UK example: making car use increasingly inconvenient
A roadmap to a 'low-carbon neighbourhood', or how to get rid of private cars.
Unwarranted road closures, roadworks that get nowhere, and car restricted areas. Low speed limits in cities and more and more surveillance cameras to enforce all kinds of rules. Living in the UK, I have experienced first-hand how driving is being systematically made more and more inconvenient.
Signs have recently begun to appear on the streets of London saying: 'Pedestrians cross when green man is displayed'. Some might associate this with the increased number of immigrants on London's streets, immigrants from parts of the world where there are no traffic lights and probably no such culture of traffic regulation at all. But there are other approaches to innovative signs. Indeed, some might feel that too many cars have appeared on the streets and pedestrians' lives have become more inconvenient, which is why such basic signs are necessary for survival.
Car congestion in the British Isles, particularly in the more densely populated south of England, is indeed problematic. Programmes of road widening and construction have lagged far behind the increases in population density and car numbers. Cycling, for example, causes great stress on Britain's roads, so it is mainly the fanatics or those who have no other reasonable means of transport who cycle there. The 'old normal' approached the problem differently. For example, former Conservative leader David Cameron promised a national programme of massive road widening to ease Britain's traffic situation.
WEF lessons learned and constant monitoring
But this was nothing more than a promise because around the same time, the World Economic Forum (WEF) began to take a very different view. These views have been evolving steadily since at least 2016, and today it is felt that the model based on private car ownership must end and that new models need to be built which are evolving all electronic spectrum from home appliances to urban planning. "This is the mindset needed to redesign cities to reduce private vehicles and other usages," say the wiser heads at the WEF.
To this end, the WEF has set up dedicated initiatives and working groups. Three major UK cities – Belfast, Leeds, and London – have formally signed up to the WEF's 'smart city' initiatives, but there is reason to speculate that there are other UK cities that are actually drawing inspiration from the WEF's vision through complex networks of influence or collaboration.
The most notorious example is, of course, Oxford. Oxford City Council already decided to ban 'excessive' car use by residents in 2021. The plan attracted a lot of criticism and so it is now the case that if you make a Google search of "Oxford 15-minute city", which is how the WEF concept chosen by the city to implement was originally worded, you will simply get pages and pages of "fact checks" exposing "conspiracy theorists" and "conspiracy theories" on the subject. Perhaps the local politicians were frightened by the radical nature of their own project and are now only moving forward step by step. In any case, their official policy has a much softer name now: 'Low-Traffic Neighbourhood' (LTN).
Even so, the policy has produced many disruptive measures, the implementation of which is increasingly seen in other UK cities as well. Clearly articulated in their policy is the idea of closing off traffic through parallel streets, which then directs all traffic into what is usually a single queuing zone, which, of course, therefore becomes a perpetual bottleneck. However, sitting in such artificially created traffic jams suddenly makes a driver think how nice it would be to have a city concept where you would almost never have to leave your home and everything you need for your daily life is just a 15-minute cycle ride away.
Secondly, I would also mention the implementation of Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras to implement the policy. The UK is one of the countries with the densest network of CCTV cameras these days (after China). Although most of these cameras have been privately installed, it is now common knowledge that law enforcement agencies can easily access them to carry out surveillance if necessary. The implementation of number-reading cameras is a quick slide towards increasing control over vehicles and their drivers, as these cameras can be given an ever greater opportunity to monitor the law-abiding behaviour of road users. This is, of course, also the case when the laws themselves come from dubious sources and have dubious aims, such as the potential imposition of sanctions on those who still wish to drive their car into a restricted zone. Or perhaps, at some point in the future, for those who want to leave a 15-minute zone without permission?
Making life hard for motorists: road closures and speed limits
One of the ways to make driving more inconvenient is, of course, simply to close roads. The city of Bristol, for example, is one, but not the only municipality leading the way in this direction. Closing roads to motor traffic is also encouraged centrally. The British government has even set up a fund for this purpose.
Undoubtedly, municipalities will feel financially more secure if the financing for these decisions comes from such funds, because they will then feel more confident to stand up to all sorts of pro-car lobby groups who threaten to sue municipalities for closing roads.
Perhaps one of the most radical plans to make life inconvenient for motorists is the Welsh government's infamous decision to limit speed in urbanised areas to 20 miles per hour (32km/h). While the original plan was to limit the speed on all streets without exception, in the later development of the plan, the plan remained concerned with the street network in residential areas and not the main roads. However, fierce opposition from local residents forced the Welsh Government to allow a process whereby, at the request of urban residents, and in consultation with experts, certain streets could be reopened to the traditional 30 mph speed limit.
One of the main methods that seems to have been used to combat the sense of comfort in car travel is all sorts of roadworks that go nowhere, and the disproportionately long and extensive road closures for supposed surveys or repairs. For example, in 2023, the M27 was 'temporarily' limited from a normal motorway speed of 70 miles per hour (112 km/h) to 50 miles per hour (80 km/h) because of concerns that an old type of bridge could pose a pollution risk to wildlife if cars drove on it too fast. Sounds like a hoot, but it was publicly acknowledged. No wonder, of course, that the place in question is an ideal place for the police, especially in the cover of darkness, to catch speeders, and that the speeding fines they are issued with are, after all, a way of accelerated progress towards a society free of car ownership.
The ill-fated M27 motorway is one of Britain's perfect examples of how an interurban highway that exists as such on paper tends not to serve its purpose in practice today. The M27 was one of the first projects to use the 'smart motorway' concept. At first, the 27-mile (43 km) section between Southampton and Portsmouth took more than four years to build, and was of course constantly delayed. However, when it was completed, motorists were able to enjoy normal speeds on most of the road for just under a year, when the motorway was closed again - this time after it was discovered that residents living in the vicinity of the motorway were being disturbed by the noise from the motorway, so it was decided to embark on years of resurfacing work. Current promises are that the resurfacing will be completed by spring 2026, provided the project will not be delayed.
Road closures tripled in five years
Sadly, the M27 is not the only unfortunate stretch of road to suffer from continuous or unnecessarily long and large-scale closures. At the local level, road closures have become more visible than ever before. For example, in Kent County alone, the number of road closures has tripled since 2019. What is particularly disturbing is that roads are often closed for roadworks for days or sometimes even weeks before any sign of real work starting on the closed road section is witnessed. There is also an increasing tendency to close roads for the whole of the repair section, even though the work itself is carried out in separate sections. One gets the impression that the aim is to make traffic on the repair site as uncomfortable as possible and for as long as possible. There is probably no scientific research into this, and it is also impossible to find any evidence that this is a deliberate policy, at least not with modern algorithms offered by Google.
The situation on British roads for the private car owner is getting worse every year and it seems to be largely a designed process rather than a natural application of the law of entropy. Driving a car, at least in the UK, is getting harder and harder, as well as more and more expensive. Clearly there comes a point where a large proportion of people will first give up the family’s second car and then move closer to work, because public transport in England is so bad it cannot be relied upon in most situations. By current trends, the WEF's target of reducing the number of global cars from 2.1 billion today to half a billion by 2050 seems realistic, and the UK may contribute to it even ahead of pace.
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Half, at least, of the judgements made concerning use, closure or indeed partial closures of public (public-funded) roads are made by incompetents. Sadly, our elected representatives who we had expected to look after our interests in the face of a humungous bureaucracy are, for the most part, incompetent. And we are the ones who elect those. At one time, any interference with the monarch’s highway was dealt with harshly. Now, nothing. We have people just clutching at straws to make sense of the world we lie in., hence the ever-increasing mad policies that inflict frustration and even harm, that in turn leads to a fragmented society. We ordinary folk cannot do anything about it, even at election time such is the poor quality of leadership on offer.
This is also starting to happen in Vancouver, Canada with restaurant patios taking up parking spots, needlessly placing barriers to make parking difficult or impossible and “safe streets” blocking the entrance and exit of certain streets so only one car can get through at a time. Very ableist and passive aggressive.