In Covid-19 recovery, London bets big on low traffic

by John  Surico, Bloomberg City Lab:  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-28/how-london-s-low-traffic-streets-keep-cars-at-bay

A cyclist passes murals on shop shutters at the junction of Coldharbour Lane and Atlantic Road in the Brixton district of London. To curb cars, the city is establishing several “low-traffic neighborhoods” in the area.

 

Photographer: Olivia Harris/Bloomberg

Sarah Berry didn’t learn how to ride a bike until last year, when she was 27. For her, London didn’t feel like a safe place to ride. Except for one day each year — on Car-Free Day, when her block in Brixton closed to through-traffic and made room for a huge block party. “A neighbor asked, ‘Why do we only get this one day a year?’” she says. “It’s clearly the best day.”

In 2018, a group of neighbors gathered to investigate the idea of establishing a “low traffic neighborhood” (LTN), where vehicular passage is limited to residents. A handful of similar schemes had existed in London for years. In Waltham Forest, dubbed London’s first “Mini-Holland,” cycle- and pedestrian-friendly infrastructure in the Dutch style were introduced in 2015, along with measures to curb car traffic. Plans for the  Railton LTN were submitted to Lambeth Council, which oversees the southwest borough where Brixton lies, and a timeline was set for consultation and implementation. 

Then the pandemic came: Street traffic plummeted, and the timeline suddenly shifted. “We were told that plans originally set for 2023 would be happening in three weeks,” says Berry, who was a lead organizer in the effort.

As of late July, 114 low-traffic neighborhood plans are in the works in London. Seemingly overnight, what was once a novelty limited to a handful of neighborhoods has become the city’s de rigeur post-Covid mobility solution. The measures are also a response to car traffic, which has nearly returned to pre-pandemic levels across the country. Now local councils and advocates, encouraged by city and central government, are working to implement the schemes at a rapid clip — and not without pushback from drivers and residents alike.

In the announcement of “Streetspace for London” — an ambitious proposal to expand space for pedestrians and cyclists released by Transport for London in May — LTNs are the third (and perhaps less recognized) pillar of intervention, along with pop-up bike lanes and widened footpaths in town centers. But the responsibility falls on local councils, who control most roads in London. Either temporary or permanent “modal filters” (such as bollards or planters) are installed at key entry points and outfitted with traffic cameras, alerting cars and motorbikes — the numbers of which have also  spiked in London — that those without residential access are banned, using plate identification. Fines then ensue.

LTNs tend to be sited in areas rampant with “rat-running,”  where drivers use residential streets — often at the encouragement of navigational apps like Google Maps or Waze — as shortcuts to bypass clogged arterial roads (the same issue afflicts neighborhoods in U.S. cities like Leonia, a New Jersey town notorious for its access to the George Washington Bridge). In the borough of Hackney, Councillor Jon Burke, an outspoken supporter of planned and long-standing LTNs there, said that returning car traffic is endangering residents who were still avoiding public transport — the majority of which don’t own a car. “We now have a unique opportunity to secure those benefits for future generations and we are committed to doing everything we can to reclaim our neighbourhoods for people, not cars,” Burke said in a statement to CityLab.

A borough like Lambeth seems ripe for it. Statistics show that a growing majority of residents do not own a car and have at least one bike at home, yet most of the community’s car traffic (and resulting air quality, which is one of the worst in the city) derives from drivers passing through to central or outer London. In the case of Railton Road (not far from where I live), planters have been installed at the block’s northern and southern entryways, where drivers come off main roads to traverse Brixton, and at the Shakespeare Road underpass, which is used as a cut-through to Coldharbour Lane, another major thoroughfare.

Now, instead of speeding cars, the streets carry street chalk, murals, flowers, and signs with children’s illustrations asking people to step out of their car and explore the neighborhood. According to the council’s projections, Berry said Shakespeare Road could lose up to 3,600 vehicles a day from the scheme. “That’s a monumental number to me,” she said. “It’s almost like permission has been granted, and the roads are for you as well. You shouldn’t be flustered or frightened to get in people’s ways.”

Berry said that her walks actually take longer now — because she often stops to chat with neighbors. That, she says, mirrors  research from Donald Appleyard, who, in the 1960s, explored San Francisco’s community interaction through the lenses of traffic. Appleyard found that in “light traffic” communities, which saw about 2,000 vehicles a day pass through, residents had two more neighborhood friends and twice as many acquaintances, compared with residents of high-traffic neighborhoods (16,000 vehicles a day).

With car parking often on both sides, the Victorian residential roads of London are incredibly tight; there’s a reason why famed town planner Colin Buchanan, who wrote in 1963 that traffic can make or break a city, cited congestion in London as a cautionary example. “What we’re seeing with these LTNs is how people were supposed to be navigating these streets,” says Berry. Banning through-traffic, she adds, also opens up road space for those residents who do drive. “There are members for our community where driving is the only option, due to mobility issues or age, and you don’t want people who can walk, cycle or take the train instead to be taking up the space from those people. This is meant to keep cars on the main roads that were designed to take them.” 

Residents have been encouraged to share their experiences with advocates like Berry, who collects them online. The council has also posted contact information, for those with questions. Not all the feedback has been positive: Practically anywhere there are talks of an LTN in London, there is also  opposition. At Shakespeare Road, I found a sign hung on a planter that read “Barriers = Segregation,” a critique of apparent socioeconomic divides. Foes of the traffic barriers  have argued that they worsen inequalities, benefitting wealthier neighborhoods and sending traffic down less well-off streets (which is a contested viewpoint). Another sign nearby reads “Access Denied” for those with disabilities. Online, groups like One Oval, made up of “residents adversely affected by the LTN” in the Oval neighborhood, cited lack of community consultation, poor design, and a reshuffling of traffic elsewhere as sore spots, amongst others.

In my own block’s Google group, one resident shared news of another LTN nearby starting, and admitted that they, too, used the neighborhood as a shortcut into central London. On Twitter, one driver told me that their IT services business would be disrupted by the changes: “Now 5 minute direct journeys have become 30 minute ones, increasing my emissions greatly. It makes me think, why bother?”

Following the pattern of debate over Labour-led plans to build more bicycling infrastructure, the interventions have also been politicized, with local Conservative lawmakers stoking opposition to the low-traffic configurations. Yet the plans are being partially funded by “active travel” emergency funds  made available by the Conservative central government, Lambeth Council being one of the highest recipients thus far. London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who oversees TfL, is Labour, although one local Labour MP cited a clip of a falling tree as reason to renege on a planned LTN for Ealing in West London, arguing that it would block emergency vehicles.

The LTN scheme has been pegged as temporary, with extensive consultation being conducted by Lambeth Council and local residents to gauge results and tweak. Berry argues that, to succeed over the long term, the LTNs cannot be done in isolation; they must be coupled with other measures to boost cycling and walking. Borough-wide networks of LTNs, which are forthcoming to Lambeth and other areas, would ease friction with drivers and disincentivize the car as a mode in London, where a third of trips are now less than 2 km. “Change is scary for everyone,” she says. “Especially for people who have been told their whole life that owning a car equals success…. and then the rules are changed, and it’s disincentivized. It must be really confusing, and not feel great. But I’m hoping that the fear of change will dissipate.”

That process may already be underway. When I first moved to Brixton earlier this month, the Railton LTN had just gone online; then, I often watched cars breezing through the planters, seemingly not paying them or signage any mind. I also saw videos from Lewisham, where drivers were using sidewalks to bypass planters (Bollards were put in immediately after). Since then, the streets have started to respond. I’ve seen a number of cars stop in front of the planters, eye the signs, and then make U-turns. Both Railton and Shakespeare Road seem less crammed to cycle and walk down — as well as noticeably quieter. It’s not uncommon to see residents conversing at the planters, or children riding around them. 

One day, I arrived when workers from Father Nature, a local greening group, were busy adding colorful flower beds to the planters. “They’ll learn eventually,” one told me, speaking of the disgruntled drivers who resented the new barriers. He chuckled: “They’ll have to.”