{"id":386,"date":"2022-11-24T07:00:22","date_gmt":"2022-11-24T08:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kevinfell.ca\/?p=386"},"modified":"2023-10-12T09:16:23","modified_gmt":"2023-10-12T09:16:23","slug":"ignore-false-claims-and-bad-journalism-most-ltns-do-reduce-traffic-andrew-gilligan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kevinfell.ca\/index.php\/2022\/11\/24\/ignore-false-claims-and-bad-journalism-most-ltns-do-reduce-traffic-andrew-gilligan\/","title":{"rendered":"Ignore false claims and bad journalism \u2013 most LTNs do reduce traffic | Andrew Gilligan"},"content":{"rendered":"
I<\/span><\/span>\u2019m starting to wonder if anyone is ever going to make an honest argument against cycling and walking infrastructure again. They do exist. People used to say things like \u201cI want to drive and park wherever I like\u201d, or \u201cwhy should cyclists and pedestrians inconvenience my much more important car journey?\u201d.<\/p>\n Those are still the basic objections, but these days most prominent opponents realise that it sounds a bit politically incorrect. You need some higher public interest ground, however shaky, to pitch your tent on.<\/p>\n With low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs), which use motor traffic restrictions to boost walking and cycling, the top choice used to be claiming that they increase pollution. But that has now been so thoroughly debunked<\/a> that it\u2019s losing its magic.<\/p>\n So a new variant appeared recently in the Times, claiming<\/a> that \u201ccouncils that implemented LTNs during the pandemic have seen bigger increases in car use than boroughs that did not\u201d.<\/p>\n This was based on adding up the total increase in traffic returning after Covid across \u201c10 inner London<\/a> boroughs that introduced LTNs in 2020\u201d (11.4%) and comparing it with the total increase in \u201ctwo inner London boroughs that did not implement LTNs in 2020\u201d (8.9%).<\/p>\n In a leader<\/a>, the paper cited its \u201cinvestigation\u201d as evidence that LTNs were an \u201cexpensive and infuriating failure\u201d.<\/p>\n The two inner boroughs that didn\u2019t introduce new LTNs were Westminster and Kensington. There\u2019s a completely obvious reason, nothing to do with LTNs, for why traffic return has been less in those two. They are central.<\/p>\n In the working-from-home era, central London\u2019s office-based economy and traffic hasn\u2019t recovered as much as elsewhere. The Times didn\u2019t mention this. It didn\u2019t even name the two boroughs, perhaps to stop readers working it out for themselves.<\/p>\n Look at each borough, rather than adding small numbers of them selectively together, and the \u201cinvestigation\u201d seems even more problematic. The lowest rise in traffic in London post-Covid (4%) was in Newham, which implemented five new LTNs. The second lowest (7.7%) was in that paragon of cycling, stuffed full of LTNs, Waltham Forest.<\/p>\n By contrast, the third highest rise in traffic (14.4%) was in Bromley, which created no LTNs. The highest of all (16.1%) was in Harrow, where a handful were installed but quickly removed. Could this be why the paper overlooked all these \u2013 and, indeed, 20 of the 32 boroughs?<\/p>\n There is good data that most, though not all, LTNs do reduce traffic \u2013 both within the scheme area and, after a lag, on the roads immediately around it, because fewer people make short local journeys by car.<\/p>\n And as you won\u2019t have read in the Times, across London the average rise in traffic post-pandemic was in fact exactly the same in boroughs that installed and kept LTNs as it was in boroughs which never did them, or ended them quickly, at 11.1%.<\/p>\n Such borough-wide data is of limited use anyway \u2013 most schemes have been done on too small a scale to have impacts across the whole. Saying all that, though, would have damaged the claim the Times was trying to push.<\/p>\n The antis\u2019 other favourite pseudo public interest argument is also under strain. To argue, as some do, that cycling is a middle-class conspiracy against the poor, you have to ignore that poor people are less likely to drive \u2013 and that cycling is cheap.<\/p>\n But poor people (and, of course, many other people) do use buses. Aha! Great! We can claim bike lanes delay buses! Or we can claim, in the words of<\/a> the long-term anti-bike infrastructure campaigner Vincent Stops, that \u201cthe cycle lobby has been allowed to ruin London\u2019s bus service\u201d and that segregated bike tracks have \u201cswung a wrecking ball at bus journey times\u201d.<\/p>\n