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Which ones have been removed because the details of the filters were bad rather than the lack of political commitment to seeing any scheme through?
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I wasn't trying to make that point. My point was that I don't think filtering should be imposed top-down. As for removal because of detail or politics, it's not always that clear-cut.
We had a case in Blackheath (which I think was further up in this thread, or if elsewhere will be easily findable) where the council tried to place a filter in what was clearly the wrong place. It kept getting removed by (presumably) locals and eventually the council gave in and didn't keep replacing it. Here, I would say the locals had a point that wasn't just anti-filtering or anti-council and the council had done shoddy work and was right to back down.
Remember also that the people doing the actual work of implementation are not politicians. They're technical people, and as in every profession, some are better, some are worse at their jobs. If you're a politician whose officers get filtering wrong, you might end up defending a very poor scheme, probably against very reasonable arguments, if you desperately want to stick it out and show political 'commitment'. (Most politicians don't understand the technical details in any case, which is fine, because they're generalists who have to deal with all sorts of things, like political GPs.)
I've seen plenty of schemes run into problems, often against prior warnings that weren't heeded. Not so much in my own borough, but certainly in others. Completely irrespective of the politics of it, councils should propose and implement good schemes as a very basic requirement. Imposing them in the way they have been doing only makes this harder.
Oliver Schick
As it happens, I've been involved in returning plenty to two-way. It does get done, yes.
It really depends on how you approach it. If you just impose it top-down, perhaps. If you have a proper engagement process (which is possible), you can have a proper integrated scheme.
I remain convinced that these changes shouldn't just be pushed down like they are at the moment. The vast majority of filtering schemes currently being done are simply terrible, quite a few have been removed again or weren't implemented in the first place, and there are numerous other problems. Trust me, it's really not as easy as saying 'something must be done, whatever the details'.