<I>Great Cities and Their Traffic</I>: Michael Thomson Revisited

Abstract

This landmark book provided the first serious attempt to examine the problem of traffic in global cities, commenting on its genesis and growth, and arguing that traffic chaos should not be blamed on the car itself or even the population explosion, but on economic growth. Michael Thomson comments on the externalities from traffic, including accidents, environmental pollution, conditions for pedestrians, traffic congestion, off-peak travel, parking, peak demand and other costs, before concluding that the solutions are unaffordable. The main part of the book builds on this more generic analysis of the traffic problem, and it attempts to categorize thirty of the most important cities through a novel fivefold typology that applies a consistent methodology to explore different approaches to tackling traffic problems. Returning to Great Cities and their Traffic after nearly 40 years is a sobering exercise, as the same issues are still being debated, and the range of externalities has increased rather than decreased. Levels of motorization are much higher, and the growth in the size and number of cities is accelerating. There are new debates around resources, sustainability, inequality, urban sprawl and quality of life, and the car is now seen as part of the problem, as cities cannot hope to adapt to the space requirements of unlimited access by car, let alone the externalities created. Other solutions must be sought. This paper takes the Thomson book as a starting point and reinterprets it from a current perspective to establish whether the arguments are still relevant, and then extends the thinking to determine whether cities today can be categorized in one of Thomson's five archetypes.