DANGEROUS MOTOR TRAFFIC. (Hansard, 20 December 1932)

§ Sir CHARLES OMAN

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to abate the damage and danger caused to the King's lieges by motor vehicles too large, too heavy, and driven at excessive speed. A good deal of eloquence has been spent in another place on the cause which I am advocating to-day, but nothing has been said here, and I am adopting the only method in my power of saying a word on behalf of the King's poor subjects, both pedestrians and householders, who are oppressed by the nightmare of motor traffic as it is at present conducted. I shall not enlarge on the subject of the massacre of the young and the old, because it has been largely spoken of in another place, but I must point out that, although the greater number of private motor owners are very considerate, courteous and harmless people, there is a minority who are public enemies. I come upon them now and then. I met 915 not so very long ago a man who said to me: "I have just come from Lincoln to Oxford in an hour and three-quarters, but that is nothing to the pleasure of a real swoop in an aeroplane." That man should be placed at once in confinement. Notice was brought to me last week of a man who, motoring late in the evening on a country road, lost visibility, and, as he said himself before the magistrates: "Visibility becoming practically nil, I slowed down to 30 miles an hour." Within a minute he had killed an unfortunate labourer, returning home on his pedal bicycle. What is to be made of people who consider that slowing down to 30 miles an hour on a country road where they cannot see an inch before them is safe and proper? That meant 44 feet a second of rapid progress. Really, when one considers some of the evidence one reads, one feels that there is a great deal to be said for the magistrate who just 100 years ago, in 1832, wrote to the effect that when a furious driver had killed his second victim, after conviction on the first, he should like to add corporal punishment to imprisonment. That is what speed megalomaniacs should be subjected to, and at present there seems to be no proper deterrent placed upon them.

But that is not what I am speaking about to-day. I am speaking about the loss of amenities, of property and of life, and the considerable daily danger among inhabitants of towns through which the great streams of traffic flow. I may incidentally, if I have time, remark upon similar things in the country. There are many towns in England which have lost the power of using their own roads normally because of intruders. Oxford happens to be a complete example of that kind. We see vehicles of enormous size going from North to South. They are labelled in large letters "Direct North-to-South Traffic," sometimes "Manchester to Southampton." From East to West we see enormous numbers of charsa-banes proceeding to various destinations, to Cardiff or Newport, or some such destination. The continual passing of these things makes local traffic impossible. They even choke up the byroads; when they get off the main line into a side street, they absolutely block all traffic. This occurs not only in Oxford 916 but in other places. In King's Lynn, a rather narrow-streeted place, I saw a builder's lorry full of bricks, labelled "Economic Transport," which had gone into a street, and, when endeavouring to get into a yard on one side, it had got its fore paws jammed against one wall and its tail against the opposite house, holding up all traffic both of pedestrians and vehicles absolutely and completely. These enormous things should not be allowed, especially when they have a trailer.

I am speaking from my personal experience. I once saw a long motor with a trailer laden with ladders in the middle of a road; when the leading vehicle swerved, the ladders, by the natural inclination, swept over the pavement and knocked down two women. In towns of narrow streets all traffic consisting of very heavy, large vehicles should entirely be prohibited. They monopolise the streets and I maintain that the inhabitant of Oxford has the right to say: "It is no profit to me when some firm in Manchester is making a slight profit, more than it otherwise would make, by delivering things at Southampton by means of a system of door-to-door collection and delivery." There may be some firm in Manchester or Southampton that will make profit out of the business, but 70,000 inhabitants of Oxford are getting the other side of it and arc having their ordinary rights of walking about absolutely prohibited.

Secondly, I protest from the point of view of speed. There is no doubt that these large, heavy vehicles, which go through on the long traffic routes, are driven much too fast. We find them going at from 40 to 60 miles an hour. Whenever the police interfere and one of the drivers is arrested, he says that the itinerary drawn up by the company is such that it would be impossible for him to keep up to it, if he did not go at these high speeds between the various stopping places. And then he would lose his job. After a second warning a company should be prohibited from running these cross-country things, as a public danger. I am sorry to say that not only are companies to blame in this matter but that sometimes the enterprise and greed of local tradesmen is responsible. They send out motor vehicles to sweep all the villages 10 or 15 miles around their 917 towns, and to destroy the trade of the village shops. Generally, these vehicles are driven by reckless boys. One of the two cases where I have been in serious danger happened on an arterial road. There rushed out of a village by-road a small commercial vehicle, which was driven by a butcher's boy of 16 years of age. He dashed straight into the vehicle in which I was sitting. He had come from a town 10 miles away, and his employer was trying to destroy the trade of the village butchers in the cheapest possible way, by sending out a little vehicle driven by an incompetent boy.

My third ground of protest is on account of noise and vibration. We are all agreed about vibration. I know about vibration much more than most people. My rooms in All Souls College, Oxford, as I told the House two years ago, had the mullions of their windows shaken out, and they fell into the street, because of the vibration from fleets of heavily-laden motor vehicles. I could quote thousands of examples of the kind, beginning with Westminster Abbey and going down to the smallest villages. But it is not merely the vibration that is so noxious; the noise also is intolerable. I have had a letter from a constituent, who has a fine house on the North Road, and he says: I have timed, two nights running, the machines at midnight passing my bedroom between the hours of 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. On the average, only four minutes elapsed between each jangling juggernaut. It is not merely the actual jangling of the individual juggernaut that prohibits sleep. As Mr. Thomas Carlyle said, it was not so much the crowing of the cocks at midnight that concerned him, but it was the waiting for the next crow. People who live on the great arterial roads cannot get any sleep. They are deprived of the ordinary right of a British citizen to use his house as a sleeping place.

Speaking within my allotted ten minutes, I will not enter into the particulars which will go into the dummy Bill which I hope to circulate. Whether anything will 'come of the Bill or not is in the hands of other people. It is in the hands of the Government. They confiscated the clay on which I had down a 918 Motion on this subject, last Wednesday. Nevertheless, I hope that I shall have some sympathy from the House in my protest against the way that motor traffic is endangering public safety and public comfort.