Jon Burke: Humanising our streets
Full talk (36:49) (see bottom of this page for transcript)
0:00 Intro (Councillor Damian Haywood)
2:41 Ambition
6:40 Keep the faith
8:43 Social media
10:25 Campaign to humanise our streets
13:48 Cars are costing us
15:55 De Pijp, De Bouvoir, Oxford ... it's the same arguments
17:16 Power matrices
18:35 Jane Jacobs defeated Robert Moses
21:19 Main routes
26:43 Councils' internal operations
30:20 Taking back the narrative
33:06 Astroturf campaigns
Below is the talk in separate MP3 files
Intro (Councillor Damian Haywood)
Ambition
Keep the faith
Social media
Campaign to humanise our streets
Cars are costing us
De Pijp, De Bouvoir, Oxford ... it's the same arguments
Power matrices
Jane Jacobs defeated Robert Moses
Main routes
Councils' internal operations
Taking back the narrative
Astroturf campaigns
Links
The following were mentioned in Jon's talk:
Top-line briefing paper on LTNs: https://twitter.com/jonburkeUK/status...
Study on impacts of LTNs: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/16340...
Statistic from "Bowling Alone" (R. Putnam) https://twitter.com/jonburkeUK/status...
Widely referenced London Society article (J. Burke) https://www.londonsociety.org.uk/post...
Useful talking points (J. Burke) https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entr...
Stats on car ownership: https://twitter.com/jonburkeUK/status...
Modal filters are cheap: https://twitter.com/jonburkeUK/status...
Railton LTN (Lambeth): https://www.pinterest.com/pin/railton...
De Pijp neighbourhood, Amsterdam (1972): https://youtu.be/YY6PQAI4TZE
Transcript
Introduction
Councillor Damian Haywood: Just to say, Jon has been a great help to me as a fellow councillor, great supporter of mine, and given me lots of advice and options over the years, and support, so really pleased that he could join us this evening. And I’m actually really pleased that he didn’t break the strike – I know we changed it, but you know [laughs] good attitude to have, so thank you Jon for doing that, and it’s really nice to hear from you this evening, really great to have your opinions on how we take our absolutely amazing plans that we’ve got that really, really could make a massive difference to Oxford in the next 5-10 years. So Jon, can I hand over to you, if that’s OK?
[0:58]
Jon Burke: Just to get some formalities out of the way first, I’d just like to very briefly reciprocate my ‘bromance’ with Damian, who has been massively I think it would be fair to say “at the coals” yesterday in preparation for this event. I do think it’s an important part of the terrain on which this battle is happening, and I totally understand why people who dip a toe in the water of this world – and experience some of the vitriol that comes with telling people that the world has got to change and it’s got to change rapidly, but ultimately we can produce better outcomes for our communities, for our children, and for their future, by undertaking that exercise – will know just how difficult those conversations can be; and I think it would be fair to say that Damian has engaged with that process robustly. But I think I’d also just say that it’s very important for people to look to their politicians as people who don’t simply talk the talk, and don’t think decarbonisation is just for the little people, but they walk the walk. I’m sure many of you will know about Damian’s own background, and how he has demonstrated that it’s possible, even with someone with quite challenging circumstances, for whom it might be very easy to use a car to travel short distances, has not done that. So I think he’s a much greater role model in many ways than I’ve been.
Ambition
[2:35]
But anyway that’s enough of massaging Damian’s ego! And I’ll start off where Damian left off, which is to refer to the level of ambition that is being expressed in Oxford. When I was a cabinet member in Hackney I was quite keen – probably from a kind of egoistic perspective – to be the deliverer of ‘biggests’ and ‘firsts’; but I think it would be fair to say if Oxfordshire County Council were to deliver on the wider programme of activities and projects – that go well beyond low traffic neighbourhoods, which we all know are just one component of the jigsaw of how we humanise our streets and decarbonise our transport sector – it will be I think far and away at this stage the most ambitious set of proposals of any city in the UK.
There’s a massive prize to fight for here, and you – in my slightly misquoted words from Carl Sagan – have found yourselves entirely by accident at a juncture in history that means you are the people that are going to be fighting for these changes. I think I noted a couple of minutes ago how mentally and physically draining this process can be, but I don’t think we should understate both the prize that’s at stake for the people of Oxford, but also the wider strategic importance of winning this battle, being able to demonstrate that it’s possible.
We’ve all had those arguments before about why – with people who want to maintain the economic status quo – about why Britain isn’t Scandinavia. But we need to demonstrate in a transport sense that London isn’t some sort of special case, that not only can things happen elsewhere, but actually that leaders can emerge in municipalities from outside the London bubble. I think that’s really important, because at the moment we run the risk of London breaking away in transport terms because of its governance arrangements with TfL, but also because of the autonomy it’s been undertaking around transport policy – in inner London in particular – from the rest of the country. So I think it’s really important for a city that has one central economic area, rather than a collection of those areas – I mean you couldn’t really compare London with cities outside of it, because structurally, geographically, in terms of the distribution of the economies and housing etc they’re very different, so for Oxford I think to demonstrate that it’s possible to implement a Ghent-style approach to transport decarbonisation.
But for the absence of light rail I think Oxford would be going further potentially than even Ghent with some of these proposals, and if it can be done there it can be done in any city of that size, and bigger again. I also think it’s really important to achieve this in Oxford, not merely because of the powerful message that that sends to other figures in local government, but also I think because of Oxford’s almost unique aesthetics, I think we have an opportunity to demonstrate just how much the transformation of the public realm through the removal of unnecessary motor vehicles, how beautiful that can make the public realm look; and what better canvas could there be for the transformation of the public realm, for the elimination of cars, than Oxford?
Keep the faith
[6:39]
So I think that there’s a huge prize at stake here, and I suppose what I’ve come here to talk about briefly this evening is not so much the technical aspect of how some of these projects are implemented, because I can already see that there are veterans in the room, that don’t really need me to talk to them about the operation of ANPR cameras or semi-closed filters and cycle park infrastructure etc – I think it’s to reassure you that though the media and the automotive industry and the outriders who are opposed to the transformation of our public realm that necessarily involves a significant reduction in the number of private motor vehicles on our roads like to make it appear that every time a municipality, a city, a local council takes this kind of action, that this is completely avant garde, it’s never been done before.
I think I’m here to reassure people that what I’ve seen emerge in Oxford so far, possibly with the exception of some quite surprising opposition on the city council – that two-tier governance system is very tricky! – what I’ve seen in terms of the opposition’s response to these measures is that there’s nothing new at all, the same arguments that were made against the 5 or 19 low traffic neighbourhoods (depending on how you measure them) that I delivered, and the 40 school streets and the segregated cycling infrastructure etc, that were made against those interventions, are being made in Oxford now.
So I think I can provide some reassurance that there’s a whole network of people who are on hand to be able to provide responses to those challenges as and when they arise.
Social media
[8:42]
I think the second thing that I would try to caution against is the self-doubt that comes with people telling you, despite the fact that virtually without exception everyone in this room this evening will have dedicated a huge amount of time to not just surface transport decarbonisation and the humanisation of our streets but, probably more widely, people are involved in progressive politics and environmental politics -- and I would encourage people to spend only the necessary amount of time that is required to deploy messages on social media, and no longer. Because – well, I think Damian, if he had an opportunity to reflect on this, would probably share my view that the mental impact of engaging with people who are not there to have a debate, but are there to wreck the process, frankly. That is a strategic tactical approach through discrediting – or the attempt to discredit – the figures who are closely associated with these measures, whether they are activists or whether they are elected politicians. That’s quite a common tactic and I would encourage people to avoid that – I’d encourage them to keep their messaging light and optimistic, and I would encourage them to remember that – as I said before – though social media, particularly Twitter, is an important terrain upon which these messages are deployed, engaging with your community is a really important part of this process as well.
Campaign to humanise our streets
[10:25]
From an electoral perspective, if we transpose an electoral campaign on to the campaign to humanise our streets, I can tell you for a fact that the number-one determining factor in whether or not somebody goes out to vote for you on polling day is whether you’ve had a conversation with them on the doorstep.
85-90% of people in your community will not be on Twitter; of the remaining 10%, 8 percentage points of them will be rarely on Twitter – you’re talking about talking to a hard core of both proponents and opponents, and in order to win hearts and minds, to make these schemes permanent, it’s important to engage actively with the overwhelming majority of people who aren’t engaged in that online debate, and not to be distracted by some of the incendiary comments you will inevitably see on things like Nextdoor – I’ve never been on that, but I know of it very well. Facebook’s another platform I don’t use. I only use Twitter, and I only use that because it’s professionally quite useful.
[11:32]
I think the more time that you spend amongst your neighbours, the more activities that you create that animate the streets that have been tentatively transformed, the more you will make people realise that the sky isn’t going to fall in, and that in exchange for the small price of spending an extra couple of minutes in the car extricating themselves from the residential area in which they live, they’re vastly – in fact they’re cutting in half the chance of their child being killed on the way to school by a speeding motorist. They’re far more likely to engage in neighbouring; they’re far more likely to see children playing in the streets.
In many ways – some of you will have seen this – I’ve often used the analogy of the invasive species when describing cars in our cities, and particularly a city like Oxford which was simply not built to accommodate the volume of motor vehicle traffic that it’s experiencing, and what we get when we eliminate – as we see from De Beauvoir, as we see from Hoxton West, as we see from Hackney Downs, as we see from Homerton – what we get when we eliminate motor vehicles from our roads, and eliminate through traffic in particular from our residential areas, is we get a flourishing of the rich social life of our cities. And we have seen that, and other local authorities have seen that, whenever they’ve implemented these kinds of measures.
[13:05]
So I would encourage you to avoid deeply engaging with people who are there to waste your time and are not there to be converted in any way, and remember that the iron law of local politics is to serve the interest of people who live within your community, not the people who drive through it. Be encouraged by the fact that there is virtually no precedent internationally for a return to streets full of cars that have had them removed through a wide variety of interventions.
Cars are costing us
[13:48]
Change is difficult, and when the number of cars on our roads have been allowed to double to 40 million in 30 years, and when all policy around transport at least since the end of the Second World War has been bent towards meeting the needs of drivers to the exclusion of our communities, our children’s social lives, and our relationships with our neighbours, and even – if anyone has read Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam – the engagement of drivers themselves with their wider community; we know that for every additional 10 minutes’ commuting time by car (this is United States literature of course but I think it’s transferable) the amount of social engagement that drivers engage in within their community is reduced by 5%.
So getting people out of their cars is not just useful from the perspective of reducing surface transport emissions, it’s not just useful from the perspective of reducing road danger, it’s not just important in the perspective of improving air quality (particularly in city environments where children are developing stunted lungs and which, despite improvements in nitrous dioxide emissions, or reductions in them, the overwhelming majority of people in the UK in urban areas remain exposed to levels of toxic particulate matter – PM10s, PM2.5s – exceeding the World Health Organisation’s safe limits) – it’s also about fostering the circumstances for a more cohesive society in which we develop stronger relationships within our communities. So there’s a massive prize at stake here.
De Pijp, De Beauvoir, Oxford ... it's the same arguments
[15:55]
So I suppose I’m here in many respects to remind people that in the same way that those battles have been fought in De Beauvoir 40 years before I delivered new low traffic neighbourhoods in Hackney, and around the same time an enormous battle was going on in the Netherlands, and particularly Amsterdam, and the De Pijp neighbourhood, which people will have seen before, so there’s nothing new under the sun when it comes to these battles. And that might not be a huge consolation but I think you should be reassured that there are no rabbits for the opposition to pull out of the hat here – it’s the same arguments rehashed time and time again.
Power matrices
[16:43]
And I think that probably the remaining piece of the popular front, popular support jigsaw in delivering this programme, will not merely be engaging actively in the real world, in your local neighbourhoods, and having those doorstep and front garden and school gate conversations, which are hugely important -- it’s also about undertaking what we used to call in the Trade Union movement ‘power matrices’. It’s important to understand who within this battle – this includes local politicians, both at the level of the county and within the city – is relatively powerful, relatively weak, relatively supportive, relatively opposed; and understanding where those people sit, and recognising within that matrices that the people who are at the extremes of support and oppose are not going to move their positions, the people who are at the extremes of powerful and weak are probably not going to change a great deal in the next 18 months, but there’s a whole clump of people in the middle, and they’re up for grabs. Some of those people will be back bench members in city council who might be inclined to oppose or support these measures depending on the extent to which they think the wind is blowing, so I think it’s important for you to be able to tell positive stories to them, produce vox pops, get quotes, ensure you’ve got footage of activated neighbourhoods as a result of car traffic reducing.
Jane Jacobs defeated Robert Moses
[18:34]
I’ll leave you with this final little anecdote about how Jane Jacobs defeated the West Manhattan highway evangelist Robert Moses, and some of you will be familiar with the story of Jane Jacobs and her titanic battles with Moses, but I think one of the lessons activists can learn from the way in which she engaged with politicians throughout that process is her creativity in her activism, and the extent to which she placed those people who we are largely undertaking this work on behalf of -- our children, or if we don’t have children, those children within the wider community; it takes a village to raise a child after all – she would march on the Town Hall with these children, she would go down to the arch in the Western Square Park, and instead of ribbon-cutting events they had ribbon-tying events to illustrate that the park was going to be defended and would not have a 6-lane motorway run through the middle of it.
So I would encourage people to be creative in the activism that they undertake, to actively engage with local politicians, particularly with those who are inclined to support but don’t necessarily feel that they’re politically strong enough or brave enough to do so – I think you’ve got to show some support to those individuals, and I think ensuring that at all times and everywhere those people are reminded of one of the iron laws that Jane Jacobs I think demonstrated around activism, when the West Manhattan highway was defeated, when it was voted down by members of the New York City planning committee, Robert Moses, who was actually an apparatchik, he wasn’t a politician at all, he was an officer, he banged the table and shouted “Nobody is opposed to this scheme but a bunch of mothers, mothers, mothers” – and I think my closing advice would be: take Robert Moses’s advice and ensure that mothers, who have historically been at the forefront of these battles, are once again at the forefront of them advocating for the rights of their children both today and in the future.
[21:00]
Chair: Wow, thank you so much Jon, that was an impressive piece of timely extemporisation, and I’m amazed at your sensitivity to the twitchiness of the Chair at the same time, that’s very impressive.
JB: I’ve had to deal with dissatisfied chairs all my life I’m afraid and you’re no different!
*** questions ***
Main roads
(Q: "What about mothers on the main roads?")
[21:19]
I think that’s a great question and it’s obviously one of the central questions and arguments that are made by the heavy artillery against low traffic neighbourhoods. I think the first thing to understand is the issue of displacement and the way in which that argument is deployed. Now it’s very important to understand that prior to the advent in particular over the last 10 or 15 years of satnav technology, there was a huge asymmetry of information that existed between drivers and roads. They didn’t use to lean into the back seat and grab a map and see how to save 5 minutes on the way home. But as soon as the advent of satnav technology came in, that meant that drivers effectively had a map, they had the knowledge that they’d never had previously, they had the knowledge of taxi drivers, so what that did was, that displaced a huge amount of traffic from an overloaded main road network on to the local road transport network, on to residential streets that were not designed to carry traffic.
So the first thing to understand is that LTNs do not displace traffic, because by definition you cannot displace traffic that has itself been displaced. All it does is place traffic back on to the roads that they always would have been on if satnavs had never been invented. What they’re really seeing is what the effects of a doubling of motor vehicles on our roads over the last 30 years would have resulted in had it not been for the fact that the market created opportunities for drivers to escape the overloaded main roads into people’s neighbourhoods.
And I think the important thing to remember is that, in effect, induced further demand for driving, because for the first 6 months that people find a rat run it saves a bit of time, but then everyone starts using it, then they find another rat run; or for the first 6 or 12 months that they’ve got the satnav they find they’re saving 5-10 minutes a day, and therefore the other family member then goes and buys a car, because they’re not stuck in traffic; so you’re inducing demand not only for more motor vehicles, but for more driving, through that process.
So the problem is – let’s assume for a moment that low traffic neighbourhoods did displace traffic – now they don’t, and I think I’ve just demonstrated that, what they actually do is place traffic on the roads built to carry it – but let’s say that they did for a moment, the answer to that cannot be to open up our residential neighbourhoods to through traffic, because it cannot solve the problem, because it induces demand for more driving and more cars, and in the end, as we have seen, our residential neighbourhoods and the main road network will also fill up. The fact of the matter is that for the last 20 years we’ve done nothing to address our significantly increasing through-traffic; in the last decade, in the decade to 2019, the amount of rat-running on London’s residential streets doubled because of satnavs. There are other factors as well but that’s the one dominant factor. It didn’t solve road traffic accidents or bring them down, it didn’t improve air quality, it didn’t reduce the amount of miles driven on our roads, and it didn’t reduce motor vehicle emissions, so it’s not a route to solving this problem.
As regards the traffic that people are now experiencing on the main road network, that they wouldn’t have been experiencing previously, it depends where that boundary lies; so if it is on a main road network, that is not necessarily within the control of the highways authority – it could be a Highways England road for example. London’s arrangements are different from Oxford’s presumably. Then the answer is to look at policies such as road user pricing to bring down the number of motor vehicles on the main road network, not to open up our communities. And I think I’d leave a final analogy, which is to say: if all of the litter and the rubbish produced by households in Oxfordshire was being dumped on to the main road network of Oxford, onto all those grass verges, people’s front gardens, nobody would reasonably say, “Well I tell you what, the best way of dealing with the rubbish problem is to spread it out across all the residential neighbourhoods – lift those bins up, shake a bit of it down a bit of Lavender Grove down there, shake a bit down the cul-de-sac down there, on the residential road, and that’ll solve the problem”.
And the same principle applies to transport: you cannot solve the problem of motor vehicle dominance by providing more road for the cars to drive on. We’ve known about induced demand since the 1960s: it didn’t solve it for the last 50 years and it’s not going to solve it now. So I think the answer to the question of those cars on the main road network is to develop policies which we know exist and can work for the main roads – do not expect our neighbourhoods to act as a pressure-release valve for an overloaded main road network.
Councils' internal operations
(Q: "What advice do you have for dealing with the council workforce?")
[26:43]
This sort of takes me back to the power matrices: I think it depends on who the figure is. I’m now a council officer, and I’ve been a cabinet member, and I’ve been an officer, so I think I’ve experienced both sides of that divide. I think within that officer group there will be people who are supportive but lacking knowledge; people who are supportive with knowledge; people who are opposed with knowledge; people who are opposed who are lacking knowledge; and there will be council figures who have relative power from cabinet, but there will also be backbenchers with an interest.
I think identifying those officers who are generally – testing the mood music of how generally supportive they are, and working with them I think to demonstrate that there’s political support from within the council, and for them to demonstrate that to the wider officer corps, that that support is there, I think is important, so I’d encourage both back-bench members and cabinet members to take an active role in engaging with officers. I mean I’m not sure what the arrangements are at the level of the county; I was a full-time cabinet member in Hackney, which meant that I was just meeting with people all day long, and providing them support, having informal and formal conversations; I think with the intransigent officers I think it’s a question of escalating issues to the cabinet member, potentially the leader, and to the chief exec; you know, the officer corps is there to deliver the policies and the manifesto commitments of the administration, it’s legally obliged to do that, within the law.
And let’s say this hypothetical county council, for a moment, if councillors are finding that there are officers who are working to rule and digging their heels in in this process then there are mechanisms for escalating this issue, and I don’t think we should be too squeamish about the fact that if there are people who are not delivering the policies of the council, then they need to make a decision about whether or not they’re willing to uphold their obligations as an officer of a local authority to do that.
But I think there’s a softer approach, which is to be visible, to be at the Town Hall or the administrative offices, to engage with people, to spend time with them both formally and informally, and supporting their work; and also I think officers quite like – and they don’t get enough of – the recognition for the work that’s being done. I think that councillors, whenever they’ve got an opportunity at committee or a full council to lavish some praise and attention on those officers who are doing the often unheralded work of the TROs or the designing of schemes, I think that one of the reasons I was able to assemble such a core of officers around me in my portfolio areas, is because they knew I would frequently emphasise publicly how important their work was to me. So I think making those officers feel valued is very important as well.
Taking back the narrative
(Q: "How do you reclaim the narrative around these schemes, when councillors are listening to the anti-LTN people frame all this as 'anti-working class', for example?")
[30:20]
So I think this is where as a group it’s really important for somebody to take on the role of providing top-line briefings; I think this is really important, especially for the people who are engaging with people actively on social media – to have top-line responses to these cynical and frankly untrue accusations. I could sit here all evening and on the class front I could tell you that actually in London the richest 10% of households are 4x as likely to own a car as the poorest 10% of households; nationally it’s 3x as likely; nationally the wealthier 10% of households are 30x more likely to own 2 cars than the lowest-income households in the UK; from the perspective of the impact on minority ethnic community we’ve known that for decades the sprawl of the motor vehicle and its effects have not been felt evenly across society, and we already know that prior to the implementation of these schemes which are designed to significantly improve public health outcomes for those most affected, that Black and Minority Ethnic people, along with working class people, were disproportionately impacted upon by motor vehicle dominance for decades, and not just from emissions but also from road danger as well.
So there’s another absolutely nonsense argument that it’s easy to counteract. But this takes me back to my point before – I think when people start levelling those arguments at you, I think when you know yourself that you’ve been campaigning on these wider issues for a long time, I think it’s easy to feel emotionally very hurt by those kinds of accusations, I think that’s why somebody circulating briefings to the group members, so that they’ve got the top facts on these issues, and are able to deploy them when they engage in these conversations, is really important. People in groups like yours don’t need 10-page briefings, they need a one-pager with top lines. So they need a one-page briefing on the impact of low traffic neighbourhoods on people with protected characteristics: and that will cover people with disabilities, black and minority ethnic communities – I think it’s really important to do that work, and then you will feel that you are intellectually equipped with responses to those accusations which are designed to wrongfoot you.
Astroturf campaigns
(Q: "It's been alleged that a lot of the opposition is non-local. What would you say about that?")
[33:06]
I think it’s probably not particularly useful for us to do what the opposition does, which is to engage in – not that I’m suggesting you’re doing this, but – conspiracy theories about where some of these attacks might be coming from. Because frankly we don’t know; I’ve had people tell me that they think some of this is funded by the Association of British Drivers – I can’t possibly tell, I’ve not seen any evidence to support this view. I think what I will say though, which I think is helpful in respect of responding to your question, is that there are many astroturf campaigns out there, particularly on social media, it’s very easy to create six or seven profiles which look reasonably credible and attempt to create the perception of this wide scale opposition to these measures.
I think I’d emphasise, if you weren’t here at the start of the meeting, that the overwhelming majority of residents certainly are not engaged in Twitter, are more likely to be engaged in Facebook, but they’re still touching relatively few people.
I think just be reassured yourselves, because when you’re in the goldfish bowl of twitter and social media, and you’re being assailed with these arguments – I’ve seen this with many councillors – be reassured by the consistent national and local polling that has been undertaken around the humanisation of our streets and low traffic neighbourhoods, that they enjoy a majority of support of voters for all mainstream political parties. In fact the only political party in the country whose voters do not by simple majority support low traffic neighbourhoods are UKIP, and even 35-36% of their members support them outright.
So I think I would encourage you to dwell less on where this opposition comes from, but to reassure yourself that despite the fact that it looks widespread and deep, that there are probably – by Carlton Reid’s estimation, by my estimation (Carlton Reid who writes for Forbes by the way, for those who don’t know his work) – there are probably 100 maybe really active committed accounts across the UK – some of them go a bit wider than the UK – but that’s 100 accounts in a country of 65 million people. So I’m not saying that we shouldn’t counter the arguments that they make, but I would, I think, avoid being drawn – as I was, I think that was probably one of my failings; you know, I’m a fighter, that’s the kind of political background that I come from, and I like to take on some of the lies and the baseless accusations that have been made against the work that I understood.
I would encourage you to think less about what the opposition are doing and think more about what you’re doing, how you look, how you’re campaigning, how you’re engaged in activism. I would leave you with that reassurance that it’s a relatively small number of astroturf campaigns that are engaged in this anti-low traffic neighbourhood activity.