Councillors who publicly declare support for low-traffic neighbourhoods do not suffer at the polls as a result, research suggests, indicating that the schemes might not be as politically divisive as is often believed.
The study also indicates that local politicians who openly express displeasure about LTNs do not suffer consequences in elections, although Labour councillors may benefit from a slightly positive effect.
The research also shows how comprehensively LTNs have been disowned by local Conservatives, despite their spread from 2020 being led by Boris Johnson’s Downing Street.
Not a single Conservative councillor tweeted a positive sentiment about the schemes during the course of the 2022 local elections in London, the focus of the study, the researchers found.
Under Rishi Sunak’s government, ministers have notably distanced themselves from the pro-active travel policies under Johnson, seemingly spooked in part by constantly negative media coverage of LTNs by some newspapers.
Last week, the transport secretary, Mark Harper, said councils should consider scrapping some LTNs, describing them as schemes that are “making it difficult for motorists”.
The research, conducted by the Active Travel Academy at the University of Westminster, found that while the majority of councillors did not tweet about LTNs, there was no statistically significant impact on the chances of re-election or vote share of those who did.
This seemed to be the case whether it involved Conservatives expressing negative views about the schemes or Labour councillors being more supportive.
The study, commissioned by the climate campaign group Possible, used the London elections, in which 80 LTNs – local schemes that use planters, bollards or cameras to stop direct through-traffic for motor vehicles in some residential streets, while maintaining access for pedestrians and cyclists – had been installed between March 2020 and May 2022.
Of the 32 councils, 18 had LTNs installed, amounting to 631 incumbent councillors, about three-quarters of whom were active on Twitter, a broadly similar proportion for Labour and Conservatives.
Just 134 councillors tweeted about LTNs, about a fifth of the total seeking re-election, seen by the researchers as a likely sign of the perceived controversy of the debate. Of those who tweeted, the median number was three – with one councillor managing 135 missives on the subject.
Using an analysis of the sentiments of the tweets, just under 88% of those from Tory councillors were seen as negative, with none positive. For Labour councillors, just under 82% were positive and the remainder neutral, with the figures for Lib Dems – a much smaller dataset of 77 tweets – broadly split.
Using a complex analysis that adjusted for boundary changes between the 2018 and 2022 elections, and took into account demographic factors, the researchers said they were unable to find any statistically significant impact of tweeting on LTNs for councillors’ chances of re-election or change in their vote share.
What effect there was appeared to be slightly positive for Labour councillors, the authors said.
They wrote: “Despite the noise on social media, protests on the street and countless articles about the polarising, divisive or simply unpopular nature of LTNs, there is little evidence here to suggest that there are significant electoral consequences.”
The report stressed significant caveats, including the possibility that councillors who chose to tweet about LTNs did so because they believed the schemes were popular, or were already confident of re-election.
