Acknowlegements to source article from theguardian.com
Ignore
false claims and bad journalism – most LTNs do reduce traffic | Andrew Gilligan
I’m 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 “I want to drive and park wherever I
like”, or “why should cyclists and pedestrians inconvenience my much more
important car journey?”.
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.
So a new variant appeared recently in the Times, claiming
that “councils that implemented LTNs during the pandemic have seen bigger
increases in car use than boroughs that did not”.
This was based on adding up the total increase in
traffic returning after Covid across “10 inner London
boroughs that introduced LTNs in 2020” (11.4%) and comparing it with the total
increase in “two inner London boroughs that did not implement LTNs in 2020”
(8.9%).
In a
leader, the paper cited its “investigation” as evidence that LTNs
were an “expensive and infuriating failure”.
The two inner boroughs that didn’t introduce new
LTNs were Westminster and Kensington. There’s a completely obvious reason,
nothing to do with LTNs, for why traffic return has been less in those two.
They are central.
In the working-from-home era, central London’s
office-based economy and traffic hasn’t recovered as much as elsewhere. The
Times didn’t mention this. It didn’t even name the two boroughs, perhaps to
stop readers working it out for themselves.
Look at each borough, rather than adding small
numbers of them selectively together, and the “investigation” 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.
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 – and, indeed, 20 of the 32 boroughs?
There is good data that most, though not all, LTNs
do reduce traffic – both within the scheme area and, after a lag, on the roads
immediately around it, because fewer people make short local journeys by car.
And as you won’t 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%.
Such borough-wide data is of limited use anyway –
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.
The antis’ 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 – and that cycling is cheap.
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 the long-term anti-bike infrastructure campaigner
Vincent Stops, that “the cycle lobby has been allowed to ruin London’s bus service”
and that segregated bike tracks have “swung a wrecking ball at bus journey
times”.
The article cites no evidence, again perhaps
because the
evidence says something quite different.
Taking the most recent three months of 2022,
average bus speeds in Westminster and Camden – the boroughs with the greatest
amount of segregated bike lane – are precisely the same now as they were in the
same periods of 2013, before construction on the lanes started.
If that’s a wrecking ball, I’d be asking my
demolition contractor for a refund. The claim that 12 miles of segregated
superhighway can have “ruined” a bus network running on almost 2,000 miles of
road is obviously wrong, too.
The article gets one thing right: overall average
bus speeds across London have indeed fallen. But here’s what it leaves out.
That decline is largely due to huge drops in outer boroughs with no meaningful
bike infrastructure at all. Bromley and Havering, for instance, have seen bus
speeds fall by up to 6.3% since 2013.
As I mentioned, traffic in central London is still
not all the way back to pre-Covid levels. Speeds did drop in the centre after
2013, before recovering. But even on a pre-pandemic comparison (between 2013
and 2019), bus speeds fell more sharply in outer boroughs than in central ones.
So could it perhaps be that buses are delayed not by bike lanes but by the
growth in motorised traffic?
It is very telling that opponents so often have to
mislead to make their case. But that doesn’t mean it’s not effective. And if
left unchallenged, it can enter the political bloodstream.
So what active travel now needs is a network of
people to scrutinise, swiftly unpick and publicly rebut false claims and bad
journalism – and to complain to the offenders, who tend to be the same few
people. That has been rather effective in reducing propaganda campaigns on
other subjects, and making news outlets think twice before publishing slanted stories.
How about it, folks?
