How much can change in two years? In 2021, Boris Johnson urged councils to “crack on” with creating low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs). In 2023, Rishi Sunak is saying he’s on the side of “motorists” and seemingly wants them gone. We are being sent mixed messages. No wonder we’re all angry.

I am generally pro-LTN, meaning I am for public transport, quieter streets, and cleaner air. I run a Twitter account in support of my local LTN in Leith that has over 900 followers. But even I can understand how toxic ths debate has become. Further, I’m not going to pretend an LTN, or even a network, in any way addresses the true scale of the problems we face.

Let’s get the obvious point out the way. Sunak’s “review” is mostly a PR stunt. For example, the three LTNs in Edinburgh, consulted on and implemented post-Covid, have undergone or are undergoing various extensive, torturous public consultations and are subject to traffic regulation orders. Ask anyone to explain these and you will end up tearing your hair out. In essence, it’s a quirk of our Scottish legal system which means you cannot simply shove in these measures overnight, and therefore it’s unlikely we will be ripping them out overnight either.

As for public consultations, these have been comprehensive. In 2021 in Leith, out of more than 800 responses, a council survey found 75 per cent supported improved cycling and 80 per cent improved walking. And yet I can see how we’ve got to Sunak’s review, and I’m not fully unsympathetic.

LTNs are low-hanging fruit; easy issues to quibble over and be distracted by. Road signs and planters give an LTN a clear boundary, unlike climate change. I can sleep easier at night by focusing my attention on the placing of a bollard than I can get my head around heatwaves, famine and mass migration.

This isn’t a war between motorists and pedestrians, or cyclists vs everyone else. The elephant in the room is our culture of car dominance causing havoc and car manufacturers having free rein to produce larger, more dangerous, more polluting and more profitable cars. Around a third of our emissions come from transport, and over half of that is from cars and taxis. Are a few LTNs going to solve that?

I must admit that, when it comes to car dominance, an LTN is like putting a towel on the floor to deal with an overflowing sink. SUVs are now officially the most popular type of car, and sales are growing. American-style pick-up trucks are ubiquitous in our streets, partly thanks to tax advantages for people who claim they drive them for business purposes.

People are murdered in parking disputes. We’ve been encouraged to get into our cars since the 1960s and now we are being asked to get out of them. Yet four in ten of us do not have access to reliable, convenient and regular public transport. It helps the pocket that fuel duty has been frozen since 2011.

Mixed messages abound. In the new low-emission zones, we can’t drive our little petrol car from 2005, but we can drive a Ford pick-up truck. Most of us remember when wood-burning stoves were ‘eco friendly’ (until about last week), diesel cars were once ‘better’ than petrol cars, and smoking was alright indoors. Some claim electric cars are ‘zero emission’, but this wilfully ignores the carbon involved in making them and the mining for materials to make batteries, not to mention the toxic particles emitted from tyre and brake dust that can give us heart attacks and cancer and make up half of air pollution. So, how do you do the right thing when you don’t know what that is? Just ask my friend who thought it would be a good idea to get a heat pump.

We are asked to drive less, consume less, and shoulder the burden. In 2021, former government adviser Allegra Stratton asked us to freeze bread to fight climate change under their #OneStepGreener campaign. But we cannot save the planet by freezing bread, or by cherry-picking lucky LTN neighbourhoods.

It’s time to turn more of our attention and energy towards those who truly can make massive changes overnight: the politicians. One quick change they could make is to crack down on car manufacturers, and stop them making massive, dangerous, fuel-guzzling monsters that crash into primary schools. Yet politicians mostly stay silent.

Why? Because car manufacturers across the country are seen as an important symbol of our (dwindling) manufacturing economy. It’s the same reason Sunak is not opposed to opening a coalmine in Cumbria. As we speak, the UK is competing to build more gigafactories to make batteries for electric vehicles. Factories create jobs. This government has made little effort to upskill and retrain the workforce we need for renewable energy, to retrofit our houses, to work in public transport. Instead, the government has flipflopped on wind power, insulating homes, and now LTNs.

So, no wonder people are angry. No wonder we feel like net zero is nothing more than a marketing campaign. Sunak, and others like him, are not on the side of ‘motorists’, ie ordinary people. They are on the side of profits and lobbyists, just like they are on the side of fossil fuel companies, private water companies, property developers.

So let me be clear. I like my LTN, and I want it to stay. It has improved safety in my neighbourhood, it’s quieter and a daily joy to live and breathe in. But it’s not enough.

If politicians were genuinely on our side, they’d wake up to the fact that thousands of people in the UK die every year due to air pollution – a massive, silent and extremely expensive health crisis – and they’d realise that tinkering around the edges of our neighbourhoods, literally, isn’t going to cut it.

Rachael Revesz is a freelance journalist

Low traffic neighbourhoods are great, but they're not going to solve the big problem: Britain's car culture – Rachael Revesz

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