Low traffic neighbourhoods

[GOODCAT]

Seen the news today with Rishi Sunak saying he is on the side of motorists with this. This is not the same thing but last year with a combination of cycle to work rapidly followed by having £2 bus fares and living somewhere where there is a bus route which goes to work, I now just use my car if I have heavy stuff to carry or want to go somewhere off a bus route that I can't cycle to.

It has changed my life for the better as I am getting out more and getting exercise. I agree with the idea of LTNs given that I don't like breathing in nasty air and prefer not having to dice with cars that can cause me injury or that are difficult to navigate round because of in street parking, but completely accept that there has been a huge financial cost to individuals where there has happened.

Is there a way that these can be acceptable to a wide range of people in neighbourhoods and if so brought in quickly?

My opinion is you can't please everyone - these neighbourhoods will work well for some and not others.

Personally, it would make life very difficult for me - I live rurally, they've cancelled ALL buses in my area (there weren't many to begin with), and I work plus my kids go to school in a city 13 miles away that I have to drive to (no buses for the school, but I do lift share). Parking is already quite difficult and expensive, plus we have a CAZ (doesn't affect me as I have an electric car).

Like I say, great for some, terrible for others, but we're humans, we learn to adapt.

@GOODCAT Where do you think the displaced traffic goes? It goes via other populated streets. Just not yours. The leafy lanes get leafier. The main roads are clogged. Traffic just sits or moves slowly. Buses queue up. Children going to school breathe it all in. It’s great if you have a bus nearby travelling in someone else’s road. Just take a look at London and see how the poorer areas on the main roads get clogged with traffic. Then there’s the ulez charge for poorer people too. LTNs are great for some and a disaster for others.

I meant Uxbridge sorry.

In my experience the local LTN was placed on a perfectly safe wide road with very expensive houses, (1m plus) and created a funnelling effect on a nearby road with a primary school on it. The air quality around the school worsened so much that the head teacher installed a monitor to record the changes. Displaced traffic needs to go somewhere, it doesn’t just disappear. The barriers have fortunately been removed and traffic flows again. Many city centres have become unrecognisable for motorists over the last few years with the installation of cycle lanes and banning of cars on certain roads, Leeds is my local example. Too late to reverse all this I guess!

I am angry about the traffic light and traffic heavy streets. Our Lib Dem Council (South West London) has done just this and it's a nightmare. Our residential street has been chosen by the Council as the working street for the neighbourhood. It is very popular with local voters because most of them live on posh quiet streets. The .Green Party Councillor told me that they choose roads with social housing as as heavy traffic roads because social housing tenants are less likely to complain about busy roads.
It has not been decided on any reasonable element but on which roads are more likely to accept without complaint being the busy roads.
Lib Dem's have this pretence about being green but it just isn't true. They go for policies which are popular with rich, affluent roads and less affluent roads are treated so badly in terms of resources. Richer roads have pavements with paving stones. We have tarmac on the pavement. It is rubbish. I loathe the hypocrisy of our local Lib Dem Council.

We walked down a CPZ very affluent road and two separate people stopped and asked us what we were doing in the road. There is such a feeling of designated posh roads and busy 'working' roads. It is ghettoising and creating two tier neighbourhoods. I know someone who lives on a traffic light road and at their coronation street party, residents toasted Margaret Thatcher and also the current Lib Dem Council for making sure their local authority road was treated differently. I have never in my life before seen residents treated so differently according to where they live.

We have to do something to remove the reliance on cars. I suspect any policy that has this aim will be controversial, not least because there is very little by way of joined up thinking.

Increasing the frequency and reliability and affordability of public transport. Better bus lanes to allow buses to skip the queues. More trains, with staffed stations (not the closure of hundreds of ticket offices). Making roads better to walk on. More cycle routes. Better park and ride facilities.

Not just preventing traffic from using certain roads.

There’s evidence from long term LTNs (in Waltham Forest) that there is an initial period of traffic displacement but that longer term, traffic in the wider area reduces overall. It’s about making shorter car journeys less practical - which is a good thing. The % of car journeys below 1km in London is shocking.

Tough one. We had a fair bit of unhappiness when it was introduced as the people on the roads not closed petitioned etc for cleaner air for everyone not just some roads

I use my bike for everything, my next door neighbour no longer has a car. There was a nursery school over the road which has now closed down because we are a 'busy' road. We are exactly the same type of residential road as the posher roads but we have a lot of social housing and as I said above, people in social housing don't complain.
It is not equitable, it is not fair bit it does ensure posh people who want posh ghettos vote for the Lib Dems.

Maybe instead of putting council homes in the middle of posh areas they should have just separated them out. That way the area would be run for everyone in that particular area and you wouldn't have an overlooked group.

What, create ghettos for social housing to keep it away from posh houses? Am I misunderstanding you?

I live on a boundary road. The combination of a CPZ, LTN and school street means that traffic is horrendous on my road now when it wasn’t before. Active travel provision isn’t joined up or been well thought out in anyway.

It’s also had another knock on effect that the roads in the LTN are now so quiet that I have to walk back the long way round on the main roads from the station if I come back late-ish at night if I am on my own. Slow hand clap there.

Good point about certain groups not benefitting. That has to be considered with new schemes. Were some posher areas just off the busiest roads and the areas with social housing on them before the schemes came in, so that the natural route went that way?

Agree that the transport ideas need to be more joined up across the country to have more environmentally friendly, safer and healthier areas for all.

I’m more concerned about removing the 20mph limit in residential areas. It’s making it less safe for pedestrians and cyclists and giving all the Audi and bmw speed racers free reign to cause even more accidents.

The main benefit of LTNs has been to funnel traffic away from leafy middle class areas into poorer areas as described above. Its virtue signalling which delivers little actual benefit or change for most people which makes it the perfect strategy for MC liberals.

This would happen anyway except on a street by street basis and it's impossible to serve a group with such diverse interests effectively. It also causes tension in a community if the different social groups don't get along.

I would love a Lib Dem to come on and say they don't nominate leafy posh roads as the quiet roads but they do. It will ensure they stay in power. Middle Class people in posh houses vote. Poorer people in social housing feel hopeless. not listened to and statistically are less likely to vote. Its a no brainer for the middle class Lib Dem councillors (and they are all lawyers and civil servants and teachers) who arrange quiet roads to keep their core voters happy.

I here keep hearing there's no social housing left.

I live in an LTN. It was spearheaded by a couple of cycling blokes locally who lobbied local councillors for ages.

The LTN has divided our estate in half, totally blocking routes through (think of our estate as like an H, now it's blocked off on both sides just north of the horizontal line). Those on the North side have no turning circles at the end of their new cul de sacs and reversing out is a pain.

We are the leafiest estate in our area and all have big gardens and large homes. We also live beside the largest park in the borough.

Our cut-through traffic is displaced onto two roads around us. To be fair, these are the main roads, and were always busy.

When the LTNs were proposed, the "champions" made anyone expressing reservations feel ashamed and frightened to say so. They ascribe any hesitancy to "not wanting driver inconvenience" and putting "driving an extra couple of minutes" over "our children's right to play out safely". No kids play out. There's no need since there's a huge park and everyone has gardens. We got a lot of "its pure lazy driver selfishness and you hate the kids if you don't want this LTN". As a result, the people against the LTN were scared to gather; meanwhile, the "pro" big guns were having regular meeting with councillors and writing positive spin about the scheme on twitter and in the news. But on voting, it was still only 52 percent of those voting who wanted to keep the LTN. It's been made permanent.

The sacrificial streets were given no vote on whether they wanted the LTN, or whether it should stay. The people who live there are majority Asian families, the houses are much smaller than ours.

Yes I would like children to have safer streets. But I would like ALL children to have safer streets. Not just the middle class ones. I would like bypasses, routes to the motorway that don't drive through my suburb, large venues (football stadia) to have parking several miles away and bus people in, except for disabled badge holders. I don't believe in creating effective "gated communities " of privilege and then the council patting each other on the back for a "successful scheme" when our estate will never be the same in regards to the way neighbours view each other. And yes, I would like my route to work to once again take 15 min less, and not involve two dangerous right turns into heavily built up traffic on the "sacrificial roads", to get to where I used to get in 15 seconds. But that really isn't my main objection.

Attaching typical "pro LTN" judgement of the type we experienced locally.

We had some LTNs installed a year or two ago, and the traffic on the main roads hasn't increased. If anything, it seems to be less. I see more cyclists than I used to.

The neighbourhood is quite mixed in terms of housing. Because of how the bombs fell in the war, most streets have a social housing block or two as well as Victorian terraces. So it's not a case of only the privileged benefiting.

We used to have one where I used to live. Instead of being able to travel half a mile down 1 straight ("nice" ) road , planters were put in place to block that road in places forcing you to make over a mile detour on already busier roads. I couldn't understand how it made sense how being on the road for considerably longer was good for the air /environment. There were also issues with emergency vehicles getting blocked and delayed. I supported the 20mph speed limit in residential roads as people would speed through which was dangerous on narrow roads with cars parked both sides. But when they removed the LTN it went back to 30mph🤷‍♀️

In our area which is Labour controlled, it's still the leafy green expensive roads that have LTNs. The poorer areas have more traffic and they have also narrowed down the roads as calming measures. So where a bus used to pull in to pick up passengers now they stop in the middle of the road and nothing can get past so a queue of traffic sits waiting for the bus to go again with their engines running and traffic builds up