We campaign for Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, also known as LTNs – a term we popularised in our seminal 2019 report on this topic.
These are groups of residential streets bordered by main roads. Every resident can drive onto their street, but it’s harder or impossible to drive through the neighbourhood from one main road to the next.
People currently drive 8 billion vehicle miles a year in London, and 40% of motor traffic is on minor roads. By removing through-traffic, the streets in a Low Traffic Neighbourhood see dramatic reductions in motor traffic levels.
This means less noise, air pollution and less road danger. Children can play out, neighbours can catch up and chat, and people feel safe to walk and cycle around their neighbourhood.
Crucially, cutting through-traffic on side streets doesn’t add significantly to congestion on the surrounding main roads after the first few months.
That’s why our original 2020 Climate Safe Streets report called for through motor traffic to be eliminated from London’s side streets and neighbourhoods by 2028.
Our 2019 LTN reports
We worked with Living Streets to produce two leading documents on Low Traffic Neighbourhoods in 2019: an LTN handbook and an introduction for policy makers. Download them below.
Children & LTNs
Kids don’t play outside any more.
In the space of two generations, we’ve seen children’s roaming distance collapse as motor vehicle volumes on residential streets have rocketed.
In the UK 8 in 10 people aged 55-64 regularly played outside their homes as a child.
Today less than 3 in 10 children are allowed to play outside.
Ref: Save the Children, 2022
School Streets are roads next to schools that are closed to motor traffic around pick-up and drop-off times. Currently mainly used around primary schools, we are seeing them expanded to secondary schools in some boroughs like Hackney. They often have resident and disabled exemptions and are enforced by anything from numberplate recognition cameras to volunteer staff and parents with pop-up bollards.
School Streets create places ideal for walking, scooting, cycling and play and have been shown to reduce the proportion of families doing the school run by car.
Increasingly, in London, School Streets are being used in conjunction with Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes to disrupt cut-through traffic, boost bus routes and enable walking and cycling for children and families across an entire area – not just the last 100m of a child’s journey to school.
The funny thing is, since the 1960s in the UK we’ve built cul-de-sac housing and council estates that are essentially low traffic neighbourhoods by default – houses are on little roads that are dead ends, and there are no rat-runs.
So in the UK there are already huge numbers of people living in effectively LTNs where the traffic rates are only around one car an hour and they feel okay to let their kids play out.
The issue instead is that in many of these neighbourhood designs there’s no permeability for anything – the pavements are poor, there are no spaces between the houses, and so they’ve very hard or impossible to cycle through, or even to walk through – driving remains easier to do than other modes. At London Cycling Campaign, we originally saw Low Traffic Neighbourhoods as something for cycling – but actually it’s even more vital for walking, for kids playing outside, and our communities overall.
LTNs around the world...
LTNs make a dramatic change to the feel of a neighbourhood and, alongside protected space on main roads, are one of the key changes needed to turn London into a cycling city.
But the idea of stopping traffic cutting through a residential neighbourhood isn't new...
Pompeii, 79AD
Wheeled vehicles like chariots were banned from the central plaza of Roman cities where public life was centred.
We can see this law enforced by physical barriers, like these three stone blocks preventing carriage traffic travelling into Pompeii's central plaza.
The Nederlands, 1960s
The Dutch principle of Woonerf, originates in the Stop de kindermoord (“Stop the child murder”) movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Woonerf means almost all Dutch neighbourhoods today cannot be driven through by car.
Hackney, 1970s
One famous London example is De Beauvoir Square in Hackney – now a very chic area with multi-million pound pads, but previously a notorious red-light district.
In the 1970s the local council decided to filter traffic in the whole area to try and stop kerb-crawling and drug-dealing.
But our local cycling group, Hackney Cycling Campaign, saw how good it was for cycling and embraced it. Hackney is now one of London's leading boroughs for LTNs.
Barcelona, 2010s
Barcelona today is famous for its 'superilles' or superblocks.
The city is built on a 3x3 grid system with the inside of each block not permeable to through-traffic.
Residents have famously spilled over their greenery, planting, conversations and communities into the streets. The city is famously easy to cycle too.
Waltham Forest, 2015
'Mini-Holland' neighbourhoods were created in the north-west London borough of Waltham Forest thanks to our 'Love London Go Dutch' 2012 Mayoral campaign.
These were modelled on Dutch infrastructure and contained many Filtered Permeability Cells: areas which allowed people and bikes through, but not cars.
But Filtered Permeability Cells wasn't a very catchy name so we changed it to Low Traffic Neighbourhoods...
...and the rest is history.
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