I revised my opinion once in 2007. I went on the radio to vigorously protest against the smoking ban, which was just about to come in, and was giving it the full Farage welly, nanny-state this, fundamental-liberty-of-man that. An unruffled guy from the GMB union argued, contrawise, that a person’s right not to get cancer from secondhand smoke at work was more important than the slightly foggier right to do whatever you liked, wherever you were. Stumped, I had to change my mind, right there mid-conversation. “Well that was unpleasant,” I thought to myself. “I’m definitely not doing that again.”
So it is with a kind of aching regret that I’ve come round to low-traffic neighbourhoods.
When they first arrived in Lambeth in 2020, I was living next door to someone also called Williams and he was a herbalist. After some snarl up on Google Maps, every device I owned had got it into its head that his business was my home, so my phone was constantly telling me how many hours it would take to get back to Mr Williams, the Herbalist; what traffic was like; what the Herbalist’s busiest times were. We were quite enmeshed, and I also liked him a lot, although I didn’t use his herbs. When the LTN came in, and people could no longer drive to his house, I could see his business damaged in real time.
It seemed to me that the people in the big houses had had a lot more notice of the low-traffic scheme than the people just trying to innocently make a living from herbs in the small houses. All the neighbourliness that had built up during the pandemic, when we were constantly offering each other eggs and chatting over garden fences, evaporated in a stroke. We would have mad rows in the WhatsApp group, where the people who went to Waitrose rejoiced that their journey was completely unaffected but, ah!, their breathing, while the people who went to the Lidl might as well have woken up to find it surrounded by a moat and a troll asking a riddle. LTN opponents made our own separate subgroup, mainly dry cleaners, herbalists, key-cutters and me, where they said things like, “and these people wonder why Brexit happened”, and I pretended to agree that Brexit was good, actually. There were times when the LTNs seemed more important than Brexit, or at least they were still in play, and I considered reinventing myself as a Brexiter just to be a better ally of the guy with the Portuguese cafe.
And this, according to the BBC’s Panorama programme Road Wars: Neighbourhood Traffic Chaos, has been replicated up and down the country. They went to Oxford, where they found the nation’s most abused bollard, on Howard Street. It’s not the hooliganism that’s chilling, it’s the howling impotence: across the whole spectrum of targets you could take direct action against, can you imagine anything that would notice less than a bollard? I probably would have switched sides in that moment, if I hadn’t already.
In the end, I flipped for a number of reasons. First I was forced to admit that my car use had declined precipitously, to the extent that when my car broke down I didn’t bother getting a new one. Reports of a significant drop in traffic within the neighbourhoods, reduction of air pollution, disease prevention, did sound plausible. Much more importantly, I woke up one day to find myself on the same side as Laurence Fox; even while he lived near me, in the white hot epicentre of his own LTN, he journeyed to Oxford to protest in their Road Wars, because that’s the kind of guy he is. I cannot travel with this fellow: I will U-turn in literally any other direction.
I also moved house, on to an arterial road, and now I could drive anywhere I liked. I’ve totally forgotten what all the fuss was about. All I can remember is it used to be fun, sometimes, to have a car.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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