Rats are not generally well regarded in our society. One can argue that this is unjust.  Rats, by all accounts an extraordinary successful species; do not seem to have a good PR department.  Perhaps Max Clifford should take them on. Perhaps if they pinned on fluffy tails they could be as well regarded as squirrels (which is not that well regarded, but better than rats).

So when people get called rats, you can assume it is not a complement. From ‘love-rats’ in the tabloid press to the infamous anti-Semitic Nazi film, Der Ewige Jude, one can conclude that comparing someone to a ‘rat’ is a pretty serious insult.

It was MADE expert panel member Martin Stockley who drew my attention to the way as community leaders, urban designers, planners and highways engineers we regularly call people ‘rats’. Have these people given us bubonic plague? Have they consumed our precious supplies of grain? No, they are guilty of nothing more than finding an alternative route to drive through the neighbourhood.

I have long held that the term ‘rat-run’ is unhelpful but after a design review day in which the term had figured in three different presentations, Martin pointed out that by using this phrase we are in effect calling people ‘rats’.  Any vehicular route through residential, or even industrial, streets that links one main road with another is instantly labelled a ‘rat-run’.  Thus the motorists who have inventively found a way of beating the jams or perhaps just adding variety and interest to their journey must be ‘rats’.

I can imagine that people will say that Martin is being oversensitive, perhaps harrumphing something about ‘political correctness gone mad’.  However, the reason for objecting to this phrase is not out of regard for the hurt feelings of the alternative-route-finding motorist, but because of the effect it has on our thinking. One only needs to say ‘it’s a rat-run’ in a planning meeting or suggest that a certain development will create a ‘rat-run’ and instantly something must be done.  And the ‘something’ is usually some complex traffic management measure, such as blocking up a road, a no-right-turn, a bus-gate or a stretch of one-way traffic. 

Cumulatively such measures create towns and cities which the motorist encounters as an illegible series of petty and incomprehensible restrictions forcing them to make their journeys via convoluted routes.  This generates frustration and hostility in motorists who then behave erratically, ducking and diving, putting their foot down on any unrestricted stretch of road in an attempt to compensate.  Often such restrictions have unintended consequences.

Strangely the term ‘rat-run’ is never applied to major highways even though, when you think about it, they resemble our mental picture of rats running (say along a sewer) much more closely than anything that happens in a residential street.  On the contrary the phrase is associated with that very 20^th Century notion that traffic should be concentrated on major roads where it can move at speed.  You are a rat not because you have scampered along this highway in a teeming mass with all your fellow rats but because you have chosen to turn off the designated route and find another way through the city.

I recall a moment of revelation at the Urban Summit in Birmingham in 2002. One of the speakers alongside John Prescott was John Norquist, then Mayor of Milwaukee and a big name in the new urbanism movement in the US.  He was showing slides of the Corbusier’s vision of traffic management, with major grade-separated concrete arteries accommodating huge volumes of traffic and depositing it beneath the tower-blocks where all work, living and leisure was to happen.

As we all know, the problem with concentrating traffic on a limited number of routes is that those routes become dominated by traffic.  There is then pressure to ‘upgrade’ these highways to dual carriageways or event motorways or to put in highways as ‘relief roads’.  These become huge barriers to pedestrian (and in some cases vehicle) movement across the city which have traditionally been dealt with by dismal subways or heavily engineered bridges.   These major urban highways split communities and introduce ugly concrete flyovers into the street scene.

Norquist asked, “Why not let the grid system absorb the traffic?” Of course most English towns and cities do not have north-American style grids, but they normally have some sort of network of streets and the principle is the same.  In that simple question Norquist had summed up a convincing alternative philosophy for traffic management.  There are no ‘rat-runs’ when all roads are ‘rat-runs’.

So here is a New Year resolution for all those who influence the design of places.  In 2011 please stop calling people ‘rats’.  And next time you hear the term ‘rat-run’ please challenge it.  It isn’t nice to call people rats and it leads to bad decisions.