Your say / Transport
‘We shouldn’t stop the East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood but we have to listen to its detractors’
I recently attended one of the weekly protest group meetings against the low traffic neighbourhood (LTN) at Cafe Conscious, just around the corner from my house in the Barton Hill area of the East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood (EBLN) scheme, currently entering a trial phase.
It was my second visit to one of these meetings having attended one previously in July, and as a resident who has been passionately and publicly campaigning for the trial’s implementation, I felt some trepidation turning up on both occasions.
The local community is tensely divided over this issue, and I get the impression that folks on both sides have become firmly entrenched in their positions, either that the scheme should go ahead largely as is or be scrapped outright.
is needed now More than ever
I’ve no doubt that some version of the scheme, funded by the UK government’s City Region Sustainable Transport Settlement, will go ahead after the trial.
To turn down such a significant funding package on principle would be to cut off our nose to spite our own face.
Along with many of my neighbours, I’ll be glad when the finalised version is in place and we can all begin the process of adjustment to a new normal.
In the meantime, however, we face a period of turmoil as the resistance movement against LTNs gains traction, just as several similar schemes are due to be rolled out around Bristol and beyond.
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The imperative to reach across this divide within the community, to find common ground and re-open a space for compassionate dialogue, cannot be understated.
This was the motivation behind my attendance at the community meeting.
There’s a concept you get taught early on in an urban planning degree which is almost clichéd as relevant today as it was when Sherry Arnstein devised it in 1969: the Ladder of Citizen Participation.
It works up through increasingly more participatory approaches to political matters, including ‘consultation’ in the middle, to ‘delegated power’ and ‘citizen control’ at the top’.
For anyone involved with, or simply supportive of, the EBLN, this trial period represents a final opportunity to mitigate the social harms caused by what is perceived by many to be a top-down process of manipulation: the bottom rung of Arnstein’s ladder.
Arnstein’s ladder of participation highlights the different forms that empowerment can take – image: Open University
Of course, just because the consultation process has been felt by some to be manipulative, that doesn’t mean its proponents were setting out to actively hurt those who the scheme has inconvenienced.
Yet, however well-meaning the active-travel professionals’ intentions may be, any paternalistically imposed long-term benefits to public health and wellbeing will come at a huge cost of political goodwill.
Now that the trial has started to be rolled out, and the initial – albeit temporary – shock to surrounding roads is being viscerally felt, this grassroots protest movement is seizing its best opportunity to recruit disgruntled drivers.
Very long traffic queues are badly affecting people’s everyday commutes, and the simple, compelling message of ‘Stop the EBLN!’ cuts right through to mobilise people’s frustration, offering a sense of power and solidarity where the state has left them feeling disempowered.
‘Stop the EBLN’ signs in the window of Cafe Conscious on Avonvale Road in Barton Hill – photo: Martin Booth
There were more people at the July meeting than I’d expected. This week, Cafe Conscious was absolutely rammed.
While I respectfully disagree with my neighbours who want the EBLN stopped because of the sharp and short-term negative impacts, it is undeniably causing issues for people who currently depend upon their cars for (often multiple) daily commutes, school-runs and social support.
I strongly empathise with their frustration and of course support their right to peaceful protest.
However, while local strategies to oppose the EBLN were being discussed at the meeting, I felt concerned to also witness discussion about how best to use the campaign’s momentum to build support in other areas facing similar schemes, contributing toward the wider national LTN resistance movement.
Vehicle demand management strategies such as LTNs are well supported by evidence, but they can only be put in place in a political culture which permits them, so the way they are communicated and implemented is of utmost importance.
There are lessons here which planners and policymakers can – and must – learn from the EBLN’s failure to properly bring the wider community along for the journey.
Sadly, because of the strings attached to these particular funds – allocated by the Conservative government in 2021 – there are severe limitations to local authorities’ ability to enact any meaningful delegation of power or citizen control over the process.
A broken sign to say that a modal filter on Glebe Road is coming soon – photo: Martin Booth
As an urban planner with a special interest in transport policy (at the time, still mid studies for my masters degree), I got stuck right into the consultation process last year, blissfully unaware that others, particularly those living in the council tower blocks which overlook my terraced house, had little to no awareness of what was coming around the corner.
Many of those who did engage now feel they were completely misled by attempts to soften the scheme’s limitations with technical language such as ‘modal filters’.
For those who completely rely on their cars (in no small part due to the abject failure of Bristol’s public transport to provide any meaningful alternative), a ‘modal filter’ is, quite simply, a road closure.
Indeed, now that the trial is being rolled out, much of the roadworks signage uses the blunt language of ‘road closed’, with good reason.
By pussy-footing around this issue we do everyone a disservice.
Future consultations would do better to be up-front with people that road closures – albeit permeable ones for non-car users – is what LTN funds are primarily allocated for.
There is a strong, evidence-based case to be made for road closures; they work, but by dodging this issue with specialist terminology like ‘modal filters’ the hard conversations are simply pushed down the line, allowing resentment and mistrust to build up.
Beaufort Road in Redfield is a noticeably more pleasant place for active travel since the start of the EBLN trial – photo: Martin Booth
Negative feelings are now rife among the EBLN’s dissenters, but it would be a huge mistake to mischaracterise them as an angry mob.
People certainly feel upset and fearful, but mostly they simply feel ignored.
Many hold firmly to their position that the scheme should be halted, but everyone I spoke to respected my position that at this stage this is neither possible or desirable – and, crucially, they really appreciated my showing up to say so.
During a frank discussion with a few people after the meeting, someone told me I was the only person who had approached their group with empathy and open ears.
Those who feel hard done by understandably want to achieve some degree of citizen power over the process – and see protest as their only route to this – but I’m afraid that was never likely within the confines of this LTN scheme.
However, it is not too late for representatives of the scheme itself to step up, own these shortcomings, and do what is possible to work in partnership and resolve the current impasse.
To come back to Arnstein,offering therapy is not much better than manipulation, but it is one rung in the right direction.
There is a seductively intuitive logic to the idea that closing residential streets and forcing traffic to drive around a longer route will merely displace the traffic and, due to the increased queuing time, associated pollution.
This is only true in the short term, but established, evidenced concepts such as ‘induced traffic’ take a bit of extra time, and a wider systems perspective, to get one’s head around.
There is a similar understandable misconception around emergency response times.
This is where the opportunity comes in for the authorities to step up to the next rung on the ladder: informing.
Overlooking the boarded-up Banksy at the bottom of my road, in Barton Hill’s ‘town centre’, there is a gigantic billboard.
Each advertisement for a TV subscription package over recent months has been a tragically missed opportunity to inform the public on what changes to actually expect in this area, and why they are taking place.
Drivers will be unable to drive their cars down a section of Marsh Lane in Barton Hill when a bus gate is installed – image: Bristol City Council
It’s still not too late to get that information out there and counter some of the misinformation being spread far and wide about LTNs.
Everyone who lives in Bristol knows that, despite being named the UK’s first ever Cycling City in 2008 and being relatively cycle-friendly by national standards, it is woefully car-dependent.
Without at least making serious improvements to existing public transport services, even a welcome gesture like providing another year of free ‘birthday bus passes’ will have very limited success in dissuading those used to driving because, as things stand, the bus simply cannot be relied upon to turn up.
Yet certain amendments to the scheme could be made, in partnership with community groups from both sides of the polarised debate, to ease the transition process for those struggling in the here and now.
Simplifying criteria for bus gate exemptions for example, to allow anyone resident within the EBLN to opt-in for a small yearly fee, would prevent many from falling through the cracks in the current exemption requirements, and be seen as a significantly more inclusive and accessible approach.
There are locations, currently missing in the scheme’s publicly available plans, where interventions such as new zebra crossings, improved street lighting and greenery could go a long way to rebuilding a modicum of faith in the ‘liveability’ of the project.
For those who are deeply invested in this growing resistance movement, such mitigatory tweaks may be seen as petty irrelevances.
They will find themselves sorely disappointed when the permanent interventions are installed.
For others though – provided there is a genuine effort from officials to turn up to these meetings, compassionately listen to concerns and work towards reasonable, consensus-based solutions – such easy concessions may be just enough to tip some very tired people from a state of confrontation into one of begrudging acceptance.
Such a placatory outcome may not sound like the resounding victory either staunch advocates or opponents of LTNs might like, but nobody is going to be won around to anything if we refuse to listen to our neighbours – and we run a serious risk of adding more fuel to a petrol fire which is already getting dangerously out of control.
This an opinion piece by Ash Lindisfarne, an independent community planner specialising in sustainable transport planning and green infrastructure
Main photo: Martin Booth
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