Harriet Larrington-Spencer

Background: Reducing private car use and increasing active travel is essential for transport decarbonisation and addressing public health crises of road traffic injuries, physical inactivity and air pollution. Low Traffic Neighbourhoods have emerged as a key intervention, particularly in London, United Kingdom, to create better environments for walking, wheeling and cycling by restricting through traffic on residential streets. While evidence suggests that Low Traffic Neighbourhoods reduce car use, increase walking and cycling, and improve road safety, their implementation has been politically contentious and has elicited a wide range of public reactions. Methods: This paper presents findings from the qualitative strand of a wider 3.5-year mixed-methods study of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods in London. Qualitative data were collected to explore the lived experiences of Low Traffic Neighbourhood residents, with a focus on how residents – including disabled residents – perceive and navigate the schemes. Participants were selected from among those living in or on the road adjacent to four selected Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, to ensure a diversity of views on the schemes, and diverse demographic characteristics were represented. Using 61 go-along interviews and 7 focus groups, we explore how Low Traffic Neighbourhoods influence residents’ experiences and perceptions of travel. Results: Our findings show that residents’ attitudes towards Low Traffic Neighbourhoods often shape their reported experiences: those who are initially supportive tend to notice and highlight positive impacts, while opponents are more likely to report no change or negative impacts. Overall, participants observed increased walking and cycling, improved perceptions of road safety, and reduced noise and air pollution within Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. However, concerns were raised by some disabled residents about longer journey times and accessibility problems. Notably, many residents living on boundary roads perceived an increase in traffic and pollution, although quantitative data on the impacts of Low Traffic Neighborhoods on boundary roads remain mixed. Conclusions: Our findings highlight the importance of considering residents’ lived experiences in scheme evaluations. While Low Traffic Neighbourhoods contribute to climate and health objectives, their implementation should be guided by a just transition framework to ensure benefits are equitably distributed. Limitations and future work: Our study’s main limitation is that it contributes to an evidence body of research on Low Traffic Neighbourhoods being predominantly from London. Future research should extend beyond London, explore a wider range of schemes and attend to experiences of further marginalised population groups. Funding: This article presents independent research funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Public Health Research programme as award number NIHR135020.

Enlivening is an increasingly common response to urban challenges and seeks to make urban space ‘liveable’ and ‘healthy’. A central tenet in achieving the enlivened city, is an active citizen who travels by sustainable modes, namely active travel. Whilst there is an increasing impetus upon producing an inclusive template of the active citizen within policy, it is our encounters with the materiality of active travel infrastructures within our everyday lives as disabled people that impact upon our ability to exercise citizenship rights and upon our sense of belonging within enlivening. Using an autoethnographic approach to my own experiences as a disabled tricyclist in Greater Manchester, UK, this paper demonstrates how through both encounters and non-encounters with access control barriers on traffic-free routes, the city is rendered less liveable, rather than enlivened, for many disabled people. I also attend to practices of care and repair related to infrastructures of active travel, and how these further consolidate embodied experiences of (non)citizenship. Recognising that such every day, small-scale interactions are the foundations of larger social forms, I demonstrate how autoethnography can contribute to informing inclusive policy and practice, in this case by demonstrating how practice needs to match rhetoric of inclusive, enlivened futures within Greater Manchester, as well as more broadly, if disabled people are to enact our citizenship through active mobility and be part of enlivened urban futures.