Then on the "anti" side you'll see what I believe are often disingenuous arguments. There'll be concern about the effects on this or that group, but really, they just don't want restrictions to private car use in principle, on an ideological level.
to me that just reads as '
I'm right and anyone who doesn't fully agree is wrong and their views should be smeared'.
I went to the RTS in Brixton. Great day out, lovely people having a party, sandpit outside Morleys, all that. Until I met a tired old lady, clearly on the verge of tears, didn't know how she'd get home, where her bus was. Collateral damage, but it left a taste I've never quite got rid of. A taste of the innocent youthful arrogance that says everyone else will benefit from what's good for me and mine, because it must be good for all.
You carry on with your
principled campaign to restrict what other people do because you don't like it and you know what's best for them. That's fine. What's less appealing is the immediate accusations that anyone questioning your vision is dishonest or disingenuous, with motives, hidden until you expose them, that are somehow representative of a malign agenda. Sneers in other words. Meanwhile you've gone off on one about speed cameras that no-one mentioned and ignored completely the discussion about how these schemes are being forced through at a time when most people are preoccupied with the virus. I wonder if that's because in the 20+ years since RTS the idea of widespread impermeable residential areas has not gained enough popular traction to be adopted legitimately, so steamrollering is the only way to achieve it.
Is top down, imposed social engineering really the outcome RTS sought?
I walked down St Matthews Rd yesterday. Saw a few drivers look confused then reverse till they could find somewhere to turn round, before joining the traffic on one or other of the main roads. They're all local, hardly anyone else uses that street, so they'll get used to it (or, as with the gates on Lambert Road, perhaps they won't). Maybe they all went home, forswore using their car ever again and became evangelical cyclists. Maybe. Or maybe they're grumbling to their mates, reading up on the dreadful Lambeth website, or on the starry eyed lambethcyclists one, or turning to threads like this where common people like them have been denigrated throughout.
Because Urban75 members have got old and bought cars.
Perhaps. Old is, after all, bad, just as power assisted personal mobility is bad. Perspective and experience equate only to '
loss of nerve', or '
anything that changes makes things worse' rather than accumulated perception of complexity, of babies and bathwater. The sort that recognises glib talk of
'exceptions - people with disabilities and people who genuinely need their vehicle for work purposes' as an expection that those at the sharp end somehow justify themselves and/or their use case to the local state, in order for their details to be added to a database for modal gates. A database which will automatically include all the different sorts of cab, delivery vehicles, state & local state exemptions that already make up the greater proportion of local streets traffic (exceptions perhaps being during the school run, the rush hour and the period when 4wds with tinted windows drop off supplies of coke to the very same people who demand access restrictions).
So yeah, whilst I (and I think most people) want a substantial reduction in pollution, noise, congestion, danger etc I am far from convinced that authoritarian impermeable residential neighbourhoods is the best way to achieve it. The skewed and obviously outcome pre-determined consultations and the virtue signalling and posturing on this thread have done little to persuade me.
I think a better analogy might be criticism of an off duty pilot for standing by whilst the jumbo captain presses the wrong button and the plane plummets to the ground. "Yeah, I was going to say that he should have pressed the red one but I'm contracted to a different airline on Wednesdays".
