Document Supply FL69/3262

Movement in London : transport research studies and their context

Date range	1969
Location	British Library (see all files stored here)

This item is duplicated at Document Supply WQ3/4655. That item redirects here.

This file is truly delightful. It is likely to bring a smile to your face, probably because it contains the sort of thing that makes trawling through dusty archive documents worthwhile. The thing in this file that makes your day might actually have nothing to do with its subject matter.

Context

Before they set about preparing a motorway network for London, the Ministry of Transport and LCC (and, later, its successor the GLC) instigated the London Traffic Survey to scientifically plot the demand for traffic movement in London.

The LTS churned out vast amounts of data and many reports, much of it impenetrable. This document is a summary of the LTS's work in what you might call human-readable format: a solid explanation of its study remit, the process that was followed, and the findings. It's well written, has lots of diagrams and is delightfully colourful.

While many parts of it are clear, others go into the detail of algorithms and data plotting and, in places, it becomes impenetrable word mush, but that's no major drawback: it's still the clearest document about the LTS you'll get to read.

It contains plans showing the various suppositional road networks, in the future year 1981, on which modelling and forecasting were carried out. These range from an unchanged "do nothing" network, through to something like the motorways that were planned in the 1960s, right through to an absurdly dense network of motorways that it would never have been possible to build. My notes indicate that "some are outright insane".

People with camera copies

None known.