HomeFrom Abbatoirs to Zoning: Melbourne 1925The Traffic Puzzle

The Traffic Puzzle

"Melbourne's Traffic Puzzle: Can You Solve It?" asked the Herald in June 1925.

Years ago public men declared that if Melbourne's traffic congestion were not abated the city would be plunged into chaos. Today the same thing is being said. Will it still be said in 1930?
The newspaper offered prizes of £10, £5 and £2 for the best entries in a public competition.1

There was little doubt in the minds of Melburnians that their city had a traffic problem. In the previous decade, the number of motor vehicles in the city - not just cars, but all kinds of trucks and delivery vans - had grown exponentially. But other kinds of traffic were growing too: there were more horse-drawn vehicles, more trams, and more pedestrians than just a few years earlier.2

The City Council had its own ideas to solve the traffic puzzle. Part of the solution was writing new by-laws, and updating old ones, to keep the faster, heavier and more dangerous vehicles driving through the city away from pedestrians, cyclists and animals. One task was to update parking regulations, which had originally been drafted in the days of horse-drawn vehicles. The Council set out parts of the city where motor vehicles could park, and established a system of inspections and penalties to enforce the new rules, drawing inspiration from how other local governments across the world had tackled the problem.

Some people thought that the traffic puzzle could be solved with new technology. The City Engineer had completed a tour of inspection in North America some years earlier, and had learned about the new automated traffic control devices in use. Although Melbourne was hesitant about letting traffic signals take over from police at the congested city intersections, some members of the public thought that they might be useful for controlling the flow of pedestrians. Some such ideas were a century ahead of their time.

The winners of the Herald competition were announced in July. First prize went to Constable C.T. O'Brien, a police officer who worked point duty at the city's very busiest intersection: the corner of Flinders and Swanston streets.3 He proposed radical solutions that touched on roads, regulation and technology together:

In the decades that followed, many of Constable O'Brien's pieces of the traffic puzzle fell into place. But Melburnians never did let go of their trams - nor their "traffic maelstrom".

References

  1. "Melbourne's Traffic Puzzle," Herald, 19 June 1925, 2.
  2. Andrew J. May, Melbourne Street Life (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2017), 59.
  3. "Relieving Traffic Congestion: Flinders Street Maelstrom," Herald, 16 July 1925, 17.

Acknowledgements