William Rees Jeffreys (1 December 1871 – 18 August 1954) was a British cyclist and early campaigner for road improvements who became a key figure in the early 20th-century development of the UK highway system. As honorary secretary and later chairman of the Roads Improvement Association and the first secretary of the Road Board (which in 1919 became part of the Ministry of Transport), he was an early advocate of a ring road around London, and helped instigate the British road numbering system. In 1937 Jeffreys was described by former UK Prime Minister David Lloyd George as "the greatest authority on roads in the United Kingdom and one of the greatest in the whole world."
A charity he founded in 1950, the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund, continues to support UK transport-related projects.
Early life
William Rees Jeffreys was born at 7 Warwick Place in Paddington, London, on 1 December 1871, the eldest of four children born to William George Jeffreys, an upholsterer, and his wife, Mary Ann, née Garratt. He was privately educated, and in 1891 joined the Board of Trade's commercial, labour, and statistical department as a second division clerk; in his late 20s he studied statistics under Arthur Lyon Bowley at the London School of Economics.
In his spare time, Jeffreys was a keen cyclist. Aged 18, he toured Scotland, and returned as member of the council of the Cyclists' Touring Club to gather information to issue as CTC guidance. He also explored Ireland, where he met Richard J. Mecredy, who helped form the Irish Roads Improvement Association.
Career
Cycling advocacy
Jeffreys was elected to the council of the Cyclists' Touring Club in 1900, and chaired its rights and privileges committee from 1901 to 1906. In 1901 he became the CTC's representative at the Roads Improvement Association, and later the same year became its honorary secretary. The RIA had been jointly established by the CTC and the National Cyclists' Union in October 1886, and initially focused on production of technical literature distributed to highways boards and surveyors to promote improved construction and maintenance methods. Jeffreys believed the RIA should focus more on political lobbying and push for a national highway authority and state funding of highways. In 1903, he was the first witness to give evidence to a British government inquiry into highway administration, and provided extensive RIA technical information on road surfaces sourced from cyclists, saying "The bicycle is perhaps the best road inspector there is." He told the CTC Gazette: "To no class in the community are good roads so important as to cyclists."
Also in 1903, a Royal Commission on London Traffic was established and proposed two major "avenues": east–west between Bayswater and Whitechapel via the City, and a north–south route between Holloway and Elephant and Castle. Jeffreys took a different view, preferring ring roads, and in 1905, more than 80 years before completion of the M25 motorway, proposed a "boulevard round London":
"Their encircling boulevards are the pride of many a continental city, and it is a crowning disgrace that, notwithstanding the absence of any great engineering difficulties, no road exists encircling the metropolis. So far as possible, the new roads should consist of a number of separate tracks, viz., one for electric trams, a second for automobiles and cycles, a third for vans, carts, traction engines, and other slow-going traffic, and a fourth for foot passengers. They should be built throughout of dustless materials."
Highways advocacy
As many cyclists also became motorists, Jeffreys's allegiances and the balance of the debate began to shift; he "became an arch motorist and the RIA morphed into a motoring organisation". In 1903 Jeffreys left the Board of Trade after being appointed administrative secretary of the Automobile Club of Great Britain (later the RAC) and secretary of the Motor Union of Great Britain and Ireland (established by the Automobile Club two years earlier; it amalgamated with the Automobile Association in 1910). In 1904, he wrote the preface for the Automobile Club's first Automobile Handbook.