11: Low traffic neighbourhoods
Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) almost always encounter anger and resistance - but are shown to cut driving and increase walking and cycling where they are introduced. Leo Murray from the climate change charity Possible and Jon Burke, who introduced LTNs during his time as a Hackney council cabinet member, join the team. We'll also meet Brenda Puech, who turned an on-road parking space into a mini park or 'parklet'.
Episode transcript
[Music flourish]
Matt: Hello, I’m Dr Matt Hannon.
Rebecca: And I’m Dr Rebecca Ford and welcome to Local Zero.
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Our last episode, which you’ll find in your Local Zero feed called Movin’ On Up, was all about the challenge of decarbonising transport. It was about the changes needed to infrastructure and policy and, of course, to the choices that we all make in our day-to-day lives. Today, we’re zooming right in on some of the most local and the most controversial transport actions taking place, Low Traffic Neighbourhoods or LTNs.
Matt: An LTN is a group of residential streets where temporary or permanent measures restrict the passage of through motor traffic. That’s car traffic to you and I.
Rebecca: Where they’ve gotten off the ground, they’ve made real progress in reducing emissions and increasing uptake of active travel, like walking or cycling, but they often face substantial resistance from local people. Today, we’re going to be hearing from two people who’ve been strong campaigners for Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and we’ll be unpacking their personal experiences and seeing whether it’s possible to build wider support for street-level climate action.
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Matt: As always, we want to hear from you. Tell us what you think of the podcast and ask questions or suggest topics for future episodes. A really great way of doing this is to leave reviews on Apple Podcasts and thanks to GrayBrov, who left a four out of five-star review and also suggested he’d like to hear more from battery research scientists and engineers. That’s noted, Gray. It’s a really interesting area and so we’ll get into that soon and hopefully, turn that into a five-star review.
Rebecca: Reviews and suggestions are always, always welcome as are five-star ratings but joking aside, we love getting reviews because it helps us understand what’s helpful and interesting to you, so please do leave one. Remember, as always, you can tweet us. We are @EnergyREV_UK and make sure you use our hashtag #LocalZero.
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Matt: Shortly, we’ll welcome back Leo Murray from climate change charity Possible and also bring in Jon Burke, former local councillor to Hackney and Cabinet Member for Energy, Transport and Waste.
Rebecca: But first, as always, let’s bring in our faithful wingman, Fraser Stewart. Fraser, welcome.
Fraser: Hi, team. How is everybody doing?
Rebecca: Good, good.
Matt: Good, yeah. How about yourself?
Fraser: Ah, existing, you know [laughter]. I don’t want to be negative. The clocks have changed, the days are longer and it’s lighter in the evenings. I’m having a good, good time just now and I’m very excited for our episode today.
Matt: Absolutely, yeah. I’ve been looking forward to this one and, in fact, just logging on this morning and doing a bit of background homework and research on this, it is such a live topic. You type in Low Traffic Neighbourhoods into Google News and you are absolutely bombarded with news articles.
Rebecca: It’s an interesting one, isn’t it? Because I feel like Low Traffic Neighbourhoods are a new way of talking about something that is, for many people, part of their everyday life. So for people that don’t live perhaps in cities, they’re used to living like this. I feel like our transport patterns have changed so much and we’ve just seen the rise of the automobile in recent years, especially in cities, that we now need to use these kinds of new terminologies that can bring us back to a way of life that we probably all remember when we were growing up.
Matt: I mean the LTN, as a concept, isn’t new. We’ll hear a bit more about this from our guests later on but it really, I guess, entered the mainstream over the past year with Covid, with social distancing and, I guess, growth in the use of local spaces as opposed to city centres. I’m trying to make the division between home and work. People were having to find ways of expanding that capacity of our local neighbourhoods. Yeah, so LTNs are in vogue and some people like them and some people really do not.
Fraser: You see a lot of these make-ups and these designs of what neighbourhoods could look like. We know from Covid that people are open to the idea. We know that, generally, when you pitch the idea, people like it. They want to do it. The question is how do we seize this formative moment and turn that into lasting behavioural change and infrastructural change as well? Because it’s not just about taking cars off the streets, right? There are a whole lot of other things that have to go along with that.
Rebecca: Yeah, absolutely. I was thinking back to our last episode where Leo was talking about the way in which the Low Traffic Neighbourhoods are changing our everyday lives and kids are out on the street a lot more. I was just thinking that when I was a kid, we used to do that. All the kids from down the street... we used to play cricket on our street. Cars were a really, really important part of that because you used to get 20 points if you hit a car and 40 or50 if you hit a house. It was 60 if you broke a window [laughter].
Matt: 50 for a windscreen.
Rebecca: [Laughter] Exactly. Obviously, they were an integral part in the way that possibly they wouldn’t be in a Low Traffic Neighbourhood. My extended family live on the outskirts of Edinburgh and they live in a small village that’s been designed in a way to prevent through traffic. So it’s not a Low Traffic Neighbourhood in and of itself. There are cars present and people living there certainly drive but you don’t get any through traffic because it’s been designed with that kind of different lifestyle in mind but unfortunately, not everywhere has.
Matt: We’re all familiar with pedestrianised town and city centres. Often, that is how our towns and cities are now planned out. The difference is these are pedestrianised suburbs and pedestrianised neighbourhoods, so it’s about telling people they can no longer use their cars in the same way. If they’re wanting to go from A to B, they’ve got to go via C.
Fraser: Yeah, and when we’re talking about action at that level in the suburbs, it’s not necessarily just about Low Traffic Neighbourhoods as we understand them in themselves. There are other things that are taking place. Last time I chatted with Leo, who is on the episode today, he mentioned a woman called Brenda Puech who started the first parklet in Hackney. She’s since pushed that movement to get more small, green spaces on streets in different places across the UK which I think is a fascinating way to do things that’s not necessarily just tied to cars and traffic, although that’s a fundamental part of it, but also about bringing nice, green, recreational space to roads and streets that have been dominated by cars in recent years. I thought we’d go back out and we’d catch up with Brenda, who we’re about to speak with in the episode today which I think is a really amazing thing that she’s doing as well.
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Brenda: I’m Brenda Puech. I actually tried to get an online parking permit and they had literally hundreds of models of cars that you could tick but there was no option for a bench or a bike park. I wrote to them and I said, ‘Can I just come into the neighbourhood office and give you my cheque for a bench?’ They said, ‘No, you can’t have a permit for a bench. It’s not allowed.’ I had already planned that I was going to do it, so this was just to establish the stage that I had actually applied for permission and I had it in writing that I had applied. I decided I had to do it because otherwise, it was never going to happen and I’d be looking back at my life and thinking, ‘I never even tried it.’ I said, ‘I’ve got to do it while I’ve still got the energy in me.’ I’d bought everything and so it was all bought stuff. I bought a bench. I bought a beautiful umbrella. I bought very luxurious grass. Well, it was artificial grass but it was the best one.
It took up the size of a car, so it was actually two metres by four metres which is exactly the size of a car. I put two cast iron planters on either side, so that cars couldn’t reverse into it and because I was doing it as a campaign, I had an opening. I cut a ribbon and we had a big party. I had a friend, Caroline Russell, who is a Green GLA member, who came and cut the ribbon officially and she gave a speech because I wasn’t ashamed of what I was doing.
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I didn’t want to do it in a way that they said, ‘Oh, if she does it quietly, then she can get away with it,’ because I wanted there to be a process. It wasn’t just for me. I wanted a system to be in place and so that’s what it was about.
Fraser: Is that the reason then that you didn’t just apply and pretend that you wanted it for a car and then do it that way? You made a point of saying this is what it has to be.
Brenda: It was for a system. I wanted a system. Two-thirds of households in Hackney do not have a car, so the number that do not have a car is double the number that do. So it’s unjust that the entire curbside space is taken over by parked cars. Parked cars are there 95% of the time, so it’s a huge waste of space and it’s also given to them very cheaply. The annual permit on my street is £39.00 a year which is extraordinarily cheap considering it’s London Fields, E8 which is a very, very popular area. It’s ridiculous to give an annual permit for that really, really ridiculously cheap price and then not to allow that space to be used for community purposes for any price. I would have paid £200 a year for that space but I wasn’t allowed it at any price. I could only put a car there. It had to have an MOT and it had to have VED. You can’t have a pretend car. It had to be a car that was actually polluting and actually able to kill. That was my interpretation. So long as it’s something that can kill and pollute, you can have that space but if you put something benign like a bench and flowers, you’re not allowed, so it was the injustice of it as well.
Fraser: What did the council have to say when you finally unveiled it in the press and you had people around?
Brenda: The council only heard about it when the press started making a noise about it. I put a big notice on it that said ‘People Parking Bay’ and I said, ‘Please park yourself here, or your shopping, or your bike, or your drink. This is for you.’ There were mothers using it to sit down with their kids to take a rest. Older people were using it to have a rest while going shopping. Joggers were using it to take a rest. Everyone was using it to take a rest. People then started sellotaping notes saying how lovely they thought it was and saying, ‘Thank you. This is so lovely.’ I put out a visitor book and within a few weeks, four visitor books had filled up. I want to make a book of the comments in the visitor book because they’re so interesting. Anyway, the council got wind of it. Obviously, they did and they were considering their action. I think it took three weeks for them to put a notice on the bay which said, ‘Would the person who put this out please remove this paraphernalia, otherwise, we will dispose of it and we will charge the owner for the cost.’ I then had to make a decision. I set up a petition to allow it to remain and it quickly got 1,000 signatures. The council didn’t relent. I actually went to a lawyer as well to get an eviction stay and they did give me a stay for another couple of weeks but then it was going to become too expensive to fight it. So I decided to remove it and put it in storage but then I moved it to a different location. It was very popular in London Fields but London Fields has a high footfall and people on trend in a sense and so they would be more open to something quite radical of this sort. I then moved it to Glyn Road which is in Lower Clapton. It’s a quiet residential road and I wondered how it would work there. People just loved it! People were just totally taken up by it and were using it, watering the plants and eventually, someone sent me a message and said, ‘You’ve got an eviction notice.’ The notice said, ‘This is an illegal parklet. It needs to be removed forthwith.’ The interesting thing was that local people didn’t know what a parklet was. No one knew. They just saw this bench, these flowers and these planters appearing but they didn’t know that’s what it was. I had called it a People Parking Bay because parklet is an Americanism, so I didn’t think people would understand but when the council called it a parklet, people said, ‘Parklet? Is that a thing? How can a parklet be illegal?’ People were really interested in the terminology. It created a lot of talk which was very interesting. Eventually, it was dismantled and I had to take it apart. However, there was a lot of local media coverage like the Evening Standard, the Hackney Gazette and Cambridge News as well. They were all saying, ‘What a shame!’ They were portraying it as a battle between a lone campaigner and the council. The thing is I actually have a good relationship with the council. So I was defying them and it was basically because they weren’t moving fast enough. They were building one parklet every two years and I just thought, ‘No, that’s just ridiculous.’
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I used to bump into them on the street and I used to say, ‘Read the visitor books. This thing has got such huge potential. You’ve got to give it a chance. You’ve got to have a pilot. You’ve got to try it out.’ Eventually, they put it in their manifesto for next year. They had a local election manifesto and they said, ‘If we win the elections, we’re going to do parklets.’ That was one year later and that was absolutely amazing to see, so I was really, really delighted.
Fraser: Yeah, that’s fantastic. That’s absolutely fantastic. So they took it into their manifesto and you eventually won them around. What kind of parklets have popped up since?
Brenda: There are now eight community parklets across Hackney and they’re all very unique. You’ve got one that is a herb garden and people come and pick their herbs there for their dinner and then they chat to each other. One of the women who put it up said that she even got a proposal of marriage from someone who just loved what she was doing but she was already married. It just showed how much people loved the idea. There was one that was built by two neighbours who had no garden because they lived up in a flat on the higher floors. In fact, that helped them get to know each other because they only knew each other to say hello. They then got together to build the garden and they became good mates. The garden then became the centre of a street party they had for their street. They ended up lobbying to have a street filter closure and they got one. From a parklet, they went to a filter and now their street is a lovely, quiet street. So this thing becomes a catalyst for something much bigger and for people to say, ‘Actually, we want more from our street.’
A group of us grassroots activists have got together and formed the London Parklets Campaign. It’s on Twitter and on Instagram. We have a website. It’s basically campaigning London-wide and working jointly so that we’re stronger to have a parklet permit system across London.
Fraser: What is your best advice to people who want to get a parklet off the ground?
Brenda: It’s not easy but I would say start talking to your local authority. Start talking to your active travel people because they are most likely to get a process in place. We need peer pressure. They should phone up Hackney Council and ask them how they do it and get advice from them because Hackney has successfully run this programme. This is a very unusual thing for a council because it’s giving up a bit of control of the street to local people and the council is very wary of that but I think if momentum builds up, we’ll get councils all over the country giving permission for parklets and having a parklet permit system. That’s what we hope for.
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Leo: Hi, I am Leo Murray. I am the Director of Innovation at the climate change charity Possible.
Jon: I’m Jon Burke. I’m probably most well known for having been the former London Borough of Hackney Cabinet Member for Energy, Waste, Transport and Public Realm where I delivered lots of new school streets and Low Traffic Neighbourhoods.
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Leo: Obviously, you’ve just had Brenda on who is a hero of mine and I know Jon and Brenda have history as well.
Jon: I’m a hero of Brenda’s.
Leo: Exactly! [Laughter] Brenda is a productive irritant, as my mum would put it. A grain of sand in the oyster that the pearl forms around, right?
Jon: The link between Brenda’s work and my work is I think Brenda has encouraged people to think about the public realm in different ways and in ways that might move away from the view that our streets, particularly, are there for the sole purpose of the storage of cars. There are 15,000 kilometres of roads in London and I think people like Brenda have encouraged us to think imaginatively about how they might be reinvented. That led directly to my work in creating Hackney’s first 21st-century street on the same or one of the same roads that Brenda pushed for a parklet. I think parklets are a good example of what communities can achieve and what their limits are. I think that the main role of parklets in Hackney was to show where there was some latent demand for the transformation of the public realm. For it to make a really big difference in terms of amenity value for residents, you’ve got to pull up some hard standing and create neighbourhood parks, whether that’s a build-out into the lane or where it’s the end of a road or there’s a modal filter occupying a significant proportion of the public carriageway for households that don’t have gardens and schoolchildren that have low access to green space, etc. I think that’s a really important component of LTNs. It won’t merely be about preventing the use of neighbourhoods as pressure release valves or a through-put for vehicles but actually, radically reimagining how the public realm looks for the benefit of residents. We also know that by increasing the quantity of green infrastructure in the urban environment, we can mitigate against the effects of increasing temperatures in our cities as well.
Rebecca: I live in the Southside of Glasgow and if I was going to see a Low Traffic Neighbourhood in my area, what does that look like? What would I experience differently?
Jon: It would mean modal filters but to allow for...
Rebecca: So those big bollards? Are we talking about the big bollards that you get in the middle of the road?
Jon: Well, it depends. Modal filters take a variety of different forms. The older ones are complete filters and they prohibit access altogether to all vehicles. There is an interim type of modal filter with fixed bollards that can be removed by emergency services and then there’s the more modern variety which are the ones operated by automatic number plate recognition systems or ANPR, as people will have seen elsewhere. They’re the ones that I delivered in Hackney overwhelmingly and they allow for the free transit of emergency service vehicles. Most people will live in areas where there are numerous modal filters that have just become part of the street furniture and may, as a result, even live in a kind of micro Low Traffic Neighbourhood that they’re not even aware of.
Leo: There are tens of thousands of modal filters in cities and towns across the UK.
Jon: That’s essentially the role that they undertake and the main reason for the delivery of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods more recently has been to address the issue of a very significant increase, in part as the circumstantial evidence would suggest as a result of the massive explosion in the use of Satnavs and wayfinding apps, of private motor vehicles using residential roads to circumvent an overloaded main road network.
Matt: Who are those arguing against LTNs then and why?
Leo: There’s a very broad spectrum. You might describe some of the people in this very broad spectrum as strange bedfellows. You have the usual suspects; the Licensed Taxi Drivers Association at one end, so black taxi drivers, and the motor lobby, the Alliance of British Drivers. It’s become expressed in the form of these One groups. You’ve got One Wandsworth and One Chiswick and so on. Normally, they’re not connected with each other but actually, when you look at the individuals who are involved, there are strong links to UKIP. That’s the natural tendency... and they will always oppose any sort of traffic reduction measure.
Matt: Just to butt in, we canvassed opinions from some local residents and, again, we don’t know their political affiliation whatsoever as that wasn’t part of the survey but we got a sense of what concerned Mr and Mrs Bloggs or Mr and Mrs Jones next door. Some of the common themes that started to emerge were the school run and people were concerned if they were running local businesses about footfall. If I can just run through a few of these and Jon and you can come back on them...
Leo: Yeah, absolutely.
Matt: Many people were actually quite inclined to move towards more active travel but blamed circumstances, whether it was weather or poor cycling infrastructure. I think a general impression that we got was not what you’ve just outlined but people feeling like they couldn’t make that jump and often, it was because there wasn’t a ready-to-go alternative, be that cycling, walking and all the rest. I just wanted to get your take on that from Jon and yourself, please.
Leo: There is the psychology of change. Change is difficult and a lot of people’s first instinct to any proposal for change is to pick holes in it and imagine the downsides. The fascinating thing about Low Traffic Neighbourhoods with respect to these types of concerns, which are perfectly reasonable and legitimate concerns that you hear from people, is that there’s a really consistent pattern which happens every time. A traffic reduction measure is proposed and it mobilises a minority of people who are super angry about it and take it very personally. Most people in the middle, who are kind of equivocal about it and have questions and things, then tend to back out of that debate and it becomes dominated by the loudest voices. That creates a sort of perception of a common sense view that everyone thinks this is terrible, even though when you actually survey people, it’s a minority. The key thing is that actually, those people who sit in the middle and think, ‘I like the idea of less traffic but what about the school run or what about that?’ Nobody ever wants these things removed afterwards. If you look at what happened in Waltham Forest, Clyde, who was the councillor who led this, had death threats. He had thousands of people marching in the streets of Waltham Forest carrying coffins representing the death of the area and shopkeepers were concerned.
Matt: I’m sure we can turn to Jon on this who, no doubt, has been in the firing line.
Leo: Yes, absolutely. Now, Waltham Forest has surveyed residents and fewer than 2% of people want to go back. The process of change is difficult and disruptive and that is mostly what you see. When you consult residents about proposals for change, what you get reflected back is a lot of anxiety about change per se.
Jon: I think loss aversion is a powerful force and expresses itself in different ways. One of the things that the public’s reaction to these changes tells us, more than anything, is how poorly... and this was reflected most recently in the Public Accounts Committee’s 45th Report on UK’s Progress Towards Decarbonisation, it is the low-level of engagement that there has been from the state with the public on the extent to which averting a global warming-induced collapse of society, which is no hyperbole as it’s widely regarded as scientific fact, will require us to make significant changes in the way that we live. Twenty years ago in London, less than 20% of children were driven to school. In some parts of London now, that’s above 80%. So when we talk about the school run as if this is some sort of an immutable law of educating children that you must drive them, actually, the school run accounts in many cities for 25% of peak-time traffic and is a significant contributor to congestion on our roads. That needs to change.
Rebecca: Let’s take it a step further and I’m going to reflect on some of my own experiences as well. We all know we need change. We know that we need to address the transport sector. We know that we need to move forward if we want to really deliver net zero and meet these targets that are absolutely imperative to a better and more sustainable future. I don’t think that’s the question. I want to bring up issues of inequalities and how we’re designing our Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and not whether they are a good thing or not but how we can make sure that they are fair for everyone. I have young children. I have four-year-old twins and so I travel around a lot on buses with my family. When I was in London with buggies, I was waiting at bus stops. There might be the infrastructure there but I’ve had to wait sometimes for 45 minutes and wait for four or five buses to go past because I cannot get on as there’s another buggy on the bus and I am not a prioritised customer. Add to that the fact that I’ve then got young children, I might be standing in the rain with them and then other people say, ‘You can get on and fold up your buggy on the bus.’ Let me tell you, you try and do that on a stationary floor, let alone trying to get your kid on a seat when no one gets up on the bus for you whilst trying to do it moving along. There are inherent problems in shifting people out of cars where we could be penalising those people who are least able to do it. It’s not the case that we don’t need these neighbourhoods. We need to make sure that there are alternative solutions. So what I want to understand from both of you is what could this future look like that doesn’t just put an intervention in because we know it’s needed and we know that we need to reduce traffic in the streets. We know we don’t want our neighbourhoods to become public by-passes. That is clear enough but how can we make sure that these are done in a way that doesn’t just penalise those people who are time poor, often paying more for public transport or paying maybe above what they can afford to and struggling already with a system that has not been explicitly designed around their needs?
Jon: I think the answer to that is that we need to make both public transport affordable and widespread but also the cost of driving should reflect the broader social and environmental costs and I think those two things are related. The fact of the matter is that we’ve consistently made it easier and cheaper for people to acquire a car and externalise the costs associated, both socially and environmentally, with the operation of cars to the rest of society whilst at the same time, systematically underfunding our public transport systems which actively discourage people from using them further.
Leo: Increasing costs and reducing frequency.
Jon: Absolutely.
Leo: Reducing coverage.
Jon: We’ve seen that over the past three decades or more, in fact, and more recently, through 11 years’ worth of fuel duty cuts which reduce the marginal operating costs of a motor vehicle and encourage people, when they’ve got one, to use it even more than they did previously. We’ve got policy going in the wrong direction in many ways and Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, to some degree, help reverse that process but they can’t achieve all of the outcomes we’re seeking to achieve on their own. They need to be part of a broader range of policy measures which, as I noted earlier, include road user pricing, affordable widespread public transport, active travel infrastructure and other measures designed to curtail demand for superfluous motor vehicle use.
Matt: So they’re not enough on their own?
Leo: No, exactly, they’re not. No one intervention can do every job. If you look at something like London’s Congestion Charge, again, it was hugely controversial when it was being proposed. You couldn’t find anybody who would stick up for it. Ken Livingstone was really on his own. He brought it in six months later and the majority of Londoners supported it because they saw that it was working and he used the proceeds to invest in bus services and bus ridership went up in London when it was falling in every other city.
Jon: Ken Livingstone added 100,000 kilometres to the bus network during his two mayoral terms.
Leo: Matt, I want to bring it back to Low Traffic Neighbourhoods because often, they’re perceived only as a stick. They make it harder to drive and that’s true and that is part of how they have such a powerful effect on getting people to walk and cycle which is by just reducing the utility of private motor traffic. Your car becomes less useful if you live in a Low Traffic Neighbourhood. What they also do, by transforming the public realm to make it safer and more attractive for walking and cycling, they also act as a carrot and draw people in. So when people say, ‘I have no alternative,’ literally, in America, some cities don’t have a pavement and so that is literally true. That is not the case in London.
Matt: Leo, I absolutely take the point. I just wanted to take one small step back to your example of the Congestion Charge and the very good point about this stick of the Congestion Charge raised a carrot in terms of improved investment in public transport, particularly buses. That strikes me as the wrong way around, particularly in the case of LTNs. You’ve got to make provision for the alternative prior to then making the intervention. I take the point that you’ve just made that it can act as both carrot and stick but if you take away that opportunity to move via the car, you have to put in place provision for something else. Ideally, you do that in parallel or before you make the intervention. I think what we’re seeing in the context of Covid and, again, I’ll invite comment from Jon particularly on this, that councils were... I don’t want to use the word ‘rush’ because it makes it sound like it wasn’t thought through and I’m not suggesting that but they were rushing to put in place things like pop-up cycle lanes so there was that alternative. Looking forward, the clock is counting down on net zero, when and how do we put in place those alternatives to make things like LTNs make more sense to everybody?
Jon: What I would say is I’m not convinced by the argument that that is the right way around in the way that you suggest. Firstly, that’s because the powers to deliver some of the carrots are not at the disposal of the highways authorities who are responsible for Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. I would argue that the local authorities that have delivered them are doing their absolute utmost to address this pressing environmental challenge with the powers that they have. Low Traffic Neighbourhoods don’t displace traffic; they place traffic on the main road network, the through traffic, that was built for it. If we then subsequently find, because the number of cars on our streets has doubled to 40 million in 30 years and that there are too many cars for the main road network, then the answer to that problem is demand management for the main road network and not to turn people’s neighbourhoods into a pressure release valve. I think local authorities are doing what they can with the powers that they have but I was also clear that there is, therefore, a responsibility for City Hall which, in my view, has taken its foot off the pedal, if you’ll excuse the pun, of dealing with an overloaded main road network because our communities have absorbed the full increase in driving on London’s roads over the last decade. If we waited around for the powers that can deliver some elements of this change to deliver this change, we’d have neither congestion charging and road user pricing or Low Traffic Neighbourhoods because we’d be in a Mexican standoff with the other tiers of the state all saying, ‘You move first.’ Local authorities have moved and now it’s the duty of strategic executive mayoralties, Highways England, Transport for London and other relevant bodies to do what they ought.
Matt: Okay, so there needs to be more of a joined-up approach from all actors across the governance landscape.
Jon: I think the joined-up element of it is... people hate this expression but I think, to some degree, that’s for the birds. I think certain tiers of government need to use the powers they’ve got and other tiers need to be able to respond to that. In environmental policymaking, and this is true of surface transport emissions as much as anything, if you give politicians an opportunity to sit around, write reports and spend time in meetings talking about what they’re going to do, they’re going to do that before delivering action on these matters. The reams of decarbonisation strategies that exist across this country with no commensurate level of action are testament to that.
Leo: Well said, Jon.
Jon: I think people need to act. When people act to address the root causes of surface transport emissions, there is a reaction to that from groups of people who have gotten used to the operation of the road network as it was. Now I understand that change is difficult for those people. What I’m not going to do is sit down and tell drivers that there’s a solution to the problems that we face that involves them being able to do exactly what they did previously. That’s not my subjective view. If we take a look at the Sixth Carbon Budget of the Climate Change Committee, it’s very clear that not only do we need to fully electrify every last vehicle on the road but even in their balanced decarbonisation pathway, we need to eliminate close to 15% of the miles currently driven on our roads by 2050. In London alone, that amounts to 4 billion miles a year which is, conveniently enough, the last ten years’ increase in driving. That’s what we’re doing in local authorities in the capital and nobody, I think, ever argued that reversing the inducement of demand for the use of our residential roads by cars, which has been incentivised by Satnavs, was ever going to be easy. Decarbonisation at the level of the individual is very tricky and we can expect that every time that we seek to alter people’s lifestyles that bring us in line with our carbon budget, which is an absolute environmental necessity, we’re going to experience this. Every local authority that’s delivered LTNs in the country has done it in quite different ways; some wildly different ways and some subtly different ways but they’re all different. Yet in every single instance, where people can’t bring themselves to object even to the principle of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, every single council, without fail, has been accused of rushing their implementation, not implementing them properly...
Leo: Yeah, and democratic...
Jon: There are a thousand different ways to say ‘I don’t like Low Traffic Neighbourhoods’ and Leo and I, I think, know of at least 998 of them.
Rebecca: Let’s touch back on one of the positives that Leo was talking about earlier. Earlier, Leo, you mentioned that once these things are implemented, you start to see kids playing in the street and the streets become a much friendlier place. I just want to contrast that with another perspective that we’ve heard on social media and, again, I’ve personally felt which is when I am walking around places, sometimes I can feel less safe, particularly if it’s dark. I live really close to the train station actually in Glasgow and I live in a very friendly neighbourhood with lots of kids. The street I live in, come Halloween (obviously not last year with Covid), usually, it’s just full of kids dominating the streets and celebrating these events. I still feel unsafe when it’s dark walking around. I want to touch back on this idea that they can be safer places but when they’re being implemented, are they being implemented in a way that makes people feel safe and secure outside of their car? Because we know that cars aren’t necessarily the safest things to be in but as we heard on our last episode, talking to Debbie Hopkins, she was citing some work which shows that people do feel safer in their cars. So how is safety being built into this?
Matt: I think it’s also important here to flag an important study from Anna Goodman and Rachel Aldred who’ve identified that actually, the LTNs have, initially from this study and certainly in Waltham Forest, made streets safer. Again, there’s perception and reality and this is a very new space.
Leo: I’m pleased you said that Matt, because actually, objectively speaking, Low Traffic Neighbourhoods do make people safer. There are huge drops in pedestrian and cyclist collisions and casualties and for car passengers as well with no increase on other streets.
Jon: I’d add to that, Leo, that the largest falls in crimes on streets in the Waltham Forest study were of a violent and a sexual nature...
Leo: That’s right.
Jon: ...two of which disproportionately impact women on our streets. I take Rebecca’s point that there’s a big gap between perception...
Leo: There’s a perception, yeah.
Jon: ...and reality and I think there’s probably a bit more work to be done on explaining why eyes on the street and more feet on the street are likely to make you safer than people travelling past you in a car. When we make these policies, we need to do so in an evidenced-led way and the evidence is clear in Waltham Forest at least that within a year, within the LTN, crime fell by 10% and within three years, that was up to 18% and the largest drops were in violence and sexual crime. On that broader issue, because I think Leo makes a really good point about the potential for amenity value of our streets when we introduce LTNs, some of the guests here today will be familiar with the concept of trophic cascade. Everyone has seen the YouTube video of the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park.
Rebecca: Absolutely fascinating and I think we’ll have to put a wee link into that on our social media for those that haven’t.
Leo: Yeah, great.
Jon: I think trophic cascade is what we see when we introduce Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. It’s like reintroducing beavers to Yellowstone or the wolves. What we begin to see is a social ecosystem begin to grow up again in streets that have become social deserts. People don’t spend time speaking to their neighbours because the cars are rushing past and they can’t hear themselves think. They don’t let their kids play out. One of the consequences of that in London is that you end up with a culture... you’ve got four-year-old twins, Rebecca, so you won’t be quite there yet but you will soon experience the hell that is play dates [laughter]. One of the problems of play dates is play dates are necessarily socially segregating. The kids who go to the same schools together and share similar cultures tend to play together. Whereas, when most of the people in this room were kids and played out in the street, the kids in the flats at the end of the road, the kids whose parents rented a place and the kids whose parents owned their house outright played together because that was who was there to play with. The potential for increased social integration from the introduction of schemes that increase the number of children playing on the streets safely, and we know that parents are much more likely to allow their children to play out if they feel they’re safe on the street, is huge. Wherever we’ve introduced the Low Traffic Neighbourhoods in Hackney, we’ve seen that abundance of social life emerge. I’m not going to tell you there are no externalities that arise from the operation of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, depending on what your perspective is, but what I am going to say is that the benefits from surface transport emissions to the social life of our cities which have atrophied because of the growth of motor vehicle use massively outweigh the disadvantages and I think that we need to be led by the evidence.
Just on a final point about inequality, it is really important to remember that the richest people in our society own the most motor vehicles and drive the most. In fact, Londoners with an income of £100,000 plus are four times more likely to own a car than the lowest income households. So the idea that, somehow, Low Traffic Neighbourhoods penalise working-class drivers just simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny I’m afraid.
Leo: Well, you can always find outliers, can’t you? That’s what people who oppose these things do. They find an example of somebody who is car-dependent because of the status quo and the way that it’s set up and will be disadvantaged by implementing these changes. Change is change. It changes the calculus of winners and losers and the status quo that we have chronically disadvantages a whole lot of people who are very marginalised right now. The fact that there are some people who’ve managed to scrape together the beans to get a car and are now dependent on it is not a good argument.
Rebecca: It sounds like we need to shift the framing of this away from being just about cars, and I think with a lot of the debate we hear fundamentally comes back to this idea of getting in your car or not, to actually looking at how these interventions create those better futures that we all want. As Jon was talking about what’s happening and these social cascades, if you like, we were all nodding along. This is a future I want. This is a future I want for my children. I don’t think that that’s a future that anybody that responded to us on social media, when we were asking who disagreed with this, seemed like they would be against. I’m wondering what role do we need to get communities, citizens and people to be playing along with councils in implementing this. Leo, maybe you can tell us a little bit about how we can bring different people together in shaping these so that we see and we’re bought into this really exciting vision.
Leo: I think there are some lessons. There are some really key lessons that practitioners of urbanism know already. Some of these things are things that we have failed to do or the local authorities were unable to do in 2020 because of the way that the funding was set out and the very, very short timeframes that people had to do it. The first thing that you do is establish that there’s a problem with the status quo, that the status quo continuing is not an option and that’s not something that people want. So the first thing that you need to do is just to get everybody to collectively say what problems they have at the moment and what kinds of things they would like to see change. What you get back from that stuff, very, very consistently, is that people want less traffic on their roads. They want cleaner air. They want less noise. That’s your starting point then. Basically, you have a mandate to say, ‘These are all objectives that people in the area have said they want. Now we look at the evidence. What kind of interventions could we make to achieve those goals that you’ve all said that you share?’ That is, by far, the best way to go about this. Unfortunately, a lot of what has happened is the emergency travel stuff wasn’t able to follow that course but that’s step one.
Matt: Jon, I’m conscious that Leo has got to shoot and so I just wanted to put it to you both, just in 20 words and no more if possible, what’s the next step beyond LTNs? Where is this headed?
Jon: Go on, Leo.
Leo: Listen, road user pricing may not be the next step and that might be a huge leap but ultimately, that is where this is heading. This is the beginning of turning the tide because vehicle miles driven on the UK’s roads have increased every year since the Second World War, bar one. We need to reverse that trend and actually, Low Traffic Neighbourhoods signal an inflexion point at which we’re going to start to see traffic fall.
Matt: You mean people paying for how much they use the roads?
Leo: Pay for how much they use the roads but it’s commonly misunderstood. We like Transport for Quality of Life’s idea that it would be more expensive to drive a car in a place with good public transport access levels with good coverage and good frequency. There are a bunch of different components to road user pricing but road user pricing, those are the three words [laughter].
Matt: Thank you, Leo. Jon, you’ve got the final word.
Jon: Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, as I’ve noted before, are part of a range of policy interventions that are required to significantly eliminate surface transport emissions but I’ll leave on the point that Leo’s just finished on around the necessity of road user pricing. We shouldn’t assume for a moment that there are either costs for drivers associated with, say, road user pricing or no costs without road user pricing. In the third novel of Updike’s Rabbit Quartet, there’s this great line and he says, ‘If you live the life you want, somebody else will pay your price.’ What we have, at the moment, is a situation in which people who drive externalise significant environmental and social costs to the rest of society. That many people drive in society makes that no less true. It just makes it less popular to undertake interventions that discourage driving even more.
Leo: Yeah, it just makes it normal.
Jon: The point here is that, at the moment, there is a price to be paid for driving. It’s not born overwhelmingly by people who benefit from the amenity value of driving.
Matt: So it’s akin to the frequent flyer levy but frequent driver levy is kind of what you’re driving at.
Jon: I’m less interested in the specific operation of them than the principle. We don’t believe that people who smoke cigarettes should have the right to blow their smoke in other people’s faces and for those people to bear the cost of that lifestyle choice and we need to apply the same principle to driving.
[Music flourish]
Matt: Leo and Jon, thank you very much for your time today. That was really fascinating.
Leo: No, thanks so much for having us on.
Jon: Thanks for having me.
Leo: It was great.
Matt: Yeah, and we’ll see you both again soon I hope.
Jon: Please don’t have Leo on the next one. That’ll be three in a row [laughter].
Leo: Bye Jon [laughter].
[Music flourish]
Matt: Okay, so Leo has exited the room but Jon has very kindly offered to hang around our favourite bit of the show which is Future or Fiction? As you know by now, Fraser is our compere and the brains behind the operation. So without further ado, Fraser, it’s over to you.
Fraser: Thanks very much, Matt. I thought that was a really great discussion by the way, just before we get into it. For the uninitiated, Future or Fiction? is a segment of the show where I present a new, innovative idea to our guests and to the panel and they decide if they think it’s the future, in which case it’s a new technology and a genuine innovation, or if they think I’ve completely pulled it out of my backside. In this episode, the innovation is called... the Angel’s Share. Now it’s no secret to anyone who knows me and anyone who follows me on social media that I’m a good, Scottish boy and I love my whisky but what do we think of the following? A Scottish whisky distillery has devised a combined heat and power plant that specifically harnesses the waste from producing whisky to fuel a biomass generator for local power. Do we think it’s the future or do we think it’s fiction?
[Music flourish]
Jon, what’s your instinct on this?
Jon: I think I’ve read that that’s true. The mash that’s left over is being used to power the distillery itself rather than more broadly in the community but then I read a lot, so maybe I’ve just fabricated that entirely [laughter].
Matt: Jon, you’re a man in the know because you’re involved with Hackney Light and Power, so this is your patch too. This is something Hackney’s new whisky distillery might be turning to.
Jon: Listen, if Hackney hasn’t already got a distillery, I’d be absolutely amazed [laughter].
Rebecca: What I really like with this example is that kind of circular economy perspective. It’s using the waste of the production process to then create or drive power that could be used, as you say, to power the distillery or, indeed, depending on how much is being produced, to feed into the grid or to support neighbouring buildings. I guess I don’t really know much about whisky, so this is my downfall. I know that energy from waste is absolutely the future. Well, not even the future but the present. We know biomass boilers are in the present. What I don’t understand enough about is the whisky process. So this is where Fraser has really got one up on me again [laughter].
Fraser: Now, you see, I did that on purpose because I thought, ‘Well, I’m not going to sneak anything on transport past Jon and Leo but I can do days on whisky.’ What I didn’t anticipate, which I should have and that’s completely on me, is that Jon knows everything about everything.
Matt: Jon’s just read the share offer on this one [laughter]. So how about we have scores on the doors? Jon, it sounds like you’re a solid yes.
Jon: I think this is real. I think it is the future.
Rebecca: Oh absolutely, future for me.
Matt: So I’m going to go future but I will be interested to hear where this is because some places, this really won’t stack up but it sounds like a really good initiative.
Fraser: Well, there are plenty of places where it’s not feasible where it’s remote, they’re based on islands and they’re away from everything. That being said, the Angel’s Share Whisky Distillery powering themselves in local areas through biomass waste is... the future, as I think we’d already established. The combined heat and power plant in Rothes in Speyside will produce 7.2 megawatts of electricity and power approximately 9,000 local homes.
Matt: Wow!
Fraser: The electricity generated will be fed directly into the national grid offsetting an estimated 46,642 tonnes of CO2 emissions.
Matt: Yeah, so that’s big.
Fraser: So yes, another reason to drink Scottish whisky.
[Music flourish]
Matt: Yeah, as if you need any more reasons, Fraser [laughter]. Good stuff. Well, thank you, Jon.
Jon: Not at all. It was quite fun.
Matt: Thank you, Fraser. Excellent stuff.
Rebecca: So another great episode wrapped up. Thanks to Brenda, Jon and Leo for some really fascinating conversations and some really inspiring futures. Remember to tweet us @EnergyREV_UK. Use our hashtag #LocalZero if you want to ask us any questions or suggest topics that we might get to in future episodes but for now, thanks for listening and bye.
Matt: Bye-bye.
Fraser: Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye.
[Music flourish]
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