He will sink it anyway. Not like Tories care about evidence-based policy anyway.

58% of people did not even know they lived in an LTN.

This part is the funniest. Just goes to show you can just get on with the work of improving things and most people won't notice or care, until the work accumulates into a more livable city.

Sunak is a cunt.

Really fucking hope they keep him till the election.

They will probably give him the boot just before and 50:50 chance of Boris coming back to rebrand the Tories post Sunak. I can seem him now cycling with his hair all over the place talking about how he's going to transform the country and how Sunak was shit but now the party is different. He's a cunt too.

Fuck sake I hate FPTP. I'm going to stop now, I only popped in to call Sunak a cunt and I'm ranting already.

"58% of people didn't even know they live in an LTN." I am dead.

But actually that tracks. I live in a post-war housing estate which is effectively an LTN, and most of the residents had no idea until they were losing their minds about the LTN the council were installing round the corner.

It's a particularly good response when you consider that the terms of reference for this study were specifically set by someone looking to find an excuse to stop doing it.

I live in one of the most deprived London boroughs. The council is installing LTNs, school streets, and a borough-wide 20mph limit. Many of the existing housing estates are already LTNs, but because that's how the estate was built, people don't recognise it as an LTN, it's just the estate.

People often say this but there isn't the slightest bit of evidence to back it up beyond statements like your 'I couldn't picture a poor street' etc., which is no kind of evidence at all. I can picture 'poor streets' getting the same, so where does that leave us?

What's more, there's plenty of evidence to the contrary. Most council estates were built on what we would now call LTN principles: you can drive into them but not through them, the roads, junctions and crossings are narrow, to discourage speeding and make it quicker and easier for pedestrians to cross, and the speed limits are set low, etc. It's possible that many of the new LTNs are being installed in wealthier neighbourhoods simply because the poorer neighbourhoods already are effectively LTNs. And, in any case, why should being wealthy mean you shouldn't get to breathe clean air?

Having said that, some of the most extensive new LTNs have been built in Newham and Tower Hamlets (where the mayor is trying to take them out despite their popularity), which are two of the poorest boroughs in London. As the article points out, most LTNs have been installed by Labour councils, which tend to be in the poorer areas. It strikes me as unlikely that the poorest councils have all decided to install LTNs exclusively in the richer enclaves.

More broadly, LEZ and ULEZ were initially rolled out in the inner city: where poorer people tend to live. So, your argument just doesn't hold up at all.

It's vice versa. There are plenty of new car free developments in poorer parts of London like Barking, but you'll never see them in rich parts like Chelsea.

Yeah i grew up next to a very deprived council estate in the 90s, they already had speed bumps in place then. Your take is nonsense.

He is terrified of upsetting the car lobby. As Chancellor of the Exchequer he kept the fuel duty freeze which has so far robbed the Exchequer of £100 billion pounds since it was introduced in 2011.

And he lives in a low traffic neighbourhood himself, it's not like people are driving up and down Downing Street all day, since it's gated at both ends.

The article mentions that he commissioned this report with the hope that he could use it to sink the idea of LTNs and stop their rollout and/or remove them where they've been installed.

Remember that unlike countries like America and Australia, the UK is a unitary state, and Westminster has a significant amount of power to tell local councils what they can and can't do.