Estimating traffic: A case study of the Chester sub-region in 1827-28

Journal of Transport History, The, Sep 2002 by Herson, John

The present bridge over the River Dee at Chester is the principal thoroughfare between the great manufacturing districts of the North of England [and] Wales; and Shropshire, Herefordshire, the Western Counties and also Holyhead and Ireland.

All the Coals for the supply of Chester and the districts to the North and East of it are brought over this bridge, as also the Iron of [Denbighshire], both in the pig and when manufactured into Boilers, Cylinders etc.; the Lead of Flintshire, the timber from Wales and Shropshire, and the Cheese of a very large extent of the Country. There are sixteen Stage-coaches passing it daily, besides all the Chaises, Gigs and Horses of the adjacent Country; it is a very great thoroughfare for Cattle, Sheep etc. and it is crowded with Foot Passengers, for whom there is not a side path.1

This description of the traffic that teemed over the medieval Dee bridge in the 1820s gives a flavour of the goods and people both coming to, and passing through, Chester in the early nineteenth century. Many contemporary sources describe traffic in terms such as those used in Chester. The problem for the historian is that such sources give little, if any, numerical information on how much traffic in total there actually was and how it was made up. Transport historians still find it difficult to provide a comprehensive and quantified picture of transport as `the movement of people and things between places' for which Robbins called in 1991.2 Valuable insights can be gained by studying the traffic generated by specific transport users, an approach used fruitfully in Jones's study of the transport policies of the brewers Truman Hanbury & Buxton and by Turnbull in the case of John Wilson & Son.3 Evidence on the transport decisions of specific enterprises or individuals is, however, hard to come by and may not be typical. The regional approach does offer a way forward, and the work of Turnbull again, together with Langton, Hallas, Freeman, Unwin, Wilson and Barrow,4 among others, has demonstrated the value of regional analysis. None of these studies offers, however, a comprehensively quantified picture of regional traffic at specific points in time. The objective of measuring the work done in terms of tons shifted and passengers carried in specific areas at particular dates continues to remain elusive.

More regional work in pursuit of this objective would be useful because it increases our understanding both of transport itself and of transport's wider significance in a number of ways. Firstly, estimates of the total amount of traffic moving in an area at a particular date are important in their own right to complement and give greater precision to the type of impressionistic evidence quoted at the beginning of this article. Comprehensive traffic figures would also allow comparisons to be made between the amounts of transport activity in different regions and the amounts at different periods in the same region. These could in turn be used as one measure of economic development to progress the type of work pioneered by Wilson.5 Secondly, it is necessary to quantify the relative importance of passenger and freight traffic within the total mix in order to be more precise about the work done by different types of operator and the extent to which they complemented each other. The results could also be an indicator of the social significance of transport in a region and its role in the less tangible transmission of information, market knowledge, ideas and money. A more refined knowledge of traffic would also come from estimating the work done by private transport as well as that done by scheduled operators. Our understanding of road transport, a vital sector, is still dominated by studies quarrying accessible data on stagecoach services and scheduled carriers; the traffic of local carters and own-account carriage continues to lurk in the shadows.

A fourth aspect of estimating regional traffic is in terms of the relative importance of different transport modes and routes and the extent to which they complemented as well as competed with each other. Unwin and, more recently, Barrow have produced valuable syntheses of regional transport patterns but their studies lack comprehensive estimates of the total traffic moved at particular dates.6 More precise measurement of the importance of different routes and carriers would help exploration of the relationship between economic activity and transport flows and the nature of links between producers, distributors and consumers. Fifthly, more precision on regional traffic could contribute to assessing the significance of the transport sector within the wider economy in terms of numbers employed, capital invested and, above all, the costs and benefits of transport. This in turn leads to a final and fundamental issue, the relationship of transport provision to economic development. There has been considerable division of opinion concerning this relationship in the industrial revolution. At one extreme are those scholars such as McCloskey and Freeman7 who suggest that the significance of transport provision for economic development has been overstated. At the other extreme Szostak argues that 'a modern system of transport was necessary for the Industrial Revolution to occur in England'.8 Attempts to resolve the relationship between transport and economic development using cliometric methods have rather fallen out of fashion in recent years despite some continuing interest in the significance of the railways.9 Though nobody would argue that better traffic estimates would alone be sufficient to resolve the question of transport's role in the industrial revolution, it is nevertheless the case that such estimates are necessary for the debate to be carried forward.