Zones! It’s starting. Jesus wept.
See also the thread below entitled DIGITAL ID - THE FINAL LOCKDOWN.(DIGITAL ID - THE FINAL LOCKDOWN. We must get rid of these devices at any cost!)
Another semi-literate hack who doesn’t know what ‘communism’ means!
The awkward thing is that people WILL be using cars less, willy nilly, since geophysical forces majeures are insisting on that; and it will become more innately draconian in time too, as pressure of widespread shortages mounts.
Having it forced on you by council busybodies, using the climate shift canard as their justification, is hardly an intelligent approach, though.
In reality, a line of actually-genuine communism. or perhaps better still genuine socialism (another word that the ill-educated babblers can scarcely define) would be able to handle these non-negotiable characteristics of our near future much better. But that’s all desperately out of fashion - for the present…
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A similar scheme is being proposed in Canterbury.
Regardless of whether the scheme goes ahead, personally I would only ever travel into the upper left zone, or to the lower left zone where there’s a decent Park & Ride into the red zone at the core. Trying to park a car in this area is a mug’s game.
Similar cathedral cities like Salisbury, Hereford and Winchester have good P&R schemes too, and I’m sure many other places do. I recall crossing Bristol twice, a while back, to get to Stanton Drew (photo below) and what a nightmare that was. The same narrow congested streets as the towns named (I don’t know Oxford) but with the added spice of all those flippin’ hills. Murder on the clutch.
Isn’t just about everywhere in the UK like this now?
Letting car traffic expand without limit for decades on end was always going to lead to disastrous conditions in cities and towns (even villages), both for drivers but especially pedestrians, children, and the natural world. Ridding town centres from these polluting noisy space grabbing metal cages I can only see as positive.
There are good examples of how to do this – on the other side of the North sea – in combination with expanding pedestrian zones, good public transport and a cycling network. It requires time, money and good planning. Something in short supply in this country. Instead you’ll get these half-arsed ideas.
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I agree.
A previous half-arsed idea in Canterbury, btw, was a series of one-way roads that prevented traffic from passing beneath what’s called the Westgate Tower. Link with image and some history below. ‘Sir William Courtenay’ was a notable prisoner.
Fascinating man who was a rabble-rouser of some skill, and later the leader of the last (so far) armed uprising in England. He and a bunch of followers were killed in the woods at Boughton not far from here. (A few soldiers snuffed it too IIRC.)
Anyway the traffic experiment lasted a year and consistently resulted in rat runs through the University campus (this was in about 2012) and several horrible accidents where foreign students looked left instead of right and were injured (in one case killed) by drivers already 15 minutes late for their appointments.