Leftenant Obvious!
It's spelt
"Lieutenant".
---
The City of London (whether its in England is slightly debatable) has no motorways as it's very small - just over a mile and a half E-W tops, and a mile as the furthest N-S distance, giving an area of just over 1sqmi. That said, there's a
partially grade separated dual carriageway crossing the city E-W alongside the river (well, on top of where it was 200 years ago).
The city itself is almost all less than 350 years old (due to the Great Fire and the reluctant replacement without redesign), and they happily have been tearing down a lot of it for skyscrapers/modern buildings. The issue with motorways there is not historic stuff (other than the issue of being first, so doing badly and barely being able to recover). OK, most of what people (especially foreigners) consider 'downtown London' is outside the City proper, and on top of the 1000 year old Abbey, etc, you have a lot of Georgian residential stuff that isn't going to be demolished ever (even if much of it has been converted to offices).
About 150 years ago, traffic was a big problem, so they built the 'New Road' (A501). Other bypasses had also been built by the turn of the 20th century - the Finchley Road (now A41-A598) and New North Road (A1200) bypassed the Great North Road (A1) that was built in the 1700s to bypass the Roman 'Old North Road'/Ermine Street (A10). The interwar period saw railway-fuelled suburbs created, and also a major boom in arterial roads that mostly didn't serve the new developments at all, but bypassed a lot of the development that had already existed along major roads - the Great West Road (A4) bypassing the Bath Road, the Watford bypass bypassing Watling Street (A5) and the (then) A41, Western Avenue the A40, Eastern Avenue the A12, etc - but ending where the urban area wasn't ribbon development any more (
see the black lines on this map). At this time, and in the post war years too, the main roads inside the Edwardian urban area were widened or further bypassed. Then in the 60s bits and pieces of Ringways were build (eg the Westway that connected the Western Avenue to the 'New Road', which was then upgraded) as well as major upgrades to arterial roads (that were build with the space) - building frontage roads and grade-separating junctions. Then pretty much everything stopped. There were many junctions improvements, but the only major schemes since the 70s were the M25, the Woodford-Barking relief road (A406 east of the M11), the highly controversial Eastway (A12 between Stratford and Redbridge) and the massive upgrade of the A13 corridor (a lot of which had to do with Docklands development). The Coulsden bypass opening in 2006 is the only bit of new A road built in London since the Eastway in 1999 (which was first proposed in 1903) and there's been nothing since that in terms of new A road mileage (some have been downgraded and a tiny bit has been widened)
---
The biggest issue is that the amount of building required to not simply move the congestion to the next bottleneck is huge. The Silvertown tunnel is considered highly controversial as, while it relieves a bottleneck and allows big loads to cross the river somewhere between Tower Bridge and Dartford, the approach roads will become a congestion problem as traffic readjusts (even if there is zero induced traffic). Demand is huge, and building roads anywhere but the fringes doesn't won't increase traffic speed. The aim is now to make roads much more pedestrian/cycle friendly while still being OK for buses, taxis, goods vehicles (and thus also cars).
Plus there's a huge level of anti-car sentiment - new (and much needed) crossings in East London are being held up as they don't want people to use the road that aren't local. And they definitely don't want goods vehicles (which, unlike cars, can't really have modal shift). And the main annoyance of people towards the highly expensive inner ring road tunnel was not the cost, nor the impact of portals, but that they saw the plan (designed, like those of many European cities) to take vehicles off roads in central London (allowing demolition of 60s viaducts, remodelling notorious roads for pedestrians to be much more pedestrian friendly) and put them underground as being too pro-car. The point of it was to be pro-pedestrians without being anti-goods vehicles.
There's an irony - new roads filling up with traffic is bad and we should stop building them, whereas new railways filling up with traffic is good and we should build more and faster. The new railways in London (while there's also a mass of suppressed and rerouted demand - as most of the filling up with traffic of new roads also is) have a lot of creation of induced demand as positive case, whereas new roads (save the East London River Crossings, though only wrt local journeys - someone not starting or ending their journey near the crossing is a problem) have it as negative case. Compare the Silvertown tunnel and Crossrail - both are predicted to be full not long after opening without even inducing demand, but whereas that's seen as a bad thing for Silvertown and an argument to not to build it, with Crossrail it's seen as showing it's immense success and therefore a relief line should be being some way through the planning process already.
Author
Topic: Why does not the city of London, England have Motorways? (Read 11857 times)