Abstract

Traffic restriction measures may create safer and healthier places for community members but may also displace traffic and air pollution to surrounding streets. Effective urban planning depends on understanding the magnitude of changes resulting from policy measures, both within and surrounding intervention areas; these are largely unstudied in the case of Low traffic Neighbourhoods (LTN). We evaluated impacts of three LTNs in the London Borough of Islington, UK, on air pollution and traffic flows in and around intervention areas, based on monthly Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) and traffic volume data provided by the local authority. We identified pre- and post-intervention monitoring periods and intervention, boundary and control sites. We then adapted the generalised difference in differences approach to evaluate the effects within LTNs and at their boundary. We found that LTNs have the potential to substantially reduce air pollution and traffic in target areas, without increasing air pollution or traffic volumes in surrounding streets. These results provide sound arguments in favour of LTNs to promote health and wellbeing in urban communities.

Phoebe Weston
Chris Packham: ‘Cop, after Cop, after Cop, with cop-out, after cop-out, after cop-out, is not serving humanity or the planet.’ Photograph: Peter Flude/The Guardian
Chris Packham is urging the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, to attend a key nature summit to protect the planet for the sake of his great-grandchildren because we are “very close to the point of no return”.
The Cop15 biodiversity summit being held in Montreal from 7-19 December is the nature equivalent of the recent Cop27 climate summit in Egypt, with governments from all over the world expected to agree targets to halt the destruction of the natural world. But world leaders are not expected to attend the once-in-a-decade meeting where the next 10 years of targets will be agreed.

Who pulls the strings of the shady groups in Tufton Street?

For years sections of the media have worked to expose 55 Tufton Street and its outsized and malign hold over the Government via the opaque lobby groups and right-wing think tanks like the so-called Global Warming Policy Foundation, the Liz Truss linked Institute for Economic Affairs and ‘anti-woke’ groups like Restore Trust. 
Now Good Law Project has embarked on a series of legal interventions focused on Tufton Street cronyism: undisclosed donors, misinformation, astro-turfing, opacity and lobbying.
Restore Trust  – far from restoring trust – is one of many organisations which needs scrutiny. It recently tried – and failed – to seize control of  the National Trust, to stop it exploring debates on issues like slavery and LGBTQ+ inclusivity. Although Restore Trust claims to be grassroots it  won’t say who funds it, or even who it is. It has many of the hallmarks of an astro-turfed – a fake grassroots – organisation whose function is to mask the real actors who have a vested and often financial interest in the message they sell. 

In a significant decision just made by the Information Commissioner, the DfT is being required to publish the assumptions behind the trajectories towards net zero that appeared in its Transport Decarbonisation Plan.

The Freedom of Information request that led to the decision was made by Professor Greg Marsden of Leeds University, who says it is vital both transport professionals and the public know the tough changes transport must make to meet decarbonisation targets, and that all share the same forecasts on which they are based.

“Just because you’ve bought a car it doesn’t mean you’ve also bought 10 square metres of public space to leave it on,” Miguel Anxo Fernández Lores, mayor of the Spanish city of Pontevedra, tells me, firmly.
Once you accept this, he explains in the week that Europe smouldered and hundreds died in an unprecedented heatwave, you’re on your way to saving the planet by challenging the entitlement felt by car owners and purging cities of their domineering climate-destroying vehicles.
Who owns public space? It’s the question at the heart of a defining battle of the climate emergency era. From London to Oslo, through Paris and Barcelona to the Balkans, the fight is on to reduce the burgeoning number and impact of cars – which accounted for nearly a quarter of the European Union’s Co2 emissions in 2019. For decades the answer has been motorists, but this has to change if humanity is to combat what United Nations secretary general Antonio Guterres called the “collective suicide” of rampant climate change.