ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book shows the centrality of road transport. Road transport attracts few devotees and is associated all too often nowadays with frustrating traffic jams, dangerous pollution and deadly accidents. A car is the personal possession par excellence and, as such, often represents much more to its owner than merely a means of transport. Even when roads were considered by transport historians, they argued, attention was concentrated on ‘turnpikes, road building and the improvement of road surfaces rather than what really mattered; the growing volume of traffic of various sorts which travelled along the roads’. Short of an oil crisis of cataclysmic proportions there seems little possibility that rail and coastal shipping can regain the freight transport they have lost to the roads.
