“Low-traffic neighbourhood schemes are causing inconvenience for little benefit” The Times
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-times-view-on-covid-street-closures-and-cycle-lanes-road-rancour-fmcstn3jmLow-traffic neighbourhood schemes are causing inconvenience for little benefitThursday January 28 2021, 12.01am, The TimesIt is good policy to encourage commuters to switch from cars to public transport and to enhance the ease and safety of travelling by bicycle or on foot. Benign aims can have perverse consequences, however, if they are badly implemented. This has happened with a recent proliferation of schemes for low-traffic neighbourhoods.Local authorities across the country have introduced low-traffic schemes since the onset of the coronavirus crisis. Many of these have been speedily abandoned or altered once the inconvenience to angry residents and businesses has become clear. The lesson is not that cars should be allowed to travel freely, but that traffic policy cannot sensibly be implemented on a local level without taking account of how it affects adjacent areas. Otherwise, far from benefiting the environment and public health, these schemes will merely displace traffic rather than reduce it.Councils anticipated a surge in the number of journeys taken by car rather than public transport owing to the risk of infection from the virus. By making an area a low-traffic neighbourhood, and blocking off roads by putting large boxes filled with earth and plants across their entrances, they hoped to make it easier for residents to take exercise while maintaining social distancing. It hasn’t happened that way.A series of disclosures from local authorities show that almost one in ten of these schemes have been abandoned shortly after their introduction. The waste of public money from installing new traffic arrangements and then either not proceeding with them or dismantling them is not trivial. Wiltshire council spent more than £400,000 to restrict traffic in the centre of Salisbury, only to suspend the scheme indefinitely after a month. Despite the profligacy, local authorities have still managed to extract substantial funds from motorists by levying fines for infractions of these short-lived regulations.This is no way to plan the traffic system and regulate the urban environment. A systematic approach is needed, rather than imposing opportunistic ad hoc restrictions and then judging their effectiveness. For one thing, more affluent neighbourhoods will tend to have greater lobbying power than poorer ones and thereby be able to divert traffic flows to areas that are already built-up and have significant amounts of particulate matter in the air.Only last month a coroner’s verdict in London judged that air pollution was responsible for the death of a young girl, Ella Kissi-Debrah, in causing a severe asthma attack. Ella had lived close to a busy ring road, which is just the type of main urban artery to which traffic will flow if drivers are peremptorily blocked from adjoining areas.Britain embraced the concept of environmental traffic management nearly 60 years ago in an influential Ministry of Transport report by the architect Colin Buchanan. Yet urban planning has often come to mean closing streets to private cars without taking account of the wider impact on traffic flows or making pedestrianised spaces attractive for recreation. The low-traffic areas adopted in the pandemic are only the most recent case of impromptu policies that aggravate the problem of congestion rather than resolve it. Councils should think longer, harder and above all geographically wider about their traffic-calming measures if they are to secure residents’ support.
Mark Perry ● 2099d68 Comments ● 2094d