f the ground to consider; with every
increment of width the value of the dwindling remainder in the meshes
of the network of roads will rise, until to pave the widened streets
with gold will be a mere trifling addition to the cost of their
"improvement."

There is, however, quite another direction in which the congestion may
find relief, and that is in the "regulation" of the traffic. This has
already begun in London in an attack on the crawling cab and in the new
bye-laws of the London County Council, whereby certain specified forms
of heavy traffic are prohibited the use of the streets between ten and
seven. These things may be the first beginning of a process of
restriction that may go far. Many people living at the present time, who
have grown up amidst the exceptional and possibly very transient
characteristics of this time, will be disposed to regard the traffic in
the streets of our great cities as a part of the natural order of
things, and as unavoidable as the throng upon the pavement. But indeed
the presence of all the chief constituents of this vehicular
torrent--the cabs and hansoms, the vans, the omnibuses--everything,
indeed, except the few private carriages--are as novel, as distinctively
things of the nineteenth century, as the railway train and the needle
telegraph. The streets of the great towns of antiquity, the streets of
the great towns of the East, the streets of all the mediaeval towns, were
not intended for any sort of wheeled traffic at all--were designed
primarily and chiefly for pedestrians. So it would be, I suppose, in any
one's ideal city. Surely Town, in theory at least, is a place one walks
about as one walks about a house and garden, dressed with a certain
ceremonious elaboration, safe from mud and the hardship and defilement
of foul weather, buying, meeting, dining, studying, carousing, seeing
the play. It is the growth in size of the city that has necessitated the
growth of this coarser traffic that has made "Town" at last so utterly
detestable.

But if one reflects, it becomes clear that, save for the vans of goods,
this moving tide of wheeled masses is still essentially a stream of
urban pedestrians, pedestrians who, by reason of the distances they have
to go, have had to jump on 'buses and take cabs--in a word, to bring in
the high road to their aid. And the vehicular traffic of the street is
essentially the high road traffic very roughly adapted to the new needs.
The cab is a sim