Modal filtering

I'm afraid compared to what Sunak has just announced, all the filtering in the world will just be irrelevant chickenshit. This Government has increasingly shown that it is intent on causing maximum motor traffic increase, mainly concentrated on electric vehicles. This will be achieved mainly through peripheral road-building (i.e., ring roads, orbital motorways/motorway boxes, tangential roads, by-passes, etc.), which increases distance travelled by motor vehicles like nothing else, and no doubt projects such as London's underground Inner Ring Road, as well as putting other roads underground to place development on top. After all, if cars don't pollute at the point of use any more, and naughty roads are underground and out of sight, there's no longer a problem, right?

Don't forget that Johnson has only ever used cycling, in whose purview filtering falls to some extent, as a 'soft' policy to confuse people and to distract from his largely right-wing and anti-social political instincts. It's from the ABC of Machiavellian advice to politicians--if you're too dictatorial and easy to work out, people will revolt, so try to break up your political profile with something that doesn't seem to fit, and some people will say good things about you.

I like filtering as much as the next person, but it affects comparatively tiny areas and is only a small gambit in the big political picture, which has become clearer and clearer since the £15bm and then the £27bn and now an even bigger funding announcement for road-building. Of course, much of this is being sold under the banner of 'sustainability', but that word has long had a viciously problematic double meaning in also referring to economic sustainability.

Automobilism is great for that because it makes people constantly need stuff--from the negative health consequences that cause people to have to seek more medical treatment, to the vastly-increased need to travel, to the need to buy cars and other vehicles, to economic practices such as how retail and business are going to work--with more roads and more electric vehicles, there'll be more potential for businesses to base their models on, say, highly-centralised Internet ordering and parcel delivery, and a lot of traffic. If you think that traffic levels today are bad, the idea that road-builders have is that if the traffic impinges less on where people live, then there won't be so much political opposition to it any more.

tl;dr--Don't be fooled by a bit of filtering, as it'll make virtually no difference to the way things are going.

And if you think all of that sounds bonkers, this map initially showed the state of these projects in March:

http://maps.dft.gov.uk/road-investment-strategy-2/

It may have been updated since, and may continue to be updated, but it's simply utterly disastrous.