On Roads

"Joe Moran is absolutely brilliant. He can take a subject that seems like the most boring subject (he wrote a book about queuing before, Queuing for Beginners ) and make it fascinating. You’ve got to know Britain, otherwise it’s a bit meaningless, but if I had to recommend just one of these books, I’d say please read Joe Moran’s On Roads . The other reason for picking Joe’s book is slightly personal, in that he begins with the A57. I actually live on the A57: it’s the road that goes all the way from Liverpool across to the Yorkshire coast. It’s a very strange road. It’s one of the hidden trunk roads of Britain. This sounds very geeky. I’m not into roads. No. I’m not at all interested in roads – I don’t even drive a car. But Joe’s book actually makes them interesting. He is able to explain the nature of social change across the country, and the quirks of Englishness, from the point of view of what’s happened to our roads. There are strange parts of our motorway system, for instance within spaghetti junctions, that you can’t actually get to. There are parts of defunct flyovers still there, apparently. Lots of things like that. It sounds odd – but Joe makes fascinating a subject that sounds more boring than watching paint dry. It revealed that there are lots of people who have tried very hard to make things work better from a technical point of view. For instance, the exact way in which our road signs are designed is a saga in itself. The font, the height of the lettering, how long a word you’re allowed to put on a road sign. There was a big battle by two sets of people to try to get different fonts on the British road signs, which in a way have become a model for the European road signs. The road sign font designers ended up driving cars very fast, while trying to read signs. Obviously the whole point of a road sign is that you should be able to read it in a very short amount of time while travelling at speed. But dozens and dozens of (almost all) men – quite geeky men – have done a lot of work, to get all the curves of roads worked out, and everything else about them that we take for granted. You just think it’s obvious, that’s how a road should be, until you read about the history and the battles that there were over these roads. I don’t like cars and I don’t like petrol, but it made even someone like me warm to the roads and to the transport engineers. He does it in a very human way. He’s interested in the people, he’s not really that interested in the technology of the road. Yes, well Joe tells you why it’s called the M3, the real story behind that. No. He’s not into that at all, Joe Moran. He doesn’t appear to have an agenda, or if he has an agenda it’s so subtle I couldn’t notice it. He just wants us to appreciate our roads. He’s into appreciating everyday objects. I can imagine him writing a book about alarm clocks, and telling us things we never knew about alarm clocks. It makes you realise that these things have quite an incredible history behind them. There is no reason for our road system to be like it is. The British could easily have had a more American road system, with far fewer pavements etc, if things had gone a different way."