IF IT IS permissible to extend the term 'road' to include tracks and footpaths, then I think it is fair to say that there has been a road problem in Britain ever since man has occupied it. Indeed, in the earliest days, the very absence of tracks or roads could be said to have constituted a road problem. Looking in the other direction, that is to say ahead, I think it is a fair prediction that we are never likely to be in the position of not having some kind of a road problem. As one who, in a general way, makes his living out of road problems, I find the outlook not unsatisfactory. However, even if the road problem is as old as mankind, I do not think there is any need for me in this lecture to review it from the earliest days, for there is little doubt that the problem in its modern form dates from no further back than the penultimate decade ofthe last century. One of these days I hope that some historical writer will write a book in which he would try to identify the events or the occasions when something happened that was destined to change the drift of a whole sector of human affairs. I am not thinking so much of the great events such as battles, or assassinations, or even great discoveries, as the subtler events which, without any? one realizing it at the time, did in fact trigger off chain reactions of the greatest significance. I think that one of these 'watersheds in time' occurred in 1888 on the day when a three-wheeled vehicle propelled by an internal combustion engine, manufactured by Carl Benz, was unloaded off a cross-channel steamer. From that day onwards many things began to change, slowly at first but at ever quickening pace, as the offspring of this ingenious machine began to infiltrate into our social and economic life.