I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and can recommend it to anyone who has an interest in roads, either professionally or as an interested bystander. Despite having spent my entire professional career as a highway engineer, I still found it informative and thought provoking; yet the author's style is such that others with a lesser involvement in highways would still find the book easy to read. A criticism is that the subtitle should more accurately be ‘5000 Years of British Highway History’, as the book is entirely about British roads and is devoid of material external to Britain.
The book is well illustrated, making good use of simple diagrams when the occasional technical point needs to be explained. The author also makes good use of statistics to explain trends and also the difficulty of foretelling the future based on extrapolating the past. A good example concerns the potential of new technology to make previous trends invalid. This is illustrated by the impact of the internal combustion engine at the beginning of the 20th century, when the initial trends suggested that the car would be a substitute for horse-drawn vehicles, the numbers of which had remained static for decades.
The book's title in some ways belies its contents, for it is far more than a mere history of highways over the last five millennia. This is probably because roads are so fundamental to social and economic development that other facets necessarily are included. The point conveyed by the author, but not explicitly stated, is that roads can be considered to be ‘living things', which evolve in accordance with people's needs and society's social structure.
The author therefore follows the introductory chapter with two chapters explaining the historical development of roads in relation to social and economic development. Included in the first of these is an analysis of some of the more prevalent myths about early roads and their origins. In the third chapter, the author makes the point that the Romans, because theirs was essentially an urban society, needed good roads for the supply of essential commodities from ports and the countryside to the dwellers of towns and cities, in very much the same way as our current society is dependent on a good road network. Other parallels with history concern the development of the Turnpike Trusts in response to a need for improved roads but unwillingness–and inability in the case of many parishes–for these to be funded from traditional sources, and the current vogue for paying for new roads through private finance.
The fourth and fifth chapters are concerned with the structure and shape of roads: they explain how these have evolved in accordance with the changing use made of them and the vehicles running on them. In the first of these, the author gives a very good account of the rivalry between the different pavement structures advocated by Telford and Macadam, with the latter proving dominant because it was a cheaper form of construction. The fifth chapter, concerned with the shape of roads, provides a good explanation of the fundamental principles underpinning modern highway design and how these have evolved. Mention is made of the more obscure effect of simultaneous changes in vertical and horizontal curvature, which was a flaw of the early autobahns.
The penultimate chapter covers the use of roads, and is probably the most thought provoking because of the historical data and analogies it includes. For example, data on the use made of the turnpikes in Hampshire show that traffic grew by approximately 400% between 1770 and 1840, making the point that ‘induced traffic’ is not just a modern phenomenon. Also, the high relative risk of travelling by road in the 19th century compared with modern times is shown by the number of fatalities in the last three decades of that century. These were typically of the order of 1700 per year compared with about 3500 now, but for far greater volumes of traffic and much longer average distances travelled.
The final chapter, entitled ‘Conclusions and speculations', brings things up to date with consideration of current issues, such as the near-insatiable demand for travel by road when it is available at relatively low cost to the user and how to predict what might be needed in the future.
