‘Stop the Road Closures’! ‘Open Back Our Roads’! LTNs, access equality and streets policy

Hackney Council has recently consulted on new low traffic neighbourhoods in Hoxton and Dalston, so sure as night follows day, some residents have been protesting to ‘open our roads’ (or ‘open back our roads’).

When people say ‘open our roads’ or ‘stop the road closures’ the real question is to whom they are open or closed, both before and after an LTN is put in place.  

We know LTNs don’t ‘close’ roads to anyone, they merely restrict through motor traffic to keep it on main roads better adapted to that purpose.  We also know there is strong evidence of many benefits from LTNs.  However, it is true that they have implications for freedom of movement, although not just in the way some people claim.

It is tempting to see the current state of city streets as natural or inevitable, but it is something that has arisen over less than the timespan of a single lifetime, as traffic growth has rocketed. 

Department for Transport Data on growth in motor vehicle traffic in Great Britain since 1949

This has transformed our towns and cities in ways few people imagined before the motor age. 

Cars have now become so ubiquitous that we hardly acknowledge them anymore and most people just accept their presence without thinking. Without positive action to prevent it, every kerbside becomes filled with parked cars, and every road dominated by their movement. This should not be normal!

More than this, people tend to hold negative effects arising from cars and driving to a completely different standard to other sources of harms.  This issue has been coined ‘motonormativity’ by Professor Ian Walker of Swansea University.  
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Professor Walker’s research has shown people are much more accepting of the exact same impacts (such as polluting the air in a densely populated area) when it comes from drivers and cars than from, say, smokers or other factors causing the same harm. The video below explains this in more detail.

A car is a fantastically useful tool, it allows a person to travel in a comfy chair, warm and protected from the elements, listening to music, and directly to where they need to be, with no physical effort at all.  But the truth is this causes community-level harms; pollution, climate change-inducing CO2, bus-delaying congestion, noise, thousands of annual road casualties, and uses vast amounts of public space.

The impact of this is also to effectively close roads to many people and even whole sections of society; unaccompanied children, pedestrians, cyclists, disabled people, people who can’t afford cars, and anyone put off by the noise stress and danger motor traffic poses. Generally the more dominated a road becomes by motor traffic, the less it is ‘open’ to those outside cars. This has led to poor population health and wellbeing.

Motonormativity means people are less likely to accept that their freedom to drive directly harms other people’s freedom to make different choices. 

When people struggle to see or accept the unintentional harms their behaviour causes, they are more likely to treat measures aimed at reducing harms and improving equality of access on roads as attacks on personal freedom.

But failing to address the dominance of cars has stolen the freedom of people to move without them, and in many places left communities degraded, environments polluted and individuals locked into car-dependent lifestyles which damage disposable incomes, health and quality of life.
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So next time you hear someone say ‘open our roads’, ask them if they mean open to school kids on bikes, or disabled people using mobility aids, or people who can’t afford cars, or if they just mean open to the small minority in Hackney who choose to drive.

The message of Low Traffic Hackney is:

If you wish to 'Stop the road closures!' (to the majority without cars) and 'Open back our roads!' (to everyone), then you need to support LTNs!
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