II—Traffic in the Dover Strait

Extract

If we examine the traffic in the Strait of Dover, which in its most narrow part is 17 miles wide, we notice that nearly the whole of this traffic, about 98 per cent, is concentrated and strangled under the British coast, in a narrow pass about five miles wide. Very heavy traffic coming from all parts of the world gathers together in the bottleneck which is the Channel. Thus innumerable vessels, when still in the Strait of Dover, spread out fan-wise at the very place where traffic in an opposite direction concentrates in order to make the same narrow passage. It is the unorganized convergence of these many routes which concentrates this very dense traffic at the mouth of the Strait of Dover and is the cause of all too many collisions. One immediately concludes that by relieving congestion and by organizing or canalizing the traffic, the problem will have received an acceptable answer.