The British government report that proposed dividing towns into “environmental areas” free of through traffic, served by a hierarchy of distributor roads, and, in dense centres, separating people and vehicles on different levels.
Buchanan’s team argued that traffic would grow without limit and that towns had to be rebuilt to accommodate it without being destroyed by it. Their answer was a hierarchy of roads and a set of “rooms” (the environmental areas) into which only local traffic would enter. For the densest centres they drew multi-level schemes in which the ground was given to vehicles and a new pedestrian level of decks and bridges was built above.
The report coincided with the City of London’s pedway plan for a network of elevated walkways, of which the Barbican’s highwalks are the largest surviving part.
The book, part by part
I Environmental areas and vertical segregation
Roads by hierarchy; people above, vehicles below.
Rules: People above, traffic below