the resulting sprawl as development becomes more diffuse. My pet favorite solution is more park & ride transition points on the outskirts and light rail in the dense areas but the cognitive dissonance it takes to argue that raised highways and highway pits cut through neighborhoods but not let out a peep when it's subway and tram lines doing the same should disqualify one from voting. As much as I hate the NIMBYs for insisting on violating other people's property rights you at least have to give them +1 for consistency. Looking back with hindsight we'd probably be better off if we had just built all the urban highways and rail lines (and other transit infrastructure projects) that have been seriously considered over the years.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    IDK where you live, but I live in a country with a lot of trams and trains (the Czech Republic), and the NIMBYs attack absolutely everything. It may take decades to overcome their resistance. One example of many: in the city I was born (Ostrava), there is a tram line planned since the 1990s (on the chance that anyone knows Ostrava here: Poruba VIII. obvod). That is not a very beautiful neighbourhood, rather a standard Communist high-rise zone with a lot of loud car and bus traffic through the main arteries. But the NIMBYs are absolutely relentless in attacking the tram project and anything even slightly connected (e.g. relocation of gas lines) in courts.
  - scratcheee 4y ago
    Rail lines have more than 10x the throughput though, so you need vastly less of them to do vastly more work. A city with enough roads for 100% car usage is approaching not being a city anymore, just an unending suburban hellscape, but a city with barely any roads and more rail than it really needs can still be a beautiful city. To add to that, underground railways exist in many cities, but underground road networks effectively don't. The throughput by volume dug out the ground is viable for a rail service, its totally non-viable to bury an equivalent throughput 20 lane highway underground.
  - egypturnash 4y ago
    but the cognitive dissonance it takes to argue that raised highways and highway pits cut through neighborhoods but not let out a peep when it's subway and tram lines doing the same should disqualify one from voting Here’s a thought experiment for you. You are on foot, perhaps with a kid in a stroller, perhaps with a dog on a leash, perhaps an armful of groceries. It is a gorgeous day for a walk. You have multiple destinations on the other side of several transit arteries: * a subway that passes under city streets with sidewalks, if you’re lucky maybe it goes under a park that’s between you and your destination * a light rail line with trains passing every few minutes, clearly visible, with lots of time in between to cross the tracks, if you’re lucky maybe the area around the line has some pretty plants and trees * an elevated highway with cars zooming along the feeder roads in its shadow, if you’re lucky there’s a crosswalk with pedestrian lights * a ground-level highway, 8-14 lanes of constant high speed traffic in both directions, if you are very lucky there is a pedestrian overpass no more than 2-3 blocks out of your way and you’ll only be inhaling exhaust for a little while Which one of these would you rather cross? Which one of these feels like an integrated part of the neighborhood, which ones feel like a raw open wound in the city when you try to cross them on foot?
  - Angostura 4y ago
    > You build highways and they screech about cutting up neighborhoods. You don't and they screech about the resulting sprawl as development becomes more diffuse. The green belt policy around London where you were prevented from developing was quite good at preventing sprawl for decades.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      Similar policies in Oregon now, which force increased density in existing (orm as an option, brand new) urban areas, rather than just spreading. Or at least, there were a decade ago. I hope they've survived.
  - brimble 4y ago
    > You don't and they screech about the resulting sprawl as development becomes more diffuse. Huh? Don't highways enable sprawl? The brand new neighborhood built way out "in the country" (not for long...) next to the brand new highway in Yates' Revolutionary Road comes to mind.
  - harg 4y ago
    > You don't and they screech about the resulting sprawl as development becomes more diffuse. Highways create urban sprawl, they don't prevent it. > the cognitive dissonance it takes to argue that raised highways and highway pits cut through neighborhoods but not let out a peep when it's subway and tram lines doing the same should disqualify one from voting. But a subway/tram line is completely different from a highway. Trains can move an order of magnitude more people/stuff, don't result in local air pollution, don't create a lot of noise, don't result in road accidents that kill people and destroy property. And that's even before you realise that a subway is underground so you don't need to tear apart neighborhoods to build them and you basically wouldn't know it's there.
petercooper 4y ago
I disagree, and wish it had happened, but regardless, the biggest problem is they failed to invest in a plan B. For example, the options for folks outside of London wanting to get in are dire and could have been solved with several large car parks next to fast mass transit - the two Westfields are perhaps the best options there right now, and those are shopping centres not intended for such use and, ironically, located right next to the expressway projects that did happen (the Westway and the A12 respectively). Maybe CrossRail will help? Park and ride from Abbey Wood, perhaps? I have a trip to London planned later this year and it's still a toss up between parking at Westfield Stratford or just driving into the city centre and paying the congestion charge.. whereas really it should be an easy choice by now.
- bananapub 4y ago
  > I disagree, and wish it had happened, but regardless, the biggest problem is they failed to invest in a plan B. For example, the options for folks outside of London wanting to get in are dire and could have been solved with several large car parks next to fast mass transit encouraging more cars into the center is explicitly an anti-goal, so not sure why you wish these projects had been built? yes there should be more park and ride on the outskirts, but Stratford isn't really outskirts anymore, and wasting lots of land for parking in Stratford or White City instead of homes also seems a silly waste of their good connectedness. > I have a trip to London planned later this year and it's still a toss up between parking at Westfield Stratford or just driving into the city centre and paying the congestion charge.. whereas really it should be an easy choice by now. I guess that indicates the congestion charge could be higher.
  - Silhouette 4y ago
    I guess that indicates the congestion charge could be higher. The trouble with public transport advocacy is that it so often relies on the stick rather than the carrot as the main incentive. The better solution is almost always to provide attractive public transport options. If you can do that then people will use them anyway. If you don't do that then people will do what you don't want instead unless you totally prohibit it. And if you prohibit it then maybe they won't come at all. The catch is that providing good public transport is a challenge even in densely populated areas and for long distance travel. Our biggest cities also tend to be very old and that means layouts that are far from ideal for running an efficient public transport network. The other catch is that good public transport is never going to be cost-effective in smaller towns and rural areas. So doing it would require a massive commitment from both local and wider government and in the UK we don't have that. Politicians tend to be very good at talking about grand ideas but no-one is willing to say "We need to put your taxes up 5% to subsidise loss-making transport infrastructure so there's a sensible alternative to cars for everyone who doesn't live in one of the biggest cities." This is why I'm not sure emphasizing public transport is the right long term policy here. Better infrastructure to support small-scale private transport seems a more promising direction to look -- bikes, e-scooters, future electric vehicles designed for one or two passengers and light baggage, etc.
pjc50 4y ago
See also Glasgow, where the megaproject did happen and the American-style M8 terminates directly in the center of the city. It's never quite caught up with good public transport options. I'd suggest trams if the massive cost and time overruns of the Edinburgh scheme hadn't put me off. (There _is_ a subway in Glasgow, but due to tunneling difficulties and its age the trains are unusually small. It feels like a 2/3 scale model of the London Underground)
- beardyw 4y ago
  I have distant memories of an on ramp coming down on the right hand / fast lane side. Am I right?
  - ilikejam 4y ago
    Yep. Charing Cross exit, J18 is on the right side.
choeger 4y ago
You're celebrating the fact that people don't own something that they probably (judging by looking at other people) would find quite useful. Many, many people pay a lot of money every month to own their own private mode of transportation. So are these 46% really voluntarily abstaining or are they forced into abstinence? I know that many, especially young, childless, people think they don't need a car. I know several such people that happily pay (and can afford to) quite a steep price for leaving their city, either by train, plane, or rental car. But they're not typical, I'd say. In my case, our family car is moved only very little, say 10000km/a. There are some use cases where a rental car or train tickets just don't cut it - we would pay double the price and still have longer travel and additional complications (mental load is a real thing for parents). Obviously, I am not driving through the city if I can avoid it. But every now and then I want to leave it/return to it. I consider ownership the best option here and I gladly pay for the parking space. So in conclusion, I think that every city should make it trivial to rent a parking space in some garage. People that don't own cars might benefit from such additional storage space as well. I also don't think it should be more expensive than renting a very simple apartment. But instead, cities try to cram more and more people with less and less space into the same buildings. And I would not be surprised if these road projects were designed with a much smaller and less densely populated city in mind.
- klelatti 4y ago
  This argument doesn’t take account of the impact on others of the thing that stays in your garage most of the time. The environmental impact of manufacturing it, of creating infrastructure to carry it etc. We should absolutely celebrate lower car ownership in cities and work towards making it a viable option for more people.
  - choeger 4y ago
    I don't buy the infrastructure, except for parking, it's needed for logistics anyways. the environmental impact of manufacture is a red herring as it's pretty much impossible to spend money without a similar impact.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

leoedin 4y ago

The proposals for the inner ring are really astounding - it would have gone right through all sorts of lovely historical neighbourhoods, across nice local parks - right through many of the nicest inner suburbs in London. Every time I see the fortress-like sides of Southwyck House in Brixton I'm reminded of it. If it had gone ahead it really would be a completely different city today.

Thlom 4y ago
There were similar plans in Oslo and Bergen as well in the 60's that would have completely destroyed the cities.
- dboreham 4y ago
  Today Oslo has major roads in tunnels under parts of the city. My impression visiting was that this is how you would solve the problem if you had infinite budget.
nly 4y ago
London was a hell hole in the 60s and nobody wanted to live there anyway. Today houses built in the 30s in what were suburban towns, still 45-60 minutes out from central on the Tube, are going for $1.5M a piece.

Areacking 4y ago

[flagged]

montroser 4y ago

Robert Moses was successful carrying out many projects like this in the 1960s to add urban highways in NYC and other northeast US metropolitan areas. It's mostly a big tragedy. Neighborhoods sliced through, where highways created largely impermeable boundaries for pedestrians. And the swaths of destruction where eminent domain was invoked and then dense, culturally rich, bustling, thriving blocks and blocks were bulldozed and paved. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses

settrans 4y ago
Even the most collectivist public-transit apologist should be celebrating Robert Moses. He greatly expanded the predecessor to the MTA, and secured its legacy by building the toll bridges and tunnels that subsidize the wildly expensive New York City subways, generations after the bridges and tunnels have been paid off.
- wonder_er 4y ago
  noooooo!!!!! This is exactly wrong. He used the toll revenue to fund his own highway building projects, independent of state/local budgets. He fired everyone on his staff that advocated for rail network. He starved rail lines (that, at the time, were being used very heavily) in favor of road networks. He also rather hated black people and puerto ricans. I can only imagine you've heard things about Robert Moses written by the great fans of the man, who USUALLY were high-modernists who loved his big bridges and roads. his biography, "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of NYC" is the comprehensive evaluation of his life and legacy. He shaped the modern world 10x more than anyone else who has ever lived, and vastly for the worse.

JamesBaxter 4y ago

Interesting to read in the current context of the Silvertown tunnel currently being built despite complaints from both sides of the river and an admission from TFL that it may make traffic worse south of the river. Not to mention the fact that cyclists can’t use the tunnel…

cameronh90 4y ago
I wonder about whether the Silvertown Tunnel will make the average traffic worse but the worst case traffic better. Currently, if the Blackwall tunnel closes, traffic basically grinds to a halt across a huge part of SE London. I was taking my dying bunny to the vet the other month and a trip that normally takes under ten minutes took forty due to the Blackwall tunnel being closed, even though I'm all the way back in Hither Green. Nevertheless, I would have preferred they built one of the many proposed pedestrian/cycling bridges...
- adwww 4y ago
  I shouldn't laugh, but that's a strong 30-50 feral hog vibes from your vet visit ha.
- saaaaaam 4y ago
  To be fair the congestion in that area is also because of a significant number of the side roads across Lewisham/Greenwich having been closed to enable the low traffic neighbourhoods - much needed but making congestion awful as a consequence.

whywhywhywhy 4y ago

What a vision of an absolute nightmare.

fmajid 4y ago

Those proposals were extreme, specially Ringway 1, but getting around London is far worse than in Paris, which has the benefit of Haussmann's boulevards pierced after the upheavals of revolutions, and the Périphérique. Political stability entrenches vested interests and NIMBYism, like the fact much of London's choicest property is still owned by descendants of the feudal aristocracy and people don't own the land their houses are built on, they just lease them like medieval serfs would have, since land reform never happened in England. At one point, there was even a proposal to build massive highways underground instead, but Paris' friable limestone (just as in London) and long history of undocumented quarries make any tunneling effort fraught.

bb123 4y ago
> people don't own the land their houses are built on, they just lease them like medieval serfs would have, since land reform never happened in England. I’m curious about this - are you referring to leaseholds? Because that seems to mainly exist for flats. If you have a freehold (like almost every house has) you definitely own the land.
- ealexhudson 4y ago
  Freehold didn't apply to much of London. Many areas are still technically owned by large landowners, Dukes and so forth. Not a huge amount of London, and not most of greater London, but definitely applicable to the Royal boroughs.
  - samizdis 4y ago
    You might find Guy Shrubsole's book, Who Owns England?, an interesting read. It deals with land ownership, so not directly with freehold v leasehold for householders, but it contains some startling statistics. There's a decent review of the book (from 2019) here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/28/who-owns-england-guy-shrubsole-review-land-ownership https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/28/who-owns-engla...
- cnorthwood 4y ago

sbisson 4y ago

Ringway 2 would have been right behind my home. Instead I have an electric railway and a lot of trees…

bb123 4y ago

Thank god this didn’t go ahead. It would have made london into a car centric hellhole, and I suspect traffic would still be terrible. I’ve never been to any large city where the traffic flows freely, regardless of how much road infrastructure there is.

quickthrower2 4y ago
I am hoping that self driving electric medium sized buses giving a hybrid between public transport and uber would solve that. Move people away from car ownership.
hansworst 4y ago
It feels like building more infrastructure just causes people to use more of it, because the "cost" of using it goes down. Kind of similar to how having faster computers has just resulted in us creating more bloated software, instead of everything becoming snappier.
- Majings 4y ago
  Your feeling is generally observed to be correct. Induced demand [1] is a fairly well observed phenomenon. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Effect_in_transportation_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Effect_in_trans...
  - Sharlin 4y ago
    Exactly. Another related and very relevant economic concept is elasticity of demand [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    Induced demand doesn’t mean the additional infrastructure is useless. It just means it likely won’t reduce traffic. You’ll get greater population, more economic growth. More people able to get to where they want to go. And induced demand applies to all kinds of things, not just automobile infrastructure. So it should help you be more thoughtful about what infrastructure you want to actually build, but crucially it does NOT mean that the infrastructure is worthless.

zabzonk 4y ago

Whilst things like Westway are an abomination, the other parts of London's road structure are little better. I used to live just off the South Circular, which is a road system in notion only - there are almost no dual carrige-ways, and the route simply joins up a lot of suburban minor roads. The North Circular is somewhat better (unless you live next to it), but not much.

tagersenim 4y ago

I do not like the way the text scroll just ‘jumps’ ahead when scrolling down after the header picture. The title has disappeared above your screen before you have time to read it. It reminds me of the Apple product pages, whereby your scroll is constantly hijacked by spinning pictures of laptops opening and closing.

saaaaaam 4y ago
Yes the user experience on this site is AWFUL on mobile. The stand-first vanishes when you scroll but the bottom of it is cut off so you have to scroll to be able to read it. Then when you scroll a pop-up appears asking me to sign up to emails. Absolutely not. I gave up even trying to read the article.

Markoff 4y ago

To save you a click - there are no lost ringways in article, whole article is about UNREALIZED ideas, not about losing any existing ringways.

meekaaku 4y ago

The dartboard should be done for the London tube/rail network. It easy to get into central London from periphery (say Bromley to Victoria is 20min by train, 1hr by car), but periphery to periphery is not good if you dont have direct train (eg Bromley to Greenwich is 45min by train, but 20 min by car). The situation is worse if you are carrying luggage and/or kids.

nly 4y ago

> Today, London has only one ring road Errr...the North and South Circular? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Circular_Road https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Circular_Road https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Circular_Road,_London https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Circular_Road,_London

ddek 4y ago
err, kinda. The North Circular is a decent enough road if you don't live by it. I happen to live just by the South Circular, and it's not really a ring road. You wouldn't use it to circumnavigate London, it's just a joined up set of separate roads (of various sizes) that happen to form a vague semi-circle.
- alexfoo 4y ago
  Also on the Eastern side there's only a ferry to connect the North and South Circulars. And that ferry has quite limited operating hours and capacity. It's also very slow. To avoid the ferry you either need to come West a bit and use the Blackwall Tunnel or go way East and use the outer ring road (M25) crossings at Dartford.

verisimi 4y ago

And this is why our governments love China so much. As Trudeau said: "There's a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime." And it is also a reason why governments and their pet projects, despite their claimed authority, are not actually serving those they purport to serve. Huge projects at public expense - eg the creation of the road networks we do have - don't necessarily serve people, but do serve corporations (eg automakers).

teh_klev 4y ago

Glasgow's M8 (incomplete) ringroad is famous for its ski-jumps to no-where and ghost junctions and sliproads. https://www.roads.org.uk/articles/glasgow https://www.roads.org.uk/articles/glasgow https://www.scottishroadsarchive.org/m8 https://www.scottishroadsarchive.org/m8 There's a really good book on the subject matter by John Cullen who was one of the original engineers who worked on the project: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0955378109 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0955378109

nickdothutton 4y ago

Before WW2 there was a plan to dramatically extend the London Underground miles into the surrounding countryside, far beyond the metropolis. The depression paused that plan and WW2 and the impoverishment of the country ended it. I hope someone writes a similar article about the unfinished transport system that we call the tube.

Aromasin 4y ago
After nearly 100 years we've come full circle and the Elizabeth line is opening, connecting Reading and the town's West on London to the city through to Shenfield - although perhaps still not on the scale they originally pictured.

rmason 4y ago

Couldn't you use Elon Musk's Boring Company to recreate the missing Ringways as underground tunnels? I remember as an American overseas in 1975 that it was one of the most baffling aspects of driving in London. I don't know if they still do it but the rental car companies would offer to drive you from Central London to the beginning of the freeway. Assuming they took either a bus or the tube back. I took a trip to Bournemouth to see a ham radio buddy and ended up being white knuckled the entire way. After our visit I ended up turning the car in and taking the train back into London!

somewhereoutth 4y ago

Is it now time to start digging these things (where they actually were built) up? Dismantling freeways, returning neighbourhoods. The harder it is to get anywhere by car, the more people will demand good public transport.