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  • Completely agree with your reflections on that.

    whether the locations of LTNs reflect a particularly privileged demographic.

    I gather this has already been challenged quite convincingly. Can't remember where/who.

    I guess I raised it because, unlike a lot of the spurious complaints about modal filtering (or 'cycle zones' if The Times is to be believed°), this one's quite a difficult one to argue against without looking like a privileged white dogooder - fact is, those less privileged tend to live in more polluted places.

    °It's not!

  • I gather this has already been challenged quite convincingly. Can't remember where/who.

    I can't remember the source (probably something by Rachel Aldred), but the Safe Cycling in London map is an interesting thing to browse (twitter account here). You can filter to look at just existing or just new LTNs. In my area at least there's an almost perfectly negative correlation between historic LTNs and the posh areas. The LTNs are mostly historic council estates. This doesn't mean that the posh streets aren't fairly naturally quiet, but they're still pretty awful public spaces (at least for cycling and playing) because the width of them has been reduced to being almost unusable by two lanes of parked SUVs.

    I don't have any evidence for the demographics of residents on main roads; however, I'm pretty certain that if you have two otherwise identical houses, one on a busy road and one on a quiet road, then people will be prepared to pay more for the house on the quieter road. Some people use that to infer that trying to make anyone's road quieter is conveying an unearned privilege on them; I take it to mean that people really, really value living somewhere with less motor traffic and therefore reducing motor traffic overall will improve everyone's quality of life.

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