Konrad Smigielski was the Chief Planning Officer for Leicester City Council between 1962 and 1972. In this time he produced plans both for the city and the wider area. One of the most renowned and influential was the 1964 Traffic Plan which looked to implement a city free from traffic in an age when car usage was exploding. Smigielski saw that traffic was to become a problem within the city due to the motor revolution taking place across the country. The plan was based on the Buchanan Report Traffic in Towns (released a year earlier) which suggested that cars were going to become one of the biggest problems of the rest of the century, both for pedestrians and the environment.
Smigielski could only envisage two solutions: enormous motorways which could have been as many as 16 lanes wide; or limiting the access of private motor vehicles to the city by providing more public transport, which would only require 4-6 lanes of motorway within the city. In reality, as he stated, there was only one realistic solution; limiting the use of the motor car and providing the city with an Integrated Transport System. Smigielski’s system would include a park and ride as far out as Kibworth (approximately 11 miles away), short-stay city centre parking, more efficient public transport systems, and separating traffic and people. The Plan also included more utopian ideas, such as a monorail to replace busses in the central area and pedestrian conveyors similar to those inside the old market place and at airports.
The Traffic Plan attracted attention from across the country for a number of reasons. The Plan itself was backed up by statistics collected in a new way; Smigielski employed a group of women who interviewed residents and visitors about their car use habits as opposed to simply counting cars. Furthermore, the idea of a monorail city was revolutionary, taking into account both congestion and environmental concerns.
Unfortunately for Smigielski, the Traffic Plan was never fully realised. The monorail was shelved due to the perceived inefficiency of this mode of transport and pedestrian conveyors were only ever implemented within the indoor market. However, pedestrianisation was slowly introduced around the clock tower area, and is expected to continue in the future, and a park and ride was introduced in 1997. When Smigielski returned to the city in 1999, he claimed he was ‘delighted’ to have seen Leicester implement some of his ideas.
Sources:
British Library, Millennium Memory Bank, W. K. Smigielski, b. 1908, recorded 1999.
K. Smigielski, Leicester Traffic Plan, (Leicester, 1964).
Author – Lauren Rowe.
The Transformation of Leicester 