The Predictable & Lazy End Of Year Roundup: 2020

Well, I said that 2019 was a tough year. I didn't reckon on 2020 did I! As the year got underway, we started to hear about a virus starting to emerge and move across the planet.

On the 16th of March, I had been been in the office for an hour or so when I got a call from my boss that we were being sent home and the office closed. This was just after couple of months in a new office (which was easier on my commute time) and so with my laptop along with the mouse and keyboard I grabbed I had to set up remotely. I remember walking to Liverpool Street Station in a bit of a daze if I was being honest.

It has been a rollercoaster of a year, but one to appreciate the small joys such as the amazing air quality we had in the Spring with the roar of the traffic gone (but which has been all but squandered). It has been nice to be in touch with the seasons and getting outside more.

Nine months later and I now have a well-established daily routine. Work has continued to flow and my firm has worked hard to look after its staff during this difficult period. Away from the laptop, I have tried to get out cycling and on the whole I have managed to get more miles under my belt than my old local commute. Mind you, the last few weeks have been tougher with some busy project work meaning some later finishes and poor weather making it less enticing to get out.

Who knows what will happen in the coming weeks and months, although I'll be carrying on with my writing with 75 posts still to go to reach the 500 I have promised myself to get to as a milestone before I decide what to do next. Here is my 2020.

January

The year started with a short post about wonky zebra crossings which was followed by a report on my nosing round the Eddington development in Cambridge which didn't quite meet my exacting standards.

I stayed in Cambridge for my next post looking at some awful counter-terrorism barriers which created safety problems for people cycling. I rounded off the month having a look at cycle tracks with priority over roads - a quirky historic design feature which remains fully legal to this day.

February

The month started with an introduction to Sweden's Vision Zero approach, a subject which has a fascinating history. Next was a look at liability and how designers could cope with rolling out continuous footways and cycle tracks despite being nervous using them.

Echelon parking was up next and then a post looking at an awkward junction in Chislehurst where the local council was putting driver convenience ahead of children's safety.

I rounded off February with a look at rural cycling networks which gave me a chance to relive the fun I had cycling in rural parts of the Netherlands.

March

With the help of #TheDoodle and @LDNSharkTrike I had a look at the dynamics of riding a non-standard cycle and how gradients and space affected their use. Next was a look at footway parking (again) with the news that the Government was going to consult on dealing with it in England.

Covid-19 started to hit with force and so I wrote a few words on how being sent home from work for an indefinite period had left me rather bewildered.

Taking stock of the new normal, I got out on my cycle and reflected on slowing down and seeing my world shrink, even if some people took the empty roads as being an excuse to drive like idiots.

April

The month started with some thinking about the concept of "flow" and how a lack of traffic during the first UK lockdown because of Covid-19 had almost had me forgetting about the act of cycling as I moved along. This was follows by a welcome return to one of my favourite subjects - kerbs - where I had a look at forgiveness.

With the impacts of the virus being felt on the public transport networks, I had a look at the legislation which could allow authorities to roll out quick changes to the street, despite a lack of interest from the government. I ended the month with a practical look at what could be rolled out quickly on the ground.

May

I had a closer look at the history of the local road system in and around the village of Terhole in The Netherlands and gave thoughts on what I thought it would take to deal with the right type of road in the right place.

I returned to the government's transport and highway law response to Covid in which my cynicism wasn't disappointed before following up with some more examples of cheap and cheerful ways to make changes to street space quickly.

I then got out on my cycle in the first of a series of #LDNCycleSafari posts looking at infrastructure that I could reach by leg power alone. I took a look at London's Quietway 6 in the first of two posts. I rounded off May with the suggestion that most highway infrastructure is for motor traffic.

June

With my tongue a little in my cheek, I asked if cycling should be allowed on motorways. A clickbait way of looking if in fact we should be bolting on cycleways to motorway bridges crossing obstacles. I then returned to London's Quietway 6 to complete my journey from Barkingside to the Olympic Park in Stratford.

Next up was a spur of the moment piece of frivolity where I jumped on my cycle once more in search of the Traffic Light Tree, I piece of art which can be found on the edge of London's Docklands. A piece of joy for the summer.

Because of the nice weather and light mornings, I headed out again at the end of June to have a look at the new layout of Waltham Forest's Whipps Cross Junction which was brilliant.

July

I blasted into July with my 400th blog post from Waltham Forest. This time, a trip along Lea Bridge Road which is probably the best urban main road design in the UK. It is protected junctions, continuous side streets and filtering. 

Following my post on Swedish Vision Zero earlier in the year, I had a look at the Dutch Sustainable Safety approach which is truly an integrated way at looking how roads and streets can be designed to function safely.

Next I jumped on my cycle to go and meet up with fellow blogger, Hackney Cyclist, to look around at pop-up and permanent street changes around Bethnal Green and Hackney and then a look at some new cycle tracks in the area.

August

My first August post saw coverage of the new English cycling infrastructure design guidance with the government's statement of intent on walking and cycling and the "Bike is Best" campaign which was a great counter to the noisy minority of people protesting against changes to our streets. 

I then asked for some honesty from people objecting to Low Traffic Neighbourhoods to be honest about their motivations and for supporters to acknowledge genuine issues. Of course, I then got lots of comments from people making my point. SomeLTN objectors have concerns about the impact on main roads and so in the absence of credible ideas from them, I took a look at the subject in a blog post which was commended at the 2020 Active Travel Academy Media Awards. This was a lovely surprise and thanks for the nomination!

I was then back on by cycle looking at a bit of East London road building history followed by a technical post looking at when we shouldn't bother using kerbs (as shocking as the idea may be).

September

I was back looking at traffic signals to start September and specifically why push buttons are awkward for people cycling (and how they could be improved). Next was a look at how the UK has developed a speeding culture and why design contributes to it. I then had a look at why cycling in town centres is a network issue.

The end of the month saw a look at a random Dutch junction which didn't rely on traffic signals and how we could import the idea.

October

As the year moved into Autumn, I was out on my cycle again looking at a couple of new Low Traffic Neighbourhoods in the London Borough of Redbridge. Sadly, the schemes didn't last long after nervous councillors succumbed to noisy protests from the usual minority of people who don;t want to change their behaviour. A huge shame as the schemes improved local walking and cycling in a very hostile high traffic area.

My next post was inspired by some Twitter idiocy by a literal Peer of The Realm and got me thinking all about pedestrian refuges. I then headed out on my cycle to the Newham - Waltham Forest border to look at an excellent joint scheme for Low Traffic Neighbourhoods.

The month ended with a look at a junction I had been regularly cycling through on my safaris and how after nearly 100 years, it remains terrible for those not driving and then my long trip over to Enfield in the first of a three part look at what is going in there.

November

My travels around Enfield continued with posts two and three looking at Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and cycleways.

An indulgent post next with a look at the cycles I have used in the years since taking up cycling for transport, including the day to day machine which has helped me keep active over the year. I ended the month looking at the difference and overlaps between law, standards and guidance.

December

A philosophical start to the winter with my thought that infrastructure drives culture and how libertarianism is street design is the opposite of the Vision Zero and Sustainable Safety movements. I then examined why 20mph speed limits are vital in making things safer on our streets.

My final regular post of 2020 was a conversation about UK roundabout design and why we need to talk about it because we are baking in subjectively unsafe layouts all the time.

So there you have it. A year which has broken superlatives. A year which has seen misery, worry and desperation, but also one which has seen people going the extra mile for others and positivity despite what is going on around us.

2021 is not going to be any easier, but I hope I can keep you a little bit distracted with this blog, so thanks for reading and try and take a little break if you can.

We Need To Talk About Roundabouts

We have a scourge stalking the Kingdom. It creates a maelstrom of danger in the search for capacity and yet designers simply cannot see what is wrong.

I'm talking about the UK's approach to roundabouts. But before I delve in, it's worth taking a step back and ask what roundabouts are for. Whenever roads and streets meet you have a junction. A place of both interaction and conflict depending on the situation. Where things are at the interaction end, then we don't need to be too worried about interfering with how people deal with it whereas at the conflict end, we will want to manage things to keep people safe and moving.

Now maybe those comments are more around how we manage motor traffic, but we can throw walking and cycling into the mix. The difference now is we're dealing with modes moving at different speeds which will immediately pull interactions to one end of the scale. In other words, non-managed interactions are the stuff of low (motor) traffic situations.

When we are managing conflicts, as traffic speeds and volumes increase we need to increase the amount of control and this is where roundabouts come in along with traffic signals and grade separation. Roundabouts are a UK favourite method of control because they can run at very high capacities and are scalable with good space efficiency and operational safety (in terms of collisions). What's not to love?

The problem with the UK approach, however, is how roundabouts are set out to enable drivers to easily find a gap in traffic to enter them and to move round them quickly - the idea is people can see a gap in the traffic on the roundabout and simply join the flow. Of course if the person in front doesn't fancy doing the same and you aren't paying attention, then there's going to be a shunt.

The photograph above is of a large roundabout in Stevenage where you can see how the approach to the give way points puts drivers onto a trajectory where they don't have to reduce speed too much if they see a gap on the roundabout. You can also see an exit from the roundabout on the right which enables people to exit at high speed. The grade separated (different level) walking and cycling space which doesn't place people moving more slowly anywhere near the motor traffic was a conscious decision for the town's original planners. Where traffic flows are light, you'll see some drivers pass through the roundabout taking as straight a line as possible, switching between lanes as they do so. It is very easy to drive through the typical UK roundabout.

Have a look through CD116 - The Geometric Design of Roundabouts, a document from the Design Manual for Roads & Bridges (DMRB). Now the DMRB is for trunk roads and motorways which usually means a high speed situation. However, many local highway authorities will use it for road schemes which are also high speed designs and so we see the DMRB permeating both rural and urban situations (with the latter often being completely inappropriate). The drawing below is an extract from CD116 showing a "normal" roundabout which is the UK standard approach. You can see how easy it is to drive around. On the approaches, the single lane becomes two lanes as the nearside "flares" out which increases capacity. With a two lane approach, you'll often see a flare to three lanes and so on.

The actual intricacies of the design of normal roundabouts are complex and not really my area of expertise, but the high level issues of the geometry and the way that high speeds and capacity are prioritised (and enabled) are all I'm really interested in at this point. The issue I have with their use is where we then mix this type of design with people walking and cycling (and horse riding in some situations) who need to cross one or more arms of a roundabouts. CD116 has a whole section devoted to designing for pedestrians, cyclists and equestrians at roundabouts. 

The table above from CD116 gives advice on the type of crossings to be considered for situations under 40mph. Zebras should not be used where the 85th percentile speed is over 35mph which rules out many situations and is unlikely to be suitable for a rural situation. Traffic signals are for higher flows on dual carriageways. The fact that under 16,000 vehicles per day (on the busiest) arm (or up to 16,000 vehicles per day) on a dual carriageway still allows an uncontrolled crossing to be considered is pretty scary in my mind and zebra crossings on multi-lane approaches are something which makes me very nervous.

My main concern with multi-lane approaches for zebra controlled situations comes from the position that in order to cross, one must place a foot on the crossing. As one looks for approaching traffic, it's entirely possible that the viewing angle could have a vehicle in the far lane blocked from view and so the person crossing cannot see or be seen. If the driver in the second lane isn't paying enough attention, then there is a risk that the person is getting hit.

In my crude little sketch above, the lorry driver in the nearside lane is stopping to allow a person to cross and while the driver of the car in the offside lane should be reacting to the lorry driver stopping, the pedestrian crossing from the right cannot see anything in the visual shadow of the lorry. This arrangement feels unsafe. Some people would feel nervous crossing there and if they had a bad experience, they may be put off from even going there again. Signalised crossings will make people feel more confident because drivers in the visual shadow will see the signals, although being an administrative control, a red signal does not necessarily make it safe. For uncontrolled crossings with multiple lanes, you're being left to find a gap in multiple traffic streams which can be very difficult.

For uncontrolled crossings, the guidance suggests that these should be provided on kerbed islands within 20m of the give way points (otherwise people may not use them which makes sense). However, the problem here is that this places them on the "splitter" islands associated with providing the flare and high speed entry/ exit and therefore situations which are potentially very difficult to cross, especially with multi-lane situations. For speeds over 40mph, uncontrolled crossings of single carriageways of less than 8,000 vehicles per day on each approach are deemed acceptable, although we will often still have flares to two lanes at the crossing point and a wide exit lane from the roundabout. 

The image about is the Weeley Roundabout near Clacton-on-Sea in Essex. I've added the shared-use footway/ cycle tracks in the area and you can see that they cross two lanes on the approaches and wide exit lanes. To the northwest, cyclists are expected to rejoin the carriageway! The aerial view shows a newer layout on the southern arm than you can't yet see in Streetview. It used to be a single lane flaring to two at the last minute (still where people are expected to cross), but as you can see there's a long 2-lane approach. Because the roundabout is often congested (even after this "improvement", it's hard to find a gap in both lanes at once.

Give or take, this roundabout layout "complies" with the DMRB standards. Between 2005 and 2019, there were 17 collisions in the vicinity of the roundabout. 16 involved a slight injury and 1 involved a serious injury (with a motorcycle rider being hit). In the whole of this period, there was 1 slight injury collision involving a cyclist (2006) and none involving pedestrians. In the conventional wisdom we have around 0.8 injury collisions a year with people walking and cycling barely registering and therefore this must be a safe layout.

The problem is, you only have to look at the layout with the difficult crossing points and the walking/ cycling next to traffic on a narrow shared path to understand that this is subjectively unsafe and really only for the fit and the brave. I imaging walking and cycling flows are insignificant compared with motor traffic flow and therefore there simply isn't an impetus to do better. Designers will carry on delivering stuff like this because it is in a National design standard document, because obviously, it has been put together by clever people who know their stuff.

CD116 actually manages to be even scarier. Let's have a look at the segregated left turn lane (SLTL) layouts. These are arrangements where separate left turns are provided to allow that traffic movement to bypass the need to slow down for the roundabout completely - a mini-bypass. There are two main types of SLTL arrangements; where drivers move into the lane and then merge after the roundabout and where the nearside lane peels away from the approach and rejoins on the exit (lane drop/ lane gain). For people wishing to cross, these can be signalised or uncontrolled.

The image above shows an SLTL layout with a lane drop/ gain and uncontrolled crossings. Let's zoom in to the SLTL on the bottom right;

Imagine trying to cross this from bottom right to top left. Three approach lanes, a wide exit lane. Then a wait with traffic passing both sides of you before you cross the slip road. Then a similar arrangement over the next arm of the roundabout.

It took me a while to find, but there is a real live SLTL roundabout just near Crawley, West Sussex - the Cheals Roundabout and it's nuts;

OK, it could have been worse with another entry lane to cross in that southwestern arm, but look at what the designers are expecting people to use;

Imagine being in that island to the right with slip road traffic on one side and traffic entering the roundabout on the other side. This island is around 2.4m in width and so not wide enough to fit many non-standard cycles and so small, you're going to struggle to fit a family on there. As an aside and if you find yourself on the roundabout but fancy getting off it, there's a curious gap in the SLTL island (which is not in CD116);

The odd cycle gap to one side, this SLTL arrangement is a legitimate layout. Even though the Cheals Roundabout is a local authority road, the DMRB has been used to guide the design in a situation one might find on a trunk road. The designers will no doubt argue that it's a reasonable design to use and because "it's in the book" it is safe. But again, it is subjectively unsafe with a design that shouldn't have soft bodied people anywhere near.

The problem with all of this is, that if we start from a sustainable safety point of view rather than a traffic flow point of view then we would either provide fully signalised layouts for people cross (notwithstanding the safety issues which remain) or providing grade separated arrangements. Ideally, we would have a completely separate walking and cycling network. However, sometimes this does coincide with the motoring network and as Stevenage taught us many years ago, grade separation is a good solution. 

It's of course no surprise that I'm going to mention the Dutch approach and that they would not provide layouts that I have mentioned in this post. The Dutch do use high capacity roundabouts (called "turbo roundabouts") which is a whole post in it's own right, but where people are not mixed other than in certain urban situations (although these are risky and should really be avoided). If a junction is very busy, then the Dutch will grade separate it to provide a safer environment for drivers with the walking/ cycling network being kept separate.

In fact, it's not just the Dutch, there's lots of rural grade separation on Danish roads in situations where the UK would go for a roundabout. Although the Danish don't have a well developed rural walking/ cycling network to the same extent as the Dutch.

Where people are crossing Dutch roundabouts, these will be one lane in/ one lane out affairs (compact roundabouts) which are developed as a safer type of junction. Generally they are moving to walking/ cycling priority in urban areas with traffic priority retained in rural areas. I wrote a whole post about this back in 2017. 

Anyway, the UK is baking in roundabouts which are subjectively hostile to people because of a design standard which comes at the issue as a traffic capacity question, rather than a making people feel safe question. When I was looking for an SLTL example, I came across lots of design reports for locations where they are being considered, so expect to see more of these as we keep trying to add capacity.

We really do need to talk about UK roundabout design especially as the compact or continental style roundabout appears in CD116 but is often rejected by designers on capacity grounds;

This is the last general post of 2020. Next week will be my annual roundup and it certain to highlight a very strange year. It just remains for me to wish you all a Merry Christmas and thank you for reading. Stay safe and let's hope 2021 is a better one.

Why Is Twenty Plenty?

The widespread adoption of 20mph (30kph) across many parts of Europe is not a coincidence or a fad, it is based on science and is a key part of delivering sustainable safety or vision zero.

Back in 2013, I wrote about the "how" of 20mph limits and in this post, I want to have a little look at the why. Before I go on, it is worth reiterating a point I am often making and that is speed limits are a product of mass motoring. Where motor traffic isn't allowed, then speed limits are a meaningless concept. It's also worth mentioning that 20 is a round number and in many cases, a lower limit would have even more positive outcomes. The 30kph limit elsewhere is of course lower at 18.6mph and even that slight difference is a little safer.

Under the sustainable safety approach, modes with significantly different speeds will be separated. It's taken as read that we wouldn't expect people walking to share the road with people driving at 30mph or more and so it's no coincidence that the Dutch designers will extend this to separating people cycling to. Sustainable safety will also keep people walking and cycling separate as well, unless there is a good reason for integration such as a public square at a destination point where people cycling will be dropping their pace.

A Dutch street with a 30mph speed limit. Cycling

is in protected space. The side street is 20mph and

cycling is integrated once more.

20mph doesn't necessarily mean that a road or street will be "safe" because with significant volumes and high levels of HGV traffic there is still a high level of risk exposure to those outside of the motor vehicles. However, 20mph is all about risk reduction and it comes from the intersection of physics and human biology - more specifically the ability of the body to withstand an impact (and I don't apologise for the blunt language).

Perhaps one the best articles I have read comes from "Unsafe at Many Speeds" by ProPublica. It's based on a US report from 2011 which uses US crash data from 1994-1998, but the laws of physics and human biology don't worry about that and there are some stark findings. The immediate thing we see is that the relationship between the risk of death and the impact speed is non-linear;

I've reproduced the graphics from the article above. This is risk of death vs impact speed from a car or a light truck. The top graph is the average risk for all ages within a 95% confidence range and the bottom graph has the risk for people aged 70 (dotted line) and people aged 30 (solid line).

What this all shows is that once we get over about 15mph, the risk multiplies for every 1 mph of speed increase and the effect is more profound on older people who's bodies (in general) cannot sustain impacts as well as younger people, even at low speeds. The data doesn't deal with impacts from heavy good vehicles because people are simply going to be crushed by them, even at low speeds. This is why people should be separated where there are high percentages of HGVs even if overall traffic flow is lower.

It's worth reading the article and looking at the interactive graph which helps you understand this non-linear relationship. Once we get to high speed crashes, then few people stand a chance of survival. We often hear from pro-speed advocates that pushing low speeds is flawed because of the relatively low numbers of crashes where a driver hits a pedestrian. This is about debating absolute numbers rather than talking about risk and it doesn't take into account situations where people are kept off the streets from a fear of being hit because of speeding drivers.

Sustainable safety also helps those inside motor vehicles in two ways. For drivers, the act of moving more slowly allows them to processes the cognitive load coming at them from an urban environment - reading signs, people crossing in front of them, people pulling out of side roads etc. In other words, there is more time to take in and react to what is going on around them, even if it is taken evasive action from someone else disobeying the rules - 20mph is a speed which forgives mistakes. The second way is that the closing speed between vehicles is reduced in a way which helps protect the occupants of the vehicle from death and injury.

The other useful benefit of 20mph in urban areas is that it allows designers to be more radical and space-efficient with their designs in terms of narrower lane widths, tighter turns, reduced forward visibility and so on. In designing in this way, we can reinforce lower speeds rather than enforcement them because the environment guides behaviour rather than just a sign at the side of the road. That doesn't mean we have change things at the same time as bringing in a 20mph limit, just that it deals with the chicken and egg by making a decision to start change.

Despite the positive outcomes of having this as a standard speed limit, there is still substantial push back from citizens and politicians which seems to hinge on a couple of misnomers. First, they will say that going to 20mph will make journeys longer in time, usually giving some local example. This only really works when we talk about free-flow roads with grade-separated junctions - places where we would never suggest 20mph. 

In urban places we are more interested in looking at journey time reliability (the same journey being predictable in time) then speed because of the complexity of how the networks operate. Unless on an urban trunk road with grade separation, you're going to meet with "friction" from side streets, traffic signals and all of the things which impact journey times. Even if you raised the urban speed limit to 50mph everywhere, you're not going to get away from the friction and the risk of collisions significantly increase.

Of course, arguments about having higher speed limits at night are often advanced on the basis that there are fewer people around, but this would still increase the risk exposure of those who are actually around (regardless of mode) and potentially an increase in noise (especially tyres). It also ignores the fact that urban places aren't generally designed for higher speeds and those driving will not be competent to handle the cognitive loading from moving faster (and in the dark) compared with say a motorway situation - many people overestimate their driving skills.

Then we have the whole argument around people who claim the gearing on their cars make it "hard" to drive at 20mph and in fact having to drop a gear (maybe) means they are more polluting. There's lots of debate around this (maybe slightly partisan in some cases), but it is pretty much impossible to separate out of the variables an the elephant in the room is missed that motor traffic is polluting (the debate isn't on a level playing field). 

If 20mph is being used at the same time as reducing motor traffic then it's not even a point of discussion and the ability to drive within any speed limit and the prevailing conditions is about roadcraft not about the mechanics of vehicles per se. If one is travelling more slowly, then there will be less gear changing and braking requires less dumping of energy (and therefore brake pollutants). Smooth driving is the important point, not the speed limit.

The discussion needs to be turned on its head. We shouldn't be having to justify 20mph in urban areas (including villages). It should be the natural choice with the idea of having a higher limit being the point which needs to be defended by those advocating for it.

Now you can disagree with me here and you can have your own opinions. However physics and human biology don't care, so maybe you need to think a little more about why you're happy with higher limits and whether or not your apparent convenience should be placed more highly than the safety of other people.

Fend For Yourselves

The infrastructure versus culture debate continues to fascinate me. I remain convinced it is the infrastructure which creates the culture, but at the same time, there's the tricky problem of the culture which drives the infrastructure.

It's classic chicken and egg because we get who we design for, but where we are used to designing for one group, we continue the cycle. This week, we've seen the debacle over the removal of a pretty basic, but incredibly effective cycling scheme on Kensington High Street, not for any data-led reasons, but because of lots of noise and selected attention by local politicians. 

Culture is an interesting thing because when you're within it, everything seems normal and it is those on the outside are odd. More than that, even if you actually understand that you are outside of thinking which is ostensibly correct, culture acts to keep you where you are. Smoking is a good example. Why would anyone in the medical profession smoke given the widespread knowledge about its harm? Yet, people in the medical profession smoke.

There was (and maybe to some extent) was a culture around smoking for a long time. Infrastructure was provided to enable it with advertising and the basic fact that people were free to smoke where they liked. As it was realised that it was harmful to the smokers and people around them, restrictions started to come in with bans on smoking in workplaces, public transport and then pubs, restrictions on advertising, cigarettes being sold in plain packaging with massive (and graphic) health warnings and mainstream political change. In other words, the infrastructure enabling smoking to be pushed has been gradually dismantled.

Of course, none of this happened in a vacuum. There were (and are) plenty of people who campaigned against change. Some people did (and do) enjoy smoking and merely wanted to continue. Some people came at it from the political (and libertarian view point) that it was not for the state to interfere in people's choice. Then we have the tobacco firms. They were concerned that the dismantling of the infrastructure which supported their ability to sell their product would hit their finances.

There are still people in all three groups out there continuing to resist change and fighting against further restrictions. It also doesn't take much research to find the political lobbyists and the groups they associate with (often murkily funded and with access to the ear of the government of the day). Maybe these days they are fighting a rear-guard action against further regulation, but they are still there and have influence.

When we turn back to our streets, we've many places utterly dominated by traffic. This is no accident. It is as the result of years of developing our infrastructure to accommodate it whether physical or political, with people unable to image anything different given that their daily culture of having to drive is so ingrained. It also explains the backlash that changes to the status quo are getting. We're in our current mess as a result of decades of gradual change and so a physical street scheme (especially the rapid deployment we have seen over the past months) hits the established culture hard.

It's also about how things have become custom and practice. Take the humble zebra crossing. The current rule is that drivers are expected to stop only when someone steps onto the crossing (and the person must be mindful of drivers in doing so). For so many people, it is utterly terrifying to step out in front of a car and so many drivers simply carry on and over time this has led some people considering zebra crossings to be unsafe and demanding signal-controlled crossings instead while ignoring the fact that red traffic signals are no more a physical barrier than painted stripes.

Even further on than this, the whole idea of so called "shared space" has permeated certain parts of political and professional thinking. It's essentially a libertarian proposal which places all highway users in a position of personal responsibility and equal standing. Except some people in a couple of tonnes of steel and glass will bully their way through and many people not so protected won't employ one proponent's tactic of "just walk out waving your arms and stare wildly".

It shouldn't come as a surprise that the Swedish Vision Zero and the Dutch Sustainable Safety approaches realise that people cannot be left to their own devices to play nicely and there does in fact need to be state interference with personal choice if people are to be provided with the conditions required to foster a culture where everyone gets a fairer chance of using the streets on their own terms. The approaches recognise and forgive human fallibility and once people are able to experience the change, then a culture develops in which liveability can be the ultimate prize.

As with smoking, there are people who come at this from the point of view that they enjoy driving, or perhaps slightly more truthfully, it's their only option in the way their lives are arranged. Infrastructural issues arising from how we spatially plan our towns and cities have conspired to give us sprawl, services being concentrated rather than being mixed and employment uses remote from where people live (including having to commute in from suburbs to city). This has helped create a culture of long hours and long commutes which at least in some ways, the Covid crisis has challenged with the impact on the concentration of offices and services in one place - we've immediately lost our resilience.

We have also failed to learn lessons from retail parks and the high street. First, allowing retail parks in planning terms a few decades back locked in car dependency and hit the high street at the same time. People got used to the big shop and the big shed, retailers lobbied to be allowed to develop the model, highway management fell into place to accommodate the retail park with huge junctions, multiple staggered crossings and a townscape set up for the model. The political side fell behind the approach hook line and sinker with the promise of employment and developer contributions.

In fact, all we really achieved was low density commercial and retail development which hollowed the high street, encouraged people to drive and left a huge legacy of highway layouts which are expensive to maintain and which are now very difficult to change in favour of other modes for fear of causing congestion. The culture has been painted into a corner.

It's understandable then, when people who have been immersed into the driving culture, that they rail against change so vociferously. They have so much invested in the current culture that they simply cannot see the privilege that they have. Change can only appear as taking something away from them and they see nothing to gain. "I'm alright Jack" pervades the agenda because of the way we have allowed our streets to be dominated by ever more powerful and physically large machinery. For some, it's almost an arms race whether it's apparently to protect their children from other people in battlewagons or simply an apparent show of wealth or status from driving the newest, largest or noisiest vehicle on the street.

We've people with a financial interest in car culture. The car manufacturers to require the creation and maintenance of roads to perpetuate their sales; the financing companies that use debt as their business model to fuel the vehicle arms race; oil companies desperate to keep their businesses going as the world starts to electrify (not to mention the wars linked to non-renewable resources); the advertisers and by extension the media, who need a source of revenue to exist. This is not to mention the political lobbyists and politicians with their own interests.

We won't change the culture without changes to infrastructure, that is certain. Encouragement cannot replace kerbs and asphalt. Expecting entire industries to change through the goodness of their hearts cannot beat regulation. Public space cannot be left to the survival of the most bullish. As we have seen in many parts of Northern Europe, infrastructural change is possible, although the same places are still enabling driving through massive road schemes; but at least the local neighbourhoods are resilient with the idea of the 15-minute city.

As for the UK, I suspect that we'll keep seeing pockets of change appearing despite the all of the embedded car culture we have built up. This will need people to shout about it, to push for it and to call out local, regional and national government which resists it. It means that anyone with influence pushing back are fair game to be called out and in some cases, direct action is going to be necessary. It also means that we need to support leaders who are trying to get change going because they will be pushing back at their own and peers' culture which will potentially leave the isolated and under pressure. But, change we must because the climate doesn't care about your cheap parking space.