{"id":453,"date":"2021-06-02T07:00:34","date_gmt":"2021-06-02T07:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kevinfell.ca\/?p=453"},"modified":"2023-10-12T09:18:38","modified_gmt":"2023-10-12T09:18:38","slug":"the-evidence-is-in-low-traffic-neighbourhoods-are-popular","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kevinfell.ca\/index.php\/2021\/06\/02\/the-evidence-is-in-low-traffic-neighbourhoods-are-popular\/","title":{"rendered":"The evidence is in: low-traffic neighbourhoods are popular"},"content":{"rendered":"
Are measures to make streets safe for walking and cycling unpopular? Are they vote-losers? Have we failed to take communities with us \u2013 and will we, as local politicians, pay the price?<\/p>\n
As a former Labour leader of Ealing council in west London, I was at the heart of this debate. The low-traffic neighbourhood schemes we installed in my borough, using cameras to stop rat-running in more than a hundred streets, caused a row noisy even by the standards of cycling scheme rows. Demonstrators marched to the council offices with \u201cJulian Bell \u2013 end this hell\u201d placards. The \u201cBell\u201d and the \u201cend\u201d were placed together to make a further well-loved phrase.<\/p>\n
The infrastructure was vandalised. I was accused of not consulting or listening to people\u2019s views \u2013 though the schemes, as trials, were themselves consultations. The schemes were often labelled \u201cunpopular\u201d and \u201ccontroversial\u201d in the local press.<\/p>\n
Now, we\u2019ve had the biggest imaginable consultation on these LTNs: we\u2019ve had an election. At the London mayoral election last month, the cycle schemes were by far the biggest issue in the five main wards of Ealing they covered \u2013 Acton Central, Ealing Common, Elthorne, Northfield and Walpole. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats blitzed the area, telling people that a vote for them would stop the LTNs. The Tory candidate, Shaun Bailey, paid a special visit to campaign against them.<\/p>\n But it turns out they\u2019re not \u201cunpopular\u201d at all. Not even really all that \u201ccontroversial\u201d, and certainly not the vote magnet our opponents hoped. In Ealing as a whole, the Tory vote did go up compared with the previous election, by 0.64 percentage points. But in the five Ealing LTN wards as a whole, the Tories went down. The Lib Dems fell, too.<\/p>\n Labour, whose mayor and council implemented the schemes, comfortably won all five of the wards \u2013 including one, Ealing Common, that the Tories took last time. The Tory vote in that ward dropped by more than 5 percentage points.<\/p>\n Labour\u2019s vote did fall across the five wards, but by less than the Ealing average. Only in Elthorne and Acton Central did the Conservatives do better, and Labour worse, than their borough averages. In both wards, however, and across the five LTN wards as a whole, more than 50% of the electorate voted for parties, Labour and the Greens, which supported the LTNs.<\/p>\n This analysis relates only to first-preference votes. When second preferences are included, the support for LTNs grows even further.<\/p>\n Similar, but even more marked, Tory underperformance occurred in many other parts of London where the Conservatives campaigned against contested cycling and walking schemes. In the borough of Hounslow, for instance, local Tories fought hard against the new CS9 segregated track on Chiswick High Road, and Bailey made a Facebook video attacking the scheme. Again, it was the main issue in the campaign locally.<\/p>\n At the election, the Tory vote in the three Chiswick wards along CS9 fell by between 10 and 12 percentage points on 2016, in a borough where the party\u2019s overall vote went up by 1.2 points. The Lib Dems rose, but only fractionally. Labour fell by more than 4 points in Hounslow as a whole \u2013 but in the CS9 wards, its vote went up by 4.4 points.<\/p>\n<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n