Why does not the city of London, England have Motorways?

[ACSCmapcollector]

Why does not the city of London, England have Motorways especially in downtown London? 

[NE2]

Because they're a bunch of commie pigs.

[jeffandnicole]

Why does not the city of London, England have Motorways especially in downtown London? 

Probably be sure the city is very old and they made the decision not to rip up the city so people can drive thru it.

[ACSCmapcollector]

Because they're a bunch of commie pigs.

I don't think so, only now China is like that, and the former USSR was too.  You couldn't find that prior to 1918, in Russia, NE 2.

[1995hoo]

This thread reminds me way too much of an Ethanman thread.

[ACSCmapcollector]

This thread reminds me way too much of an Ethanman thread.

England is one of those nations that drive on the left side of the highway, maybe including Australia too. I have noticed from a spoken comment from my job coach.

[1995hoo]

This thread reminds me way too much of an Ethanman thread.

England is one of those nations that drive on the left side of the highway, maybe including Australia too. I have noticed from a spoken comment from my job coach.

You sure your name isn't Captain Obvious?

[Buck87]

Why does not the city of London, England have Motorways especially in downtown London? 

I actually just recently saw this youtube video on the history of London's freeways/lack of freeways. It's just some guy with a youtube channel who made the video and it's kinda quirky, but it covered the topic pretty well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUEHWhO_HdY

[ACSCmapcollector]

This thread reminds me way too much of an Ethanman thread.

England is one of those nations that drive on the left side of the highway, maybe including Australia too. I have noticed from a spoken comment from my job coach.

You sure your name isn't Captain Obvious?

Not exactly.

[national highway 1]

Because they're a bunch of commie pigs.

I don't think so, only now China is like that, and the former USSR was too.  You couldn't find that prior to 1918, in Russia, NE 2.

You should realize by now, that many of NE2's comments are just plain joking. Try not to view comments too literally, but view them just as humor.

[1995hoo]

This thread reminds me way too much of an Ethanman thread.

England is one of those nations that drive on the left side of the highway, maybe including Australia too. I have noticed from a spoken comment from my job coach.

You sure your name isn't Captain Obvious?

Not exactly.

You're right, this is a thread about the UK. I apologize, Leftenant Obvious! 

[ACSCmapcollector]

Because they're a bunch of commie pigs.

I don't think so, only now China is like that, and the former USSR was too.  You couldn't find that prior to 1918, in Russia, NE 2.

You should realize by now, that many of NE2's comments are just plain joking. Try not to view comments too literally, but view them just as humor.

Yes i understand that too.

[ACSCmapcollector]

Because they're a bunch of commie pigs.

I don't think so, only now China is like that, and the former USSR was too.  You couldn't find that prior to 1918, in Russia, NE 2.

You should realize by now, that many of NE2's comments are just plain joking. Try not to view comments too literally, but view them just as humor.

Yes i understand that too.

Except for the "Pity my job coach", I would put up defenses on my borders to protect myself.

[lordsutch]

Everything you'd ever want to know about London's largely-nonexistent motorway network is at Ringways.

More recently, the disconnected motorways in London were downgraded to non-motorway classifications to put them under the jurisdiction of Transport for London (legally it's unclear whether this was necessary, but that is what was decided). There are plans for a few short sections of controlled-access road here and there (the proposed Silvertown Tunnel under the Thames, for example) but any extensive projects are unlikely although there are arguments for building better connections, particularly to the M23 to the south - most of the radial roads connecting to the other motorways are at least somewhat decent once you get out of inner London, but the A23 is terrible.

[rickmastfan67]

ACSCmapcollector, DO NOT quote your own posts just to add more info when you still have the current last post in a thread.  There's an EDIT (Modify) button in your own posts for that reason.

[Otto Yamamoto]

Because they're a bunch of commie pigs.

As proven by the campaign for Brexit.

[english si]

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.

[Pete from Boston]

Because they're a bunch of commie pigs.

I don't think so, only now China is like that, and the former USSR was too.  You couldn't find that prior to 1918, in Russia, NE 2.

You could.  The pigs were just inarticulate about it until Orwell taught them to speak.

[J N Winkler]

English Si has a fine-grained answer.  I would just add that the Ringways (which themselves succeeded Abercrombie's Rings plan from the 1940's) were the only concept for outfitting London with motorways that went any distance, and relied on conventional ideas of urban express highway construction.  In the late 1950's there was a dalliance with "motorways in the sky" which would have had the main carriageways cantilevered about 60 feet above the ground on huge piers, with spiral ramps (similar to those found in parking garages) to connect them to the ground.  This idea never got past the conceptual stage.  Then, in the late 1960's, there was a "Tunnelways" scheme, which would have consisted of a grid of motorways in bored tunnels about 60 feet under built-up London to keep them well clear of utilities, the Underground, etc.  This again never got beyond the conceptual stage; the tunnels themselves called for tunnel boring machines of much larger diameter than anything then in use.

In the early 1970's the Department of the Environment, which then had responsibility for trunk roads and highways policy (the Ministry of Transport was folded into it in 1970), commissioned a urban motorways study with the basic objective of measuring the extent of environmental mitigation required to accommodate express highways in the urban environment in a way that eliminated the basis for public objections.  There was an accompanying design project that looked at methods for quantifying noise, visual impact, severance (both physical and psychological), and other disamenities of urban motorways.  The formal conclusion of the study was that building a motorway in an urban area with appropriate provision for environmental mitigation added an increment of cost (about 10%-20%) to the capital construction and that this should be paid.  However, there were some takeaways that were very uncomfortable for the cause of urban motorway construction.  First was that the cost advantages of viaducts were so overwhelming that the case to build them, in spite of the visual impact, and the need to redevelop adjacent buildings so that they were fully noiseproof, was almost impossible to beat.  Second was that the known criteria for environmental mitigation were clearly inadequate--for example, noise guidelines called for reduction of road noise to a barely tolerable level (low enough that you could have a conversation inside your house if you raised your voice, for example), not so low that you could sit by yourself in a quiet room, listening carefully, and not be able to tell that there was a motorway in the near vicinity.

[jeffandnicole]

...

Just wondering...in London, at what age do they consider things historic?  In America, once it's 50 or 75 years old, it starts to be considered historic.  Since nearly everything in America is more recent than London, they need to do a detailed analysis of anything older to determine its significance, what else from that era is similar, etc, etc, etc...

It also depends on the city.  In NYC, where a lot of infrastructure is older, they may have an easier time tearing down older buildings as similar buildings are nearby.  In other cities, they may be more hesitant on tearing something down, or at least need to do more documentation to show why something can be torn down.

[J N Winkler]

In Britain, listed building status is the local equivalent to National Historical Landmark/National Historical District designation.  Age is one of the criteria (e.g., any building erected before 1700 that still has a substantial proportion of its original fabric should be listed), but far from the only one, and there are listed mid-twentieth-century Brutalist buildings.  More detail (with appropriate references to legislation and published guidance) can be found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listed_building

[1995hoo]

Leftenant Obvious!

It's spelt "Lieutenant".

....

Duh! It was meant as a joke. The utter lack of senses of humor from which some people here seem to suffer will never cease to astonish me.

[english si]

Also listing is not anathema to demolition. Heathrow's third runway was approved, but only the Grade 1 listed church would be saved (moved, piece by piece to a museum that has other buildings reconstructed), with other listed buildings happily condemned to be demolished by the Government.

The ability to build skyscrapers in the Roman city is due to most of the older buildings being similar, and of a similar design to ones elsewhere in the Georgian urban area. Ones worth keeping for reasons that are mere age are kept (eg St Bride's Church, the inspiration for the tiered wedding cake, sits surrounded by buildings of various ages in Cheapside, despite being the only building that would have been there when Austen wrote about people living there). Quite a bit of this view still has Georgian buildings (eg around Bank), but there's lots of buildings that are only this century.

Terry Pratchett, writing about Ankh-Morpork said that Ankh-Morpork wasn't built on the soft, water-sodden ground, but on itself. London is the same (the archetype in fact).

Duh! It was meant as a joke.

So was my deadpan correction of you.

The utter lack of senses of humor from which some people here seem to suffer will never cease to astonish me.

I don't have a sense of humor (whatever that is), but I do have a sense of humour, which has a u, but not a 'you', as you seem to lack it.

[ACSCmapcollector]

ACSCmapcollector, DO NOT quote your own posts just to add more info when you still have the current last post in a thread.  There's an EDIT (Modify) button in your own posts for that reason.

I am using honesty and truth to the person I became, with my behaviour when handling netiquitte on the Internet, and showing respect to others and myself.  When I say "borders", it means I really have to protect myself in a Godly way. I appreciate your advice, but now for me for the best thing is to use myself in the right way.

[hotdogPi]

ACSCmapcollector, DO NOT quote your own posts just to add more info when you still have the current last post in a thread.  There's an EDIT (Modify) button in your own posts for that reason.

I am using honesty and truth to the person I became, with my behaviour when handling netiquitte on the Internet, and showing respect to others and myself.  When I say "borders", it means I really have to protect myself in a Godly way. I appreciate your advice, but now for me for the best thing is to use myself in the right way.

The problem was not "borders". The problem was unnecessary double-posting.