A leading government adviser on cities has urged ministers to make urban areas friendlier for walking and cycling. He said this would promote prosperity, health and personal freedom and could even help solve the housing crisis.
In a report that takes a strikingly different stance from Rishi Sunak’s recent ‘plan for drivers’, which aims to prioritize car use at the expense of active travel and bus use, Nicholas Boys Smith says: who is chairman of the The government’s Office for Space said cars “reduce and increase freedom”.
“Don’t hate cars. Don’t wage war on motorists. But don’t go to war for them either,” Boys wrote in the report by Create Streets, the urban planning organization he founded. “Instead, fight the battle for place and for happy, healthy, prosperous and productive neighborhoods. All the evidence indicates that voters will be grateful.”
The new study, titled Move Free, comes after a series of moves by Sunak and his ministers to curb councils’ ability to encourage walking and cycling through initiatives such as low-traffic neighbourhoods, 20mph speed limits and bus lanes.
While the report argues that it was crucial for politicians to gain public consent before taking steps to shift car traffic in the city, the report notes that evidence from around the world showed the enormous benefits this would bring .
“Look at the facts and data already in your local community,” the report said. “In many historic English market towns, the most prosperous streets with the fewest or no empty shops are those with the most street trees and the narrowest, most speed-restricted carriageway. There may be cars there, but they are guests. People are the dominant species, not cars.”
The study points to research from dozens of cities around the world showing that towns and cities that are not dominated by fast-moving motor vehicles do better economically because people find them more attractive. Removing parking spaces did not appear to impact retail sales, it added.
More walking and cycling has been found to make people significantly healthier and happier, the report said, while years of research have shown that car-dominated streets greatly restrict children’s freedom.
“Cars above all destroy the child’s and teenager’s freedom to move around safely,” the report said. “Children are much less free now than they were fifty or a hundred years ago, a fact that is changing the nature and vitality of our cities.”
Given the much greater space efficiency of other forms of transport, especially given the need to park cars – where they spend 96% of their time, according to the report – a shift towards denser cities could greatly help the housing crisis by increasing the number of homes built should be and where people want to live.
While much of this is considered standard urban planning practice in many European cities, England has recently moved away from the drive to encourage active travel, amid a prioritization of motorists seemingly based more on ideology than research.
So Boys Smith’s intervention is notable: the former Conservative adviser was appointed by Michael Gove to head the Office for Space, based within Gove’s leveling department.
Commenting on the report, prepared with the help of the charity Cycling UK, Boys Smith said: “Cars are great. Cars are terrible. Cars can increase freedom. Cars can destroy it. Cars can help the economy. Cars can undermine it. The main question is where.”