Why are there conspiracy theories around traffic reduction schemes?

A couple of weeks ago the Canadian philosophy professor Jordan Peterson claimed on Twitter that a traffic reduction scheme in Oxford amounts to a scheme by which “idiot tyrannical bureaucrats can decide by fiat where you’re ‘allowed’ to drive”. According to Peter Walker of the Guardian’s Bike Blog, this translates to an accusation that “a city is planning to lock people in their local districts as part of a ‘well-documented’ global plot to, ultimately, deprive them of all personal possessions” (Peterson quotes a tweet that links the Oxford traffic ‘filtering’ scheme to the so-called ‘Great Reset’ conspiracy theory). Walker goes on to tell us that people who object to the Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) imposed in many British towns and cities since 2020 are mostly “a noisy minority” linked to anti-vaxxers including Laurence Fox and the members of Right Said Fred, and GB News.

I cycle, I drive and I’m a truck driver. I get the bus and train occasionally. I have to drive to work because I live nowhere reasonably near a railway station, and the trains between that station and most of the places I work are nothing like direct, and sometimes I finish in the early morning when there are no trains. There aren’t any LTNs in my immediate area, but there are some around London which are ill-thought-out and cause major inconvenience, though a lot of the early schemes only lasted a few months. They were suddenly and very undemocratically imposed in mid-2020, immediately after the end of the first lockdown (this timing explains phrases like “climate lockdown”), before masks were introduced in July 2020, when a lot of people were driving to leisure destinations (a lot of people were still on furlough or working from home then) because public transport was not safe for everyone to use and buses had reduced capacity, and roads were choked with traffic pretty much all day. Some of the schemes made this worse: in Tooting, an LTN was imposed on areas around Tooting Bec and important secondary roads were closed off, while the main road was narrowed with ‘wands’ to expand the pavement for social distancing, resulting in nose-to-tail traffic that could not go anywhere else. Councils were allotted money from the government and allowed to impose them without any consultation because of the ’emergency’. (When councils hold consultations, however, they routinely ignore the results, telling objectors that it’s “not a referendum”.)

Ever since Ken Livingstone’s time as mayor of London, cycle lanes have been installed on roads across London; these have nearly always been at the expense of space for other traffic, including buses, rather than actual new routes (although sometimes they have been shared with footpaths as well), favouring fit young people over the elderly and disabled people and parents of young children who are more likely to take the bus. In Kingston, cycle lanes have been laid at the expense of bus lanes on a number of main roads (though this would have been passed by the borough council, not the mayor’s office) and in Chiswick, along a stretch of the South Circular Road where it runs along Chiswick High Road, there is a two-way cycle lane next to two lanes of westbound traffic, leaving only one lane for eastbound traffic at a point where traffic from across the river and from Brentford has merged. This obviously causes a bottleneck; this past week, there have been temporary traffic lights at that junction, causing tailbacks halfway to Richmond and Sheen for traffic coming from across the river. To make matters worse, an alternative route via Chiswick Bridge through the Grove Park area, past Chiswick train station, has had restrictions imposed on it by Hounslow borough council as part of a so-called Liveable Neighbourhood scheme so that residents of well-heeled south Chiswick are spared the inconvenience of passing traffic, and house prices there go up accordingly.

And this would not be so bad, but all the roads people have to use instead of those within LTNs are residential themselves. Mortlake Road, the stretch of the South Circular Road that approaches Kew Bridge from the south-east, is a glorified rat-run, distinguished from any other such road only by having green road signs. It’s narrow, windy, with a low railway bridge, with houses on both sides, and runs through a village with a green just before it reaches the river. It’s fine if LTNs and the like stopped people using residential roads when perfectly good bypasses exist, but they don’t. In London, cross-town highways were stopped after public protest in the 1980s, but people neither want commuters and trucks coming through ‘their’ neighbourhoods; they want them through someone else’s instead. Likewise, councils want to displace traffic onto someone else’s roads; in the case of Grove Park, Transport for London’s. Hounslow can similarly blame TFL for the difficulties caused by the mayor’s stupid cycle lane scheme rather than back down on its low-traffic scheme, supported by selfish NIMBY residents’ associations.

I don’t have any time for Jordan Peterson or GB News, but the simple reason people’s reaction to them is not always perfectly rational is that they were imposed undemocratically, often rather suddenly, at a time when the country was reeling from the first major outbreak of the Covid pandemic. The problem with all of these schemes is that they use congestion as a weapon rather than offering alternatives. Schemes aimed at cars also hit bus users, for example (ditto for the proliferation of 20mph speed limits). Schemes aimed at keeping some residential roads quiet force traffic onto others, as if people living on one road had a better right to a quiet night than those on another. I have no issue with keeping through traffic off roads that are plainly unsuitable for them, but not whole parts of town just because they make enough noise or have a word in the right ear, and we need reasonable alternatives, not just other windy little roads that just happen to have been built in the right place. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to be against ill-conceived schemes that restrict liberty and cost people their jobs because they can’t get to work on time. Our streets are all our streets; they don’t just belong to those who live on them.

Image source: Jack Fifield, via Flickr. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution (BY) 2.0 licence.