ABSTRACT
Though the proportion of roads to area is high in the British Isles, our road administration is hardly up to the standard that might be expected even in spite of the improvements recently made. Consolidation had been urged by several Committees and by numerous individuals, notably Sir Henry Parnell and Davies Gilbert, while Peel proposed to group parishes into districts for the purposes of road administration, so that the number of authorities would be reduced to 600. To find any general principle, however, upon which an apportionment can be made between the road user and the community seems practically impossible, and the difficulty is rendered the greater by the unco-ordinated nature of our road administration. Again road administration has not been based on the needs of traffic so much as by the necessities of local authorities to provide work in their own areas.
