I would ideally like to put cars, especially HGVs and vans, as far away from the most people as possible.
You want to have your cake and eat it.
Want to keep cars away from the most people possible? Ok, ban private cars from the city altogether then.
Oh, but we can't do that because some people really do need private cars? Ok. What do they need them for? To get to services and to see other people? So they need to go to where people are? Right, so we must let people drive to get to other people and services but we have to organise it so that in order to do this, they stay as far as possible from other people and services? Doesn't really work does it. If you genuinely want to keep cars away from people, the only solution is to reduce the number of them that are going around to an absolute minimum.
Much the same applies to vans and HGVs. If they are doing genuinely necessary stuff, then the stuff they are doing is getting stuff to where people and businesses are.
This cake-and-eat-it thinking is partly what is behind the planning disaster of out of town retail parks. A town centre realises that it would be much more pleasant without heavy traffic. So they pedestrianise shopping streets, build ring roads and so on. All to keep the traffic away from the people. And that works just fine if everyone using the city centre facilities uses public transport to get there. But they don't, either because the public transport isn't provided or because they don't want to use it, or a mixture of both. So what happens? Retail parks appear outside of the centre, which are seemingly convenient to get to if you don't want to give up your car. And lots of people start driving there, and these anti-pedestrian hellholes which are also hard to serve with public transport expand and expand, and the town centre businesses lose trade and the nice pedestrianised town centre ends up with charity shops and empty units and anyone who doesn't have a car loses out massively.
That's not me making an argument against pedestrianised town centres. It's an argument against failing to make the town planning decisions that prevent all the activity moving out of the centre. Those decisions don't get made properly, because there's always so much resistance to anything that makes it more difficult to do everything by car. It's because of the same cake-and-eat-it mindset that you are displaying. They want the attractive town centre but they also want to be able to drive everywhere.
The idea that we can make residential streets the main traffic arteries is nonsensical and it's just deluded thinking that doesn't want to engage with the fact that if you really genuinely want to get traffic away from people you have to reduce the amount of traffic overall. And where you start is by eliminating all the journeys that really aren't necessary to do by private car because other perfectly viable modes are available.
They seem determined to whip up anti sentiment to them - can’t see why it’s helpful to have a meeting solely focused on it less than 2 weeks into the trial!
londonnewsonline.co.uk
