Air quality improved both inside and on boundary roads of low traffic neighbourhoods, but Labour MP claims more LTNs will worsen congestion

festina wrote:

If people can't walk of cycle then give them a mobility scooter.

I often think that and yes they certainly could be more widely employed to help people who are unable to walk or cycle to get to the shops et cetera, but to be fair if you have an illness that stops you walking or cycling you might well have regular hospital appointments and if you don't live in a large town – or sometimes even if you do – you may need to go twenty miles or more for your consultations/treatment, in which case a 4 mph mobility scooter won't really fit the bill. There will always be some people who genuinely need to use cars - they are just a much smaller minority than the pro-car lobby pretend.

All true and "economies of scale".  Also a) the more driving the further it seems reasonable to space medical facilities (repeat) b) despite said centralisation we're also increasingly urban and probably - for much standard medical treatment - still not that far.

A quick google threw up this study - it was a) about acute care not (the increasing) "routine" / chronic condition maintenance and b) a decade (!) ago though and I think there may have been recent changes.  Still:

[quopte]The study finds that despite the total number of emergency admissions rising by over a third in ten years, the average distance from home to hospital has only increased by 0.2 miles.

In most cases these distances are not large: in 70% of cases, emergency admissions happened within 6.2 miles (10km) of a patient’s home, and only 3% of people were admitted to a hospital more than 18.6 miles (30km) from home. But the research did show that people in some rural areas have to travel over ten times as far as those in urban areas.[/quote]

Interesting figures, thanks. There will always be a need to travel for some treatment though just because it's simply economically impractical to have duplicates of highly expensive treatment machinery and properly trained experts in every single hospital, for example a friend of mine has recently been undergoing treatment for cancer; he lives right on the border of Greater London and Surrey and although he has two hospitals within a couple of miles neither have the highly specialist equipment and staff required for his treatment so he was offered a choice between King's College Hospital, about 12 miles in one direction, and Royal Surrey, about 20 miles in the other direction. This is for someone who actually lives in London (much as I like to call it the sticks), so I imagine in other parts of the country the problem is greatly magnified.

Also, not all miles are created equal. If your appointment is just a few miles away on the edge of town, but there are a couple of busy junctions with no real crossing provision between you and it, it might just as well be a couple of towns over - you're not much more likely to convince people that a slow-moving mobility aid is a viable way to access it.

Rendel Harris wrote:

There will always be some people who genuinely need to use cars

It's worth bearing in mind that these are low traffic neighbourhoods, they are not pedestrianised. Mostly they have the effect of turning a small area into an effective cul-de-sac - you can drive in, and you can drive out, you just can't drive through.

If someone lives in an LTN they can still drive or taxi to their hospital appointments, they'll just have the benefit of quieter streets to do it on.

That wasn't the implication of festina's comment, though - it was that no-one needs to drive(/be driven).

Indeed that is the case but I was specifically addressing festina's suggestion that "if people can't walk or cycle then give them a mobility scooter", which implied to me that everybody can manage perfectly well without a car, which I don't think is the case.

Indeed, only ... where are they going to ride their mobility scooter?  If the pavements are full of parked cars, or delivery vehicles, or signage for motorists, or dug up because that's where the utilities run, or someone's doing some building works...?

Vertical kerbs can be quite an issue to those with small wheels also, never mind changes in level.

Point is - there are still some issues - but the biggest one being how much we prioritise motor vehicles so that we accept as natural the first space to be used for any "overspill" or other requirements will come from those not in motor vehicles.

If on the other hand our country was set up something like this... and as for "but works" there is perhaps another way we could prioritise things (bridge?  No problem!).

"We can make your neighbourhood air cleaner, make your neighbourhood roads safer, make your neighbourhood quieter, make it easier for you and your kids to walk and cycle with all the benefits, both mental and physical, that brings, and it won't have any negative impact on other people."

"Wow, that sounds fantastic! What's the catch?"

"No catch. Oh, except one end of your road will be closed to cars so if you do drive you'll have to go in and out the other end."

"I'm not having that! That's all stick and no carrot is that!"

Despair.

I don't think the 'stick/carrot' remarks are in reference to the residents of the LTNs, though - its more about those travelling through/past them. Ideally, the LTN disincentives them to use private motor transport and shift their modal choice too. But if you don't provide viable alternatives, that disincentive doesn't have much effect, other than annoying them.

Fair point.

mdavidford wrote:

But if you don't provide viable alternatives, that disincentive doesn't have much effect, other than annoying them.

Mostly agree - but again we shouldn't forget that (given a short time) "traffic" is not like an incompressible fluid which has to go somewhere.  Indeed it can evaporate!

While everyone has a reason it seems to me we very easily fall into the thought that "they were driving ergo they had to drive" here.  Plus a measure of "important, meaningful journey" - after all they paid for it!

Apparently if you drive to (insert you local purveyer of snacks) then back to "get some air" those are "journeys" (probably helping "growth" or something).  Hop on your bike and merely ride around to "get some exercise" and that's frivolous recreation - even if you perhaps stop for that very snack.  And that's something wasteful that we can probably do without; can you guarantee you didn't hold up any drivers, causing congestion...?

UK places are generally very permeable to traffic...

Agreed that there seem to be a lot of people who presume that a cyclist is only ever cycling frivolously/recreationally whereas motorists are always driving for a Serious Purpose.

brooksby wrote:

Agreed that there seem to be a lot of people who presume that a cyclist is only ever cycling frivolously/recreationally whereas motorists are always driving for a Serious Purpose.

Meaningful A to B journeys!

Cello lessons? 

Longbow practice.  It (was) the law!

Danbury wrote:

"my concern from the beginning of the roll-out of the LTNs is that they are a ‘stick’ which has been introduced without any ‘carrot’ or enabler of green transport"

LTNs are the enabler of green transport.

She's almost certainly not daft, but I don't think she had really thought through what she was saying there.

I rather think you are the daft one.  She is clearly saying an LTN is just one element of a green transport policy - for example buying and scheduling more buses.  Its really not hard to interpret her statements as mostly positive unless you are wilfully casting her fully against LTN's.

I realise you were only giving it as an example, but I think in the case of Oxford, buying and scheduling more buses probably wouldn't help much. What's needed is more finding ways for the existing buses to bypass the queues of other vehicles (I assume that's what Dodds is referring to by 'bus prioritisation'). Most of the time when services are cancelled, it seems to be because they've sat in traffic for so long that they've effectively become the next scheduled service instead.

Well - her party may be in soon, so she perhaps she might like to push them to do a tiny little bit more for all those people?  And even perhaps for all those "left behind" - or just not well-served - by so much mass motoring ... indeed quite a few who turn out to be the same people she's claiming to be on the side of.

If she could even get a bit more cash sent to the authorities that might give them the options to spend on more than a "mini-scheme" here, a small intervention there.  But they might just use it trying desperately to plug the widening holes in their social budgets.  Or just dump it into actual pot holes (soon to return).

If they keep to what they've outlined "if you're not happy with things just now, vote for us so it won't get much worse" seems to be the message.

There will always be excuses for not going ahead with active travel schemes: 'not yet, it's too soon, what about doing X first?'

We need to get on with making streets safer and more pleasant, and enabling cycling. We need to do it now, and Oxfordshire are doing it - so well done.

Dodds strikes me as one of these 'I'm not against this in principle but' people. In reality, the pre-conditions they attach to active travel projects will be never-ending.

There is no difference between people who are in favour of active travel in principle but not in practice, and those who are against active travel.