SECTION 4

You will hear an extract from a lecture on traffic management. Listen to what the speaker says and answer questions 37 to 40. First you have some time to look at the questions. Now listen carefully and answer questions 37 and 38. 

Good afternoon. I'm Tom Fisher and I'll be lecturing you on traffic management this term. Before we go any further I thought you should look at the sort of problems we’ve inherited and inherited or received as a legacy from those before us is just the word for our situation. Many of our major cities were built long before the car was thought of and the road system evolved from the goat tracts followed by the early inhabitants. These we can refer to as old-structure problems and you can take the expression ‘old structure’ to refer to problems which were in place before we saw the need to build efficient  road systems. Old structure problems are easily demonstrated in London, New York, Sydney and Paris. Let's look at each city in turn. London has the most confusing road system which is forgivable because it's a very old city. I'll talk more about the ring roads later. New York is laid out on a grid which makes it easier to find your way around but it's an enormous city and the sheer pressure of numbers strangles the roads. Sydney has narrow streets in the centre of the city and the new roadworks and not keeping up. Paris has wide streets but it's still the victim of old structure problems like Rome and Edinburgh. Tokyo is another city with old structure problems compounded by a huge population like New York. Cities which do not have these old structure problems are Houston, Los Angeles and Dallas. The thing which saves some of these cities is an effective public transport system usually below ground. London has an old but effective underground train system known as the ‘Tube’ and a comprehensive bus and train system above ground. Hong Kong has cheap, swift and effective public transport in the form of mass transit railway, buses and ferries. Paris has a metro underground railway which carries tens of thousands of people daily and a large bus system. New York has a comprehensive underground train system but many people feel that it's dangerous to ride on. There have been some nasty attacks. However the trains themselves are efficient so we have to call it a good system. Sydney has good public transport system but only part of it is underground. 

Now answer questions 39 to 40. Write no more than three words for each answer.

Notably absent from this discussion of cities with good public transport are the cities I nominated previously as not having old structure problems; Houston, Los Angeles and Dallas. Let’s start with Dallas, a very wealthy city in Texas which grew up in an era when cars were considered to be essential to move about. It has an excellent road system as does Houston. Another new city with wise city leaders who insisted on good roads. However the public transport system in both Houston and Dallas is extremely poor. As a result, travel in Dallas and Houston is easy except for peak hour. When a twenty minute run can expand to more than an hour in traffic jams. Los Angeles suffers from chronic highway blockages despite the efforts to encourage people to use public transport. Cities with good road systems and no old-structure problems can use other methods to reduce the number of vehicles travelling together at peak hour. Flexi time is one good method. Offices open and close at different times so people are travelling to and from work at different times. Vehicles carrying more than one person can use special priority lanes which means they can travel more quickly. They're even systems to make peak hour car use more expensive with electronic chips recording the presence of a vehicle in a given high traffic area at a given time. So what can we do? The rest of this course will be devoted to looking at the conflicting demands of road uses and relating the use of the private car to other aspects of the economy. Over the next three weeks I we’ll be discussing this in more detail. 

That is the end of section four. You now have some time to check your answers.