Professor Rachel Aldred, Professor of Transport, was interviewed by Air Quality News about Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) and her research regarding their effectiveness.
Discussing the assumption that LTNs favour wealthier communities, Professor Aldred said: “In actual fact, we found that the most deprived areas in London were nearly three times as likely to have a new LTN than the least deprived areas. We looked at the characteristics of people who live within the LTN and compared this to those who live near the adjacent boundary roads and generally speaking we found there wasn’t any difference, certainly not with respect to deprivation.
“But it is important to highlight that implementing LTNs at scale is a relatively new intervention, so we definitely need more data looking at a whole range of outcomes in order to really get the full picture. We are doing some work on this, but a lot more needs to be done.”
She added: “I find it frustrating that when we talk about LTNs we don’t talk enough about the wider context. The level of pollution in London is still unacceptable and we absolutely do need policies in place to tackle that and make pollution better on a city-wide scale.
“The government has a lot of options, they can introduce much better bike infrastructure, they can use electric buses instead of diesel, they can expand the ULEZ, there’s a whole range of things and I think the message is that we need to do all of them, LTNs haven’t made these issues go away.”
Read the full article on the Air Quality News website.
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