Initiated in May of 2020, the Department for Transport’s (DfT) Emergency Active Travel Fund (EATF) was designed to address the immediate challenges of travel and social distancing under COVID while also thinking about longer term timescales of active and sustainable travel to tackle the country’s climate commitments.
At the launch of the EATF, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps stated “Accompanying the new money, we are today publishing fast-tracked statutory guidance, effective immediately, requiring councils in England to cater for significantly-increased numbers of cyclists and pedestrians, and making it easier for them to create safer streets.” Shapps further emphasised that “Pop-up bike lanes. Wider pavements. Cycle and bus-only streets. All examples of what people will start to see more of,” (ibid).
Nowhere in the Minister’s speech was there indication that these were changes the public wanted (e.g. people will see, not want to see) nor based on any engagement with the public. Shapps’s “effective immediately” meant a timeline as little as six weeks for local authorities to deliver the new measures. Under resourced and with several competing issues, many local authorities chose to install large, wooden box planters in residential neighbourhoods as a quick fix to making streets safer. What ensured was an overall sweeping resistance to the measures, accompanied by vandalism, protests and even death threats to locally elected leaders.
In this presentation I discuss why a mobility scheme designed to tackle two emergencies—the pandemic and the climate—largely failed in the eyes public, even though it was designed with their benefit in mind. What are the lessons to be had around communication and decision-making power in the context of transport and mobility? Why did the public accept emergency, often ad hoc changes to daily life in the case of a pandemic but not in the case of a more localised, perhaps more subtle public health and environmental crisis?
Mots clés : Active travel|Neighbourhood planning|Sustainability planning|Public engagement|Temporary infrastructure
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