How a road safety scheme led my neighbours to mistake me for a Brexiter | Zoe Williams

I was trying to make a point about the lack of democratic process in some council plans to make walking and cycling safer. But I ended up looking weirdly contrarian"Build back better" is not my favourite phrase (meaning always gets sacrificed for alliteration; alliteration sucks), but it is the only way to think anything constructive about this grim time, so I am prepared to let it go. What if Covid changed the way we lived so profoundly and made us totally reevaluate what we care about, so that the planet, against all the odds, was saved? Well, my south London council has made a start, blocking all the traffic at one end of a toast rack of fancy roads, which will apparently make cycling and walking conditions much safer. It has called this the Oval Triangle.Look, I have no skin in this game: I don't have a car, I have not been frightened of cycling in London since 2001 and, anyway, I am moving. I don't know if this will reduce traffic, or just increase it on the other roads and boost emissions by making journeys longer. But I somehow busked into the WhatsApp group of the most important fancy road - let's call it Fancy Road - when, in fact, I live in the definitively not-fancy road just off it. So I know that there was a democratic deficit in the planning, which is that none of the not-fancy roads were consulted. No leaflets, no meetings, no "consultative process", just a bunch of giant planters suddenly where the thoroughfare used to be. Continue reading...