Can we even dream of eliminating congestion?

Yes we can, if we just understand it better…

Congestion… No matter how many efforts we put in fighting it, plagues probably every single city in the world. Our poor results are probably the consequence of misunderstanding its causes, and the passionate discussions it raises. Despite being a highly technical subject, the fact that congestion affects everyone who lives in a city or urban area raises as many opinions as there are persons giving them.

To explain congestion, I’ll go through two histories that involve… geometry.

The first part concerns the history of railways in England. The development of the railway network started in England in the early 19th century. Early versions of railways were built to connect coal mines with waterways.The “world’s first railway to make no use of animal power” was an 8 mile (12,8 km) line “at Hetton Colliery in County Durham, which began operations in 1822” [0]. The first public railway, the Stockton and Darlington Railway, mainly used to transport coal, opened in 1825, providing a proof of concept and spanning the development of 25 new railway lines in the next five years [0]. The first line to haul both passengers and freight was the Liverpool-Manchester line, which opened in 1830 [0]. An 1832 essay comparing the costs of transport between Liverpool and Manchester with railways, waterways and roads showed the breakthrough that railways represented. While the trip by canal took 20 hours and the trip by road took 4 hours, the trip by train took just one hour and forty-five minutes [1]. With this proof of concept, the railway network expansion was extremely fast for the next 40 years. 378 miles of track opened between 1826 and 1836; in 1844, the network had grown almost six times, to 2210 miles [1], and in 1871 the network reached 13 000 miles [0], thirty-four times the length of the initial network.

But more importantly than its growth rate, it’s the network’s topology that will matter to understand congestion. Since railways were developed by private companies (or individuals wealthy enough to finance them), they aimed at connecting the most populous areas to ensure the return of their investment, so the main purpose of railways became intercity transport. This fact gave the network a star-like shape connecting major cities between them. The 1851 network map depicted in this link clearly shows the radial shape of the early network, spanning from major city to major city. This is a key factor in analysing congestion. In fact, with this network topology, being in the centre of a city was a major advantage, since one single node (station) could give access to multiple destinations. On the other hand, being located between two nodes was a disadvantage, since the number of destinations reduced to just two, and accessing other locations necessarily required interchanging in a major node. With the pervasiveness of railway networks, this fact is still valid today. The second part of the history took place in these less favoured locations, and this fact was critical in the growth of congestion.

The second part of this history started at the end of the 19th century. At this time, London was the core of the industrial era, and as such, it concentrated all the downsides of the industrial revolution: air pollution and overcrowding. According to the Museum of London, 6.5 million people lived in London by the end of the 19th century. Smoking factories, coal-powered trains, but especially horses, plus an insufficiently developed sewage system, contributed to making it a smelly place, where the population was subject to multiple diseases.

“Dirt and smell were facts of urban life that equally contributed to the poor health of Londoners. People could not cross a road without the benefit of a crossing sweeper who cleared dust and horse manure from their path”. [2]

In the middle of this sanitary crisis, the urban planner / entrepreneur Ebenezer Howard returned to England in 1876, after spending 5 years in the United States. He had lived in Chicago in 1871, where he witnessed the birth of the first skyscrapers, and of the first suburb — Riverside — , built by NYC’s Central Park architect Frederick Law Olmsted [3]. In 1898 he published Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, a book which described a new urban form that would correct all the flaws of the dense cities in the industrial revolution: the Garden cities. Garden cities were a complete social project, imagined as autonomous communities in unused rural land, that combined the benefits of town and country. Garden cities were circular living areas, with an urban centre that would occupy 1/6 of the surface, and where the rest of the surface would provide “agricultural, institutional or recreational services for the community” [3]. The size of Garden cities would be limited in population and surface, and agricultural belts would prevent their conurbation with other towns. They were meant to be interconnected between them and with larger cities using railways (late 19th century’s most advanced transportation system). However, despite the intent of attracting industries to provide jobs, the initial garden cities weren’t really autonomous. Gossop points that in Welwyn Garden City, promoted as a place where “a man’s house will be near his work in a pure and healthy atmosphere” [4], half of the population commuted to London, distant 32 km, when the railway station opened in 1925. However, the myth of a healthier urban life in the countryside was born.

Despite little dissemination after a few initial garden city developments in the 1920s, the housing needs caused by the Second World War (WWII) made the concept of garden cities evolve into that of new towns, enacted in 1947 [4]. Gossop points, though, that the population and size in post-WWII new towns was much larger than the limited population garden cities envisioned by Howard, to avoid the cost of the administering of a large number of small towns [4]. Bigger post-war suburbs rendered their railway stations less accessible by foot. With the widespread availability of motor vehicles, railways also became less relevant, turning commuters entirely dependent of the private car. The commuting destinations for the most part, however, remained dense cities. Motorways replaced high-speed railway links, and as suburbs grew in population (and in cars), congestion raised to its present levels.

In conclusion, the shape of railway networks, which spread radially from dense urban areas, and the post-WWII development of suburbs, born from the will to escape the pollution and density of the industrial city, made suburban inhabitants entirely dependent on the private car.

However, the railway network can be the tool that finally helps us tackle congestion. Thanks to the pervasiveness of the network, high speed links between suburbs and exurbs and dense urban locations already exist. The problem that prevents commuters from using railways to reach the central urban areas is the distance from their home to the “nearby” railway station. At SuburVAN we’re developing autonomous minivans to make the travel time to reach a suburban railway station negligible, and help cities and metropolitan areas get commuters back into commuter railways. This will not only help suburban inhabitants make consistent time and money savings, but will help cities reduce congestion, pollution and CO2 emissions to the extent required by the challenge of global warming.

[0] Shaw-Taylor, L., You, X., The development of the railway network in Britain 1825–1911 in Shaw-Taylor, L., Bogart, D., Satchell, M., The Online Historical Atlas of Transport, Urbanization and Economic Development in England and Wales c.1680–1911 (online), URL: https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/transport/onlineatlas/, 2018.

[1] UK Parliament, Railways in early nineteenth century Britain (online), URL: https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/transportcomms/roadsrail/kent-case-study/introduction/railways-in-early-nineteenth-century-britain/ (accessed Feb. 2nd 2021), UK Parliament.

[2] Cook, Werner, Breathing in London’s history: from the Great Stink to the Great Smog, 2017

[3] Miller, M., English Garden Cities, English Heritage, Swindon, 2010.

[4] Gossop, C., From Garden Cities to New Towns, 42nd ISoCaRP Congress, 2006.