De Beauvoir Cycle Gang Strikes Again

(yes, Oliver, all traffic)

Oops, this just reminded me that I forgot to reply to this:

People do not say it all the time. People in a particular field of interest may write it in dry technical documents and web pages because they wish to be precise.

It's not lazy shorthand, it's perfectly valid colloquial usage. For it to be lazy the person using the term would have to be aware that they should be prepending the adjective, and for the most part they are not. Is "United Kingdom" lazy shorthand for "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, its territories and dominions?"

To use the term 'motor traffic' yourself may be considered precise, but admonishing someone else for not using it is definitely pedantic.

That's the sort of thing only a German would do :-)

To use the term 'motor traffic' yourself may be considered precise, but admonishing someone else for not using it is definitely pedantic.

You did get the joke, didn't you? ;)

But seriously, in a nutshell it's quite simple. The meaning of 'traffic' is clear. It hasn't changed with majority usage. That people are not 'aware that they should be prepending the adjective' is a symptom of an ignorant prejudice that has developed on the back of the UK's very great motor dependence (higher than that of any other large European country, although some smaller ones come close). It is perfectly possible to be called lazy for a failure of just falling in with general usage without thinking.

This sort of shorthand that is by no means only a concern of specialists--people genuinely lack the understanding that 'traffic' can work in another way, as with 'traffic' being taken over by a wrong meaning in their minds, they then lack the concept. Words are not only words--they have an important role to play in people's access to concepts.