NBC’s new sitcom The Paper, a spinoff of The Office, marries the same kind of gallows humor about the state of community journalism with a well-worn workplace comedy setup. The show is set at The Truth Teller, a faltering small-town daily in Toledo, Ohio. Domhnall Gleeson plays Ned Sampson, a college journalism major-turned-salesman who arrives as editor-in-chief, insisting he wants to be “the real superhero, like Clark Kent.” Unlike Superman, however, Sampson has no powers, no cape, and has parachuted into a newsroom that resembles a hospice ward. Truth Teller pages are padded out with fluff about celebrity skincare routines and whatever comes across the AP Wire. At one point, a staffer sums it up flatly: “I’m not sure if it’s even a real paper. It’s local ads and a few articles of clickbait with some sports scores on the cover.”

As a freelance journalist myself, I find The Paper’s laughs more painful than painfully funny because the loss of quality local journalism is an American tragedy. For years, the slow-moving crisis was treated simply as a business problem, characterized by job losses or shuttered buildings, one that could be solved with apps, paywalls, or foundation grants. But as The Paper notes, it’s also a civic story about the disappearance of accountability, the evaporation of civic trust, and — as corny as it sounds — the shared story of a physical place.

Yes, like Ned Sampson, I’m a true believer. For the first several years of my career, I toiled in the newsrooms of small-town central Missouri. In the sneeze-or-you’ll-miss-it farm town of Centralia, Mo., I lost my job after less than a year. One day, I drove to the office to find it locked forever because the owner was tired of losing money in journalism and wanted to focus on a much more profitable endeavor: selling bail bonds.

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Later, at The Mexico Ledger in nearby Mexico, Mo. (town slogan: Just A Little North of the Border!), I was the sole full-time reporter, a single set of eyes on an entire community. In Jefferson City, the state capital, I covered crime and courts for the News Tribune. Most of the time, the job was thankless and the pay pitiful, but it still mattered. In Mexico, I helped expose the school district’s shady deal with a for-profit education vendor and a greedy property owner who paid for an astroturfed campaign to bring a controversial Super Walmart to town, despite opposition from local merchants (spoiler alert: Walmart won). One night, after exposing a prominent local figure’s embarrassing brush with petty crime, I found my car keyed in retaliation. It was petty vengeance, but also proof that someone cared enough about what was printed in the paper to lash out. My work, however minor, had made a dent in the local fabric.

Today, in too many towns, that fabric is fraying. Since 2005, more than 3,200 newspapers in the United States have shut down or been absorbed, according to a Northwestern University study. The closures have only accelerated: in 2022, about two papers closed every week. Of the roughly 6,000 papers left, most are published weekly, not daily. Large swaths of the country now exist in what researchers call “news deserts.” Today, at least 200 counties in America have no local news outlet at all, and more than half have either no paper or only one. Some major cities no longer have a daily newspaper at all.

I witnessed the absurdity of news deserts firsthand while living in Mobile, Ala. There, I uncovered a conspiracy involving a man running for re-election despite having been dead for weeks, and then how political figures colluded for his mother to take his seat so she could vote on a controversial annexation plan. It was the perfect local scoop, bizarre yet consequential. However, Mobile had no daily paper left to publish it, so I ended up running the piece in a magazine based in California, hundreds of miles away from the city whose voters most needed to know about it. The story traveled widely, but the sad fact was that a community had to read about its own corrupt politics in an out-of-state publication.

Even in places that still have papers, the reporters are vanishing. Many papers fall victim to hedge-fund and private-equity owners, whose model often involves selling off real assets or converting them to condos and laying off most of the staff and getting rid of most local reporting to boost cash flow. What remains is a ghost paper, heavily dependent on syndicated national copy and too starved for investigative resources to pay attention to the community.

Such outlets rarely have staff to sit through budget hearings, file records requests through freedom-of-information requests, or conduct in-depth investigations. In The Paper, the clueless managing editor, Esmeralda, brags about her silly long-form piece that reads: “You will not believe how much Ben Affleck tipped his limo driver.” Ironically, this race to the bottom has occurred in the age of information abundance, not drought. Many court filings, city council meetings, and legislative reports are available online with the click of a mouse, but few are paying attention, except for some scattered commentary from social-media influencers or limited coverage provided by television stations.

Years ago, I coined the term pink-slime journalism to describe Journatic, a company I once worked for that secretly outsourced local news to low-paid freelancers overseas, who strung together news releases and website copy into something meant to resemble actual news. Today, the slime has taken on new forms, such as AI-generated copy spun up to pad out hollowed mastheads. In many places, the filler has vanished entirely, leaving nothing but silence.

The effects are not abstract. When a local paper disappears, citizens are less likely to vote, those who do vote are more likely to do so in sharply partisan fashion, and local government becomes freer to act without scrutiny. In too many towns, the front page has been replaced by a Facebook group or Nextdoor forums rife with misinformation and unsubstantiated gossip. Meanwhile, cable news and the internet erased old boundaries, nationalizing our sense of attention and flattening all politics into national theater — with people knowing more about what’s on Hunter Biden’s laptop than about their own mayor.

It’s no coincidence that while liberals obsess over the corruption emanating from the White House, a thousand mini-Trumps are flourishing in towns and counties across America with little notice. Petty strongmen, grifters, and small-time operators siphon public funds, steer contracts to friends, or intimidate critics — all without the scrutiny that even a half-staffed metro daily once provided. National scandals dominate cable news, while the quiet theft in city-hall chambers is less likely to make a headline.

The link between a lack of local news and municipal corruption is now quantifiable. A Columbia Journalism Review study tracking 65 major dailies that closed between 1996 and 2018 compared districts that lost a paper to those that didn’t. Where newspapers disappeared, federal corruption charges and indictments rose by 7 percent There’s plenty of official misdoings in my current hometown of Harrisburg, Pa., which has been without a dedicated daily paper since 2012. In journalism’s absence, it’s been up to newly elected Dauphin County Commissioner Justin Douglas to personally crusade against corrupt dealings involving his fellow elected county officials, even using phrases like “This is a heist” to call out some of his colleagues who had been siphoning millions of taxpayer dollars into pay-for-play schemes.

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More broadly, the collapse of news institutions corrodes civic participation itself. A generation ago, local papers and regional TV affiliates formed the backbone of voters’ information diets. People knew their school-board members and county commissioners because their names and faces appeared in the paper. As local outlets weaken or die, the cycle accelerates: less coverage leads to less civic knowledge, which, in turn, translates to less engagement, making it easier still to cut more reporters. The numbers are dismal. In many cities and counties, turnout in off-year elections has collapsed into single-digit percentages to decide matters such as who sets property tax rates, decides zoning codes, and who fills the pothole — or doesn’t — on your streets. When no one is covering these elections, no one votes in them.

Who’s to blame? Wall Street, as mentioned, bears a share of the blame. Libertarians, meanwhile, gloat about the die-off, insisting that the internet is more efficient than the dinosaurs of old media and the free market will provide a solution, as though TikTok clips and Substacks could replace a city beat reporter with a notepad at the zoning meeting. But the truth is more uncomfortable: we’re all holding the shovel that’s throwing dirt on local journalism’s grave. We’ve collectively chosen entertainment over citizenship, shelling out much more for expensive streaming bundles over three bucks for the paper. Netflix alone now earns roughly twice the revenue of every newspaper in America combined. To paraphrase The Washington Post’s slogan: Democracy dies in distraction — when readers stop showing up to subscribe, to vote, or even to care.

In retrospect, the joke of The Onion’s Daily Planet article has only grown sharper with time. It’s one thing to suspend disbelief about a flying alien from outer space who shoots lasers from his eyes, and it seems like quite another to imagine a metro newsroom in the 21st century where Clark Kent and Lois Lane would be chasing Lex Luthor on the job instead of clickbait. We live in a world that keeps producing new Superman movies while every week newspapers continue to wink out of existence.

That’s what makes the early episodes of The Paper so cutting. In its bumbling editor, recycled wire copy, and crushing sense of apathy, it forces us to confront the fact that the joke of local journalism’s demise is ultimately on all of us.

Walls have been going up again in Oxford over the past few years. But this time, they aren’t made of brick. The barriers consist of wooden planters festooned with daffodils or removable bollards. They might seem innocuous compared with brick walls. And their purpose, too, seems so benign. These road blocks are intended to create Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, or LTNs, which, according to the established propaganda, are officially good for us: they cut traffic speeds, carbon emissions and noise pollution. They are supposed to encourage children to ditch their PS5s and play outside. In particular, they are designed to make us drive less. And they are not confined to Oxford; they’re springing up across the country.

Unlike the Cutteslowe Walls, these fenced-off micro communities retain one point of entry and exit for drivers — every address within an LTN remains accessible — but the routes are purposefully more circuitous, sometimes tortuously so, to encourage a “think twice” approach to hopping in the car when it would be quicker to walk or cycle. The ideal LTN is a compact square-kilometre in size, meaning the average able-bodied resident should be able to walk from one side to the other in under 15 minutes. They are a nice idea — but one that lately has hit the cold, hard bollard of reality.

Blocking roads to reduce traffic is not a new idea. But using roadblocks to reconfigure swathes of existing cities is a relatively recent innovation. The poster boy of this cyclo-urbanism is the Danish architect Jan Gehl, who, over the past 40 years, has successfully managed to entirely remove cars from parts of Copenhagen. Aspects of his plan have been cribbed by UK cycling activists with a knowledge of civic planning, and placed into campaigning proposals for corners of cities that they particularly value, such as the streets they lived on.

When Covid-19 prompted a mass avoidance of public transport and a sense of crisis about the future of the city, LTNs were offered up by activists to councillors as both an opportunity to turn Britain into a nation of cyclists, and to prevent mass gridlock as we took to our cars. Since March 2020, an area the size of Tyneside has effectively banned motorists without much oversight by professional urban planners.

And yet LTNs seem to remain popular. A recent poll by Redfield & Wilton Strategies found that 58% of Londoners supported the introduction of LTNs, with only 17% opposed. Of course there will be a vocal minority unhappy at the disruption, angered by the increase of traffic on congested arterial routes or the closure of their favourite rat run. These are presumably the same people who made off with the bollards in Oxford soon after they were first installed — or knocked them down, set them alight or took chainsaws to them. In February, almost three years after Oxford’s first trial LTN, some 2,000 protesters were still sufficiently disgruntled to attend a rally in the city centre that ended with violent clashes and five arrests.

There is a sense that politicians are increasingly waging a “war on cars”. Measures include road filtering, to give priority to low-carbon methods of transport, and placing extra charges on polluting vehicles, in a push towards net zero. The shift is prompting anguished debate and splits within parties. Earlier this month, Labour lost one of its safest council seats in the country to a former party member-turned-independent who stood opposed to the imposition of LTNs across Newham, in East London. Last autumn, former Labour politician Lutfur Rahman was returned as mayor of Tower Hamlets, also in East London, deposing the party’s chosen incumbent, on a pro-motorist platform; one of his first acts was to axe a newly installed LTN and demand a review of the others across his borough. More recently, the prospective Labour MP for Uxbridge has been openly campaigning against Sadiq Khan’s Ulez scheme.

In Oxford City, large swathes of Labour’s local party have defected to an independent group fighting the LTNs and the traffic schemes that will supersede them; in March, its official candidate in the Littlemore ward came within an inch of being beaten by such an independent.

The truth is that the bollards in Oxford’s Low Traffic Neighbourhoods have upset more locals than the Cutteslowe Walls ever did. Even the Liberal Democrats, part of the rainbow coalition of progressive parties which run the Oxford’s council, are rejecting the idea they once championed. Andrew Gant, Lib Dem cabinet member for highway management, was keen to make it clear to me that the LTNs weren’t his idea. Describing Oxford’s wider traffic management system, he insists: “The LTNs are not one of the core schemes.” Three years after traffic filtering was trialled, the bollards and planters are to be replaced by other forms of traffic calming, such as bus gates monitored by traffic cameras and a workplace car parking levy.

The Conservative Party, more than any other, is seeking to distance itself from the LTN experiment. Last week, transport secretary Mark Harper demanded that councils across the country rethink “unpopular” LTNs. But they need to backpedal harder if they don’t want to be associated with the policy. In Oxfordshire, it was a Tory-led council that green-lit local LTNs. It was Boris Johnson who, as prime minister during the first lockdown in 2020, set up a £225 million Emergency Active Travel Fund (EATF) to promote new transport routes for walking and cycling.

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In and of itself, EATF would have been relatively innocuous, were it not for the fact that David Cameron’s government had already granted new powers to local authorities under the 2015 Infrastructure Act. The worst kind of Coalition compromise, it sloughed off oversight for road maintenance to local authorities in an attempt to “get things done”, and encouraged experimental traffic orders that implemented new road schemes without public consultation. As if emerging from a stupor, Rishi Sunak’s administration has now removed funding for LTNs, while in Oxford, the party is now campaigning against the very thing it introduced.

The supposedly progressive idea of roping-off residential streets for the all-round benefit of local residents doesn’t work. If you want to know why LTNs have gone from being a panacea for the UK’s urban traffic problems to being sidelined three years later, look no further than Oxford. Here, LTNs were bad politics from the beginning, a case of localism run riot, and what happens when you give the cleverest people in the room carte blanche to bulldoze through a single solution to a single policy. In lockdown, the Conservative-run county council, followed by the Lib-Lab-Green coalition that later replaced it, gave unprecedented priority to activist groups with a narrow agenda regarding transport policy. These groups included Oxfordshire Liveable Streets, whose campaign manager once glued her chest to a busy road in the name of Extinction Rebellion.

In addition, no matter how nice they may be once you’re inside, LTNs weren’t really planned at all. This pioneering piece of urbanism was mainly a series of poorly conceived roadblocks determined by the suggestions of cycling activists on Zoom meetings. Little professional understanding of traffic flows were ever applied. Indeed, possible traffic jams were considered a plus as they would provide further disincentives to car travel.

Given that LTNs were conceived to operate at a street level, it is not surprising that they have gone so badly wrong at a wider urban scale. The arterial road system in Oxford, particularly the ring road, is not up to dealing with the amount of new traffic that has been forced into it by the roadblocks; traffic times have lengthened hugely. Anti-car advocates insist that such measures work in cities like Utrecht in the Netherlands or Ghent in Belgium, conveniently ignoring the fact that both places also have three-lane ring roads and three tram lines. If we are to have Ghent-style LTNs, let’s have the rest of Ghent’s infrastructure, too.

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At a political level, there is some irony in the fact that europhile supporters of LTNs have not heeded the lesson of the gilets jaunes protests in France — namely, that blue-collar workers will not be made sacrificial lambs to environmental policies. Idrees Mohammed, managing director of Oxford Lettings, a property management agency, told me that electricians now charge 60% more for a call-out into the Cowley LTN because it takes so long to get to it. Amir Steve Ali, who works in a takeaway in East Oxford, recently delivered a petition against LTNs to Downing Street with more than 30,000 signatures. “You’re trying to keep some of the roads clean-air, pollution-free — but you’ve just chucked your rubbish next door, where others are now facing gridlock,” he says. “Where’s the justice in this?”

The LTNs were primarily designed to inhibit one form of transport use, rather than, say, make improvements to cycling provision. For a university city once synonymous with the bike, Oxford has pretty poor cycle lanes out to the suburbs, incapable of handling any increased demand.

There is something more fundamental at play than the local situation in Oxford, however. In recent years, there has been a slow retreat from shared urban experiences. Lockdown delivered a shattering blow to the idea of the city as a shared space. LTNs were supposed to encourage “15-minute cities”, where everything you need, from school to supermarket to GP surgery, is just a 15-minute walk from your front door. This concept was not an attempt to “lock” people into their homes, as some of the wilder claims would have it. But LTNs did emerge from the same failure to preserve our collective ownership of streets, which includes the rights to traverse them in the predominant transport system of the age, the car.

Could LTNs have been introduced in a way that would have benefitted Oxford as a whole, rather than just the advocates who live within them? Or is chopping a city up into neat but almost impenetrable quads, in a bid to please academically minded activists, always a bad idea? How different is it, fundamentally, from building walls to keep people out? Those waging war on the car must endeavour to answer these questions, or else risk throttling the very places they cherish.

Unfortunately, our present government is less discerning. The whole of Kent has been placed under Tier 3 Covid restrictions — meaning that the end of lockdown barely makes a difference. That’s also true of other parts of the country, but Kent has particular reason to feel aggrieved. Having gone into lockdown as a Tier 1 area, it’s emerged at the other end of the scale.

For some people, this is proof positive that lockdowns don’t work. The real problem, though, is the precise opposite — the surge of infections seen in one corner of the county has not spread to anything like the same extent. Indeed, in some areas there are so few cases that the figures have to be disguised to stop particular individuals from being identified. 

In case you don’t know Kent very well, it’s pretty big — 50 miles plus from one side to the other. It borders London at one end, but is closer to Calais at the other. It’s also home to 1.8 million people. That’s more than four EU member states (or six, if you were to return the London boroughs of Bromley and Bexley to their Kentish homeland).

Kent also contains a whole country’s worth of sociological differences. Picture perfect villages contrast with struggling coastal towns; and built-up suburbs with sparsely populated marshland. And just compare bourgeois Tunbridge Wells, which voted to remain, with Brexity Thanet, which, at one point, had a UKIP-controlled district council. Nigel Farage, born in Farnborough, is a quintessential Kentishman; but then so was Ted Heath, born in Broadstairs. The county is both closely connected to the Continent (literally, thanks to the Channel Tunnel), but also sticks two fingers up to it.

Fierce and gentle, rebellious and conservative, poor and prosperous, the dualities of the county find an echo in the distinction between Kentish Men and Men of Kent. Today, those labels refer to the western and eastern parts of the county; but there was once a class connotation too — the Men of Kent being grander than the mere Kentish Men.

In short, Kent contains multitudes. Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped the Government from treating the county as an undifferentiated blob. Which is weird, because elsewhere the map of tiers has been drawn in finer detail. For instance, Slough is in Tier 3, but not the rest of Berkshire which is in Tier 2.

So why the geographical blunderbuss in one county and not the other? 

Perhaps it’s because Berkshire doesn’t exist — at least not for administrative purposes. Berkshire County Council was abolished in 1998 and turned into a series of unitary authorities. However, Kent — like most of England — was left largely as it is. With the exception of Medway, Kent County Council remains the highest tier of local government. 

An absurd possibility therefore presents itself — which is that the Covid tiers were assigned by some bureaucrat reading down a list of highest-level local authorities and making no allowance for their greatly varying sizes. But can that really be the explanation? They surely can’t have locked-down nearly two million people just because of a historical quirk of political geography, can they?

It’s hard to tell, because the Government won’t properly explain the rationale for the new tiers. As a result temperatures are rising; mild-mannered MPs like Damian Green, Greg Clark and Tom Tugendhat are on the warpath. And who can blame them? If the ministers can’t justify an apparently nonsensical decision then they deserve all the Kentish pitchforks heading their way.

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At this point, I ought to state that I’m not reflexively anti-lockdown. If there’s a firm scientific basis for any anti-Covid measure, then so be it. I also think we ought to be tolerant of the mistakes that are bound to be made in such extraordinary circumstances. Our leaders are only human after all. However, when a mistake had been identified, it ought to be corrected. Kent MPs have already alerted the government to its geographical illiteracy, pleading with ministers to set tiers by district and borough, not by county. It’s an eminently sensible idea — so why has it been ignored?

As a Kentish Man, I’ve been entertaining doubts — not just about Covid policy or government competence, but also about something of longer-lasting significance: the entire county system. Indeed, I’m coming to the conclusion that this literally medieval arrangement is doing serious harm to the governance of England in the 21st century.

This is a painful realisation. For a cultural conservative like me, county-scepticism isn’t just unorthodox, it’s downright heretical. Our ancient counties aren’t called ancient for nothing — they go back to the early Middle Ages, and some of them to Dark Ages. Kent, for instance, was one of the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the Heptarchy. So why on earth would I want to get rid of that much history? What could be more redolent of a bloodless, bureaucratic mindset than erasing age-old traditions to make way for something more “rational”? I mean, that’s the sort of thing the French would do. Indeed, they have done it — many times. Parisian technocrats are forever tinkering with the internal borders of France.

Ironically, it was the French who gave us the term counties — or comtés — in the first place, replacing the older shires. Originally, a county was a jurisdiction governed by a count — a title derived from a Latin word meaning ‘companion’ (to a king). In England, we replaced the word “count” with “earl” for reasons of delicacy, but “counties” remained.

Over the centuries they took on various administrative functions — and in the Victorian era they became the main engine of local democracy. Except that it’s long been obvious that the county map doesn’t correspond to the geography of the modern world. Urbanisation has disrupted older patterns of settlement; in some cases, county borders that once ran through the back-of-beyond, were enveloped by growing towns and cities. Royal Tunbridge Wells is the classic example: 400 years ago it didn’t exist, but then a spring was a discovered and the famous spa grew up around it, in time becoming bigger than its parent town, Tonbridge. Inconveniently, though, the Kent-Sussex border chopped the new town in half.

Borders can be moved, of course — which is what eventually happened in Tunbridge Wells. However, such tweaks only kick the can down the road. Indeed, road and rail links have changed the old rules of geography, shrinking distances and creating hubs that extend far beyond irrelevant old boundaries. For instance, the Dartford Tunnel means that the two shores of the Thames Estuary have drawn closer together.

Thanks to a shared environment and their mutual proximity to London, they have things in common that don’t apply the rest of their respective counties (Kent and Essex). The same can be said of the Kent-Sussex border. Now that the Weald is no longer an impenetrable wilderness, but a throughly civilised Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, there’s no real distinction between the communities on either side of the invisible line.

In the post-war period, reorganisations of local government tried to catch up with the new realities. Of course, they failed because they were micromanaged from the top-down. Traditional counties like Middlesex and Rutland were abolished and artificial creations like Avon and Humberside imposed on unwilling residents. In any case, the real power stayed in Whitehall.

Subsequent reforms were also bungled. Margaret Thatcher left Greater London and Greater Manchester without effective city-wide government. Tony Blair’s attempt at English regional government was an embarrassing flop. David Cameron and George Osborne made some progress with the City Deals and Metropolitan Mayors, but then they drove their reforms up a dead end. That’s because they tried to impose the same model they used in the cities on other parts of the country and it just didn’t fit. While a city is an organic whole, a non-metropolitan area containing a similar number of people is just too big and incoherent.

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Power must be localised, but only to communities that actually exist — and those are defined by observable everyday experience. Where do people send their kids to school? Where do they go for the big weekly shop? Where to go to church or walk the dog? This is real human geography — the places that people call home and therefore actually care about. Things like travel-to-work-areas may sound coldly functional, but they reflect the rhythms of life. They also define housing markets and hence planning policy — the most important role of a meaningful local democracy. 

In England, devolution is stuck, because our messed-up map of local government has got in the way. In particular, county councils suck decision-making power away from where it ought to be exercised. They are too big to be local, but too small to take on major infrastructure projects currently controlled by Whitehall. And, as we’ve seen with the Kent Covid fiasco, the county system encourages central government to impose one-size-fits-all decisions on places that have little to do with one another.  

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What about identity, though? Don’t counties add to the richness of our national life? Well, yes, up to a point, they do. But not a very significant point — not compared to the other things we identify with. Cross from one home to another, one town to another, one nation to another — and the differences are all-important. Cross a county line, however, and nothing much changes. If it weren’t for the road signs, you probably wouldn’t notice. Even postcodes carry more emotional resonance, in London at least.

I’m not saying that county-based variations in dialect and custom don’t matter. They’ve been much eroded, but let’s hold on to what we can. I love the pageantry of counties too. When I see the flag of Kent — a rearing white horse on a red background — I feel a flutter of pride. Some county flags may be of rather more recent vintage, but ancient traditions are of great value, even if they were invented last Tuesday. 

There’s no reason why we can’t keep the ceremonial counties, with their lords-lieutenant and high sheriffs. In fact, we ought to restore the old boundaries — bringing back long-lost counties like Westmorland. Free of any administrative significance, it would be easily done. 

As with the monarchy, a clear distinction between the efficient and dignified parts of the constitution would allow us to enjoy the symbolism and ritual of the past, without constraining the present. Counties should be like our surviving castles and manor houses — lovely to look at and of zero relevance to contemporary decision-making.

We can keep our heritage, but we don’t have to be governed by it. Especially when it means the difference between being allowed out of our homes or not.

The war for control of London’ streets is being fought with traffic bollards, speed cameras and cycle lanes. There have been screaming matches, Facebook flamewars, poison pen letters, nocturnal stickering campaigns and incidents of civil disobedience. Each side is accusing the other of putting lives at risk. The anti-car faction points to the death toll on our roads; their pro-car enemies say that traffic restrictions are causing congestion and impeding emergency vehicles and other vital services.

These tensions have been rumbling away for years, if not decades, but they’ve now reached a whole new level. The recent ramping up of Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes is a dramatic raising the stakes. The assumption that motorists can drive wherever they will no longer holds. We have entered an era in which the systematic exclusion of motorised traffic is now a realistic policy option and, furthermore, a hyper-localised one.

This is politics at its most up-close-and-personal, which is precisely why it’s become so heated.

*

An Englishman’s home may be his castle, but at his front step or garden gate, his authority comes to an abrupt halt. Just feet away from your twitching net curtains, complete strangers can do or say whatever they want within the law, and come and go as they please.

That might seem obvious, but by the standards of the past, it’s highly unusual. Throughout most of history, the transition from private to public has been rather more complicated than it is for most of us today. Our ancestors didn’t just have homes, they had territory — defended with their neighbours against the stranger. From the smallest village to the walled city, there was a zone beyond private property, in which outsiders could not come and go as they pleased.

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Over the centuries, security and social trust has become the norm, allowing these zones of control to shrink away. Some remnants still exist: gang rule at one end of the social spectrum, gated communities at the other. But for most of us there’s no buffer zone between the completely private and the fully public. The one borders directly upon the other — a miracle of social harmony that we take for granted.

Perhaps that’s why we’ve surrendered control over our neighbourhoods. The streetscape beyond your property is a regulated space. There are speed limits, planning laws, licensing regimes and policing policies. But for the most part we’re content if the key decisions are made miles away — by office-holders we’ve never heard of, chosen by people we’ve never met. Most of us don’t even vote in local elections, let alone participate in community decision-making more directly. 

On-street parking is one of the few issues on which local residents do fight their corner. We see the tarmac right outside our homes as part of the private realm not the public — and therefore as belonging to us morally, if not legally. But beyond these jealously defended patches is neutral territory, open to all and therefore not really our business. 

That’s why London’s road wars, while farcical in some ways, are also highly significant: residents are asserting their control not just over parking spaces, but over the whole of the streetscape that defines each neighbourhood.

*

The trigger for this growing conflict is scarcity. As I’ve written about before, road space is running out. Whenever a resource becomes scarce, it becomes contested — in this case between motorists, cyclists, pedestrians and other users. Covid-19 has added fuel to the flames, by driving people off the buses and trains and into their cars — or onto their bikes or feet.

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It’s not just a conflict between incompatible modes of transport. Viewed locally, it’s also a clash of interests between residents and outsiders. Especially contentious is the issue of ‘rat runs’ — the use of residential streets by motorists seeking to avoid congestion elsewhere. 

It’s not a new cause for complaint, of course, but three factors are bringing matters to a head: firstly, the increased volumes of road traffic I mentioned above; secondly, the fact that many more people are now working from home and thus have all day to experience the rat run on the doorstep; and thirdly, the contrast between the current situation and the calm of the deep lockdown period earlier this year.

The bright and eerie Covid spring was deeply unsettling, but there was one compensation — millions of us got a chance to live life free from the noise, fumes and danger of motorised traffic. It’s an experience that raises an important question: why can’t it be like that all the time? 

The potency of the Local Traffic Neighbourhood is that it opens up that very possibility. According to The Guardian, more than 200 schemes are in the works or already being trialed — most of them in London. 

These interventions go well beyond mere ‘traffic calming’. Through-traffic isn’t just slowed down: most of it is kept out. Each Low Traffic Neighbourhood is defined as a ‘cell’ of residential streets, access to which is restricted using ‘modal filters’ that are meant to discourage the wrong modes of transport (e.g. cars), encourage the right ones (e.g. bicycles) and accommodate the necessary sort (e.g. emergency vehicles). Some of these filters are technologically sophisticated — for instance, the use of number plate recognition systems to distinguish between residents’ vehicles and outside traffic. Others are really quite crude — for instance the use of heavy planters to block-off access to particular streets. 

As one might imagine, the public reaction to the LTNs has been mixed. Some people are delighted, especially local residents (though not all of them). Other people, especially motorists, are apoplectic. Cars have been filmed mounting pavements to drive around newly installed barriers. In other cases, the obstacles have been removed or even vandalised.

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Obviously anyone who engages in criminal and/or threatening behaviour should be condemned out of hand. But that aside, one should understand the passions on all sides. Residents want the places where they and their families live to be safe, peaceful and unpolluted. Cyclists want to cycle without fear of death and injury. For their part, motorists want to get themselves to work and their children safely to school.

Again, Covid is raising the temperature. We’ve had months of restrictions, of being told where we can go, who we can meet and what we have to wear on our faces. We’ve had our livelihoods put in peril and our social lives wiped out. An LTN, while a blessed relief to some, is whole heap of new restrictions for others.

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This is a combustible mix of rival interests and local politicians are struggling to cope. In the London Borough of Ealing, the council leader narrowly survived a vote of no-confidence, provoked by the LTN controversy. Meanwhile in Wandsworth the council has suspended all LTNs across the borough, pending a review. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more of this — politicians lowering the temperature by simply freezing the issue.

But this would be a mistake. A true democracy does not suppress disagreement or disempower people desperate for change. Indeed, those who claim to be concerned about the ‘deep divisions’ caused by this or that controversial issue should themselves be regarded with wariness. Most likely, what their concerns actually amount to is a bad faith argument for privileging the status quo or allowing the views of the in-group to pass without challenge. Beyond sensible laws against hate speech and the harassment of political opponents, we must be free to argue out our differences. 

This may result in compromise or even consensus, but it doesn’t have to. Democracy also legitimises the complete victory of one side over the other. And sometimes that’s the only way. In regard to Brexit, there were compromises that could have been made on the precise trade relationship between Britain and the EU, but the primary issue was binary. Either we remained part of a project to build a supranational state or we left it. It had to be one or the other — and it was entirely right to ask the British people to decide the matter. 

Binary decisions have to be made at a local level too. Do we allow a residential street to be used as a rat run or don’t we? It’s a yes/no question — but, in this case, who should decide? That’s not quite so clear, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable for the fate of a residential street to be decided by its residents. 

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There are complications though. Less traffic on your street might mean more traffic on somebody else’s. Presumably, people who live along main roads aren’t going to be allowed an LTN of their own — and that sets up an unhealthy class dynamic in which the richer, leafier parts of the city are improved while poorer areas are further downgraded.

As it stands, the LTN system allows for some troubling asymmetries of power. However, that’s not because democracy has become too local, but because it’s still not local enough. If, for instance, we had a fully localised road pricing system then revenues could be allocated more precisely to those neighbourhoods that are forced to put up with the worst traffic. The money could be used to fund environmental improvements — such as turning ugly arterial roads into tree-lined boulevards. Alternatively, residents could receive direct financial compensation. 

Needless to say, road charging should always and aggressively penalise the most polluting vehicles. If it’s asymmetries of power that we’re worried about, then let’s start with what comes out of the exhaust pipe of diesel-fuelled SUV (and goes into our lungs.)

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Far from making the road wars go away, we should welcome them. This is just the sort of meaningful argument that we need to reinvigorate local democracy — in fact, democracy as a whole. However, we will have to rethink the neutrality of the public realm. Public highways will remain public, but local residents would have a much bigger say over how they get used. 

I don’t know if the current, rather centralising, Government likes that idea; but it was they who told us to “take back control”. 

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