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It is a very common statement, but when you look for actual data to support it, you enter very troubled waters.

In the UK as a whole, 80% of households are car owners/users. In London, that number drops to 56%. A quick back-of-the-napkin calculation shows that, with a rough population of 9.5 million, and average household number of 3 people (generous but makes the maths easier) that is 3.2 million households of which only 1.8 million have cars. Just over 111,000 of those are private hire vehicles/ taxicabs- leaving us with roughly 1.69 million private cars. Once work vehicles, vans, fleet cars etc are counted back in that brings the total to closer to 2.6 million. There are just as many cars registered in London as there are people in Birmingham, the UKs second largest city, and more privately owned vehicles than there are people in Glasgow.

Once those figures are taken into consideration, reducing the amount of cars on the road and/or reducing emissions is a far more complicated issue than just offering a few cycle lanes and closing a couple of roads. If almost half the city resident-households are using alternative transport, the question has to be not why DON’T the car-users just use other methods, but why CAN’T they.

LTNs do not on their own reduce car usage. They instead push the traffic onto the already congested surrounding roads; the thought process is that if driving is made more difficult and inconvenient, then rather than sit in extra traffic jams, people will try to find an easier option. This is a flawed theory. Making transport methods more or less convenient for the individual, not just in relation to each other, is needed to see any positive change. If almost half the population are already using alternative means, and yet the roads are still congested and slow-moving, then the only conclusion that can be drawn is that, for the majority of drivers, the other options are simply not viable. For the few who drive when they could use bikes or take buses, they obviously do not want to. Making the driving experience more unpleasant for every road user to try to dissuade these individuals is a hostile policy- surely a far better and cost effective option would be to make the alternatives more appealing- We have one of the most expensive public transit systems in the western world- the again dreaded ‘Little England’ mentality has meant our road infrastructure and tube network were left untouched for a century, meaning everything needs expensive and extensive upgrading and therefore ticket prices are considerably higher than in the rest of Europe. If buses are expensive, take a long time to get anywhere and yet still don’t go where you need them to, then they are not going to be an option against the convenience of using a personal vehicle- but bus routes are the easiest to be examined and potentially changed to better suit the needs of the customers. For most people, these are the types of solutions needed to help them abandon their cars- closing more streets and creating even more congestion by removing lanes etc is just more proof that the people behind these schemes are so distracted by their own agendas that they cannot see the real issue- it is not that too many people have cars- it is that there are too many people. When, to cope with the extra demand caused by an increased population, we should be looking to expand our networks and transit capabilities, we are instead reducing them. In every natural system, when a principal transit route becomes oversubscribed and is under pressure, secondary and tributary routes are developed to allow the traffic to flow smoothly. If we were to replace our road system with our circulatory system, LTNs would cause tissue death and necrosis as blood and nutrients are unable to flow freely into the area and main arteries becoming more and more congested and then reduced in width would lead to a massive increase in pressure, clots, and eventually a stroke. Doctors work tirelessly to make sure this does not happen inside us, whilst our council and mayor are purposefully trying to make sure it happens around us.

So, if common sense and basic natural modelling show that car usage should not drop because of a hostile anti-car policy, how have some councils managed to generate figures to show that it does?

At this point in time, most data sets use numbers from 2019 (before covid) and 2021/22, but fail to take in any of the other external factors that could have affected the figures- such as:

  • People Leaving London- working from home has meant people no longer need to live in or near the city and can work from a nice 3-bed in the countryside for the same price as a bedsit in Highbury. When they leave- so does their car and its appearance in the figures.
  • Brexit- in 2020- whilst the oven-ready deal was going mouldy in the microwave, many EU citizens opted to leave the UK and return to the mainland, either selling any vehicles or taking them with them.
  • The Pandemic- Covid caused an unprecedented death-toll which will also have had a considerable impact on the figures.

Enfield Council then throws an even sneakier element in the mix- the figures they promote to show a 20% drop in car use on the roads around the Fox Lane LTN were taken during the petrol crisis, where most people were unable to drive at all as they had no fuel. Hardly a fair or accurate comparison.

So, overall, any data provided needs to be closely examined to see if it is telling the whole story. And, given the amount of extra congestion leading to increased fuel consumption and time spent getting in and out of their home-area, for a small, but not insignificant number of people whose work is based around their ability to drive, they may have to give up their car because the traffic has made it financially untenable to keep- the LTN may have literally cost them their job.

Sign the petitions to make sure Haringey do not do the same to us!