Considering the narrowness of the average village High Street, and the concentration of its historical relics in its centre, there is much to be said for the construction of a “by-pass” road to carry through traffic round the village. Otherwise the village green, the pond, the stocks, the inns, and nearly all the old landmarks would have to go. Traders object in the case of the larger towns, but vested interests always turn up somewhere, and it seems fairly certain that the “by-pass” road meets the needs of the greater number besides preserving the old village intact. Eventually there will have to be a ring-road round all old cities, like Oxford, which stand at the intersection of important highways, or the concentration of traffic at the centre will become unmanageable. We have hardly grown accustomed yet to the great new arterial roads, though several are already in use. They seem to me to represent one of our highest achievements in civil engineering as they sweep majestically through cuttings and over embankments with an uninterrupted width of a hundred feet or more. In some ways they are the biggest thing we have in England, out of scale with our doll’s-house villages and landscapes, and out of character with our little winding lanes. It will be years before the trees that line them turn them into magnificent avenues, but by that time we shall have learned to accept them and even to admire them. Presumably we shall see an end of telegraph-poles soon, and that will be all to the good. But there are other things that engineers might bear in mind. The great road that runs south-west from Birmingham to the Lickey Hills, a noble highway in width, is disfigured by tramway poles and wires. Is that necessary in 1927? Surely the petrol-engine, which has done much to spoil the country, can atone for some of its crimes here by taking the place of electrically driven vehicles? In Birmingham, as in the narrow streets of Ipswich, and--still worse--in the beautiful Wharfedale valley, is to be seen a more frightful abortion, the “trackless tram.” There has been a proposal to extend this hideous system in Wharfedale on a broad highway cutting across some fine country. Surely motor-buses could serve every purpose that the lumbering trackless tram fulfils.