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It's interesting to try to think of arguments that will speak specifically to a conservative/Conservative/libertarian/classical liberal mindset. It's also really important, since that's where a huge amount of the anti-cycling rhetoric comes from. In no particular order the following strike me as having potential:
- Roads are a public space that we have historic rights to use. People shouldn't be excluded from using the roads because they don't have a car, but they currently are because of the situation on the roads.
- Children should be able to play outdoors and have the independence that safe cycling affords them.
- Businesses actually benefit from more diverse approaches to personal transport.
- Running a car is simultaneously expensive and cheap: it is expensive from the view of a hard-working family (TM), who could well use that money for something else, but it is cheap inasmuch as it is hugely subsidised by people who don't drive and the true cost of motoring (pollution, congestion, collisions etc.) to the driver should be much, much higher if they were actually paying their way.
- Cycles are often just the right tool for the job.
Unfortunately it's really difficult to get through with these arguments unless you can convince them of a the fundamental underlying logic chain that goes something like:
- The state and use of the road network are not natural, organic creations, but rather the result of policy decisions.
- People's transport choices (which involve various trade-offs of cost, time, reliability, comfort, simultaneous benefits (like exercise or listening to the radio), and self-identity) are constrained and driven by the environment that these policies have put in place.
- The situation that we see now is therefore not the result of people voting with their feet/wallets in some utterly unconstrained, free-market Utopia. It is not the inevitable and immutable endpoint of any transport system but the result of a series of policy decisions that has had some obvious negative consequences (e.g., the Westway) and some less obvious consequences (e.g., the creeping exclusion of children from the public realm)
- The ultimate result of this is that people (with specific emphasis on some groups: children, the elderly, people with disabilities, and to a lesser degree women) are being prevented from making a free choice as to how to exercise their right to use the roads and to choose the form of transport that is both best for them for the journey in question and best for those around them. This exclusion is just as real as if it were mandated directly by policy.
- The end result is injustice and a situation that ultimately is disadvantageous for everyone to some degree or another and can be redressed only by the means that it was imposed: policy.
- Roads are a public space that we have historic rights to use. People shouldn't be excluded from using the roads because they don't have a car, but they currently are because of the situation on the roads.
Thought this was interesting, coming from a tory:
"However, we must not fall into the trap of listening to the loudest voices in our party – or perpetuated myths on Twitter – as reasons for scrapping or never implementing these schemes. Imperial College London found no evidence that cycle superhighways worsened traffic congestion in London. In Kensington and Chelsea, independent polling found just 30 per cent of those surveyed were against the Kensington High Street cycle lane. This is not an isolated case as surveys have consistently found that the majority of residents support LTNs too – perhaps unsurprisingly, as who wouldn’t favour traffic moving from residential streets to main roads?
Polling in March this year shows just 16 per centof people oppose LTNs, whereas 47 per cent support them in London. Supporting cycle schemes is a vote-winning policy and for Conservatives to remain relevant in cities and amongst future generations we must embrace many Briton’s desires to cycle safely."