Harriet Larrington-Spencer, Ersilia Verlinghieri, Rachel Aldred, Emma Lawlor and David Fevyer 2025. Everyday discourses of climate delay in opposition to Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. Active Travel Studies. https://doi.org/10.16997/ats.1811
| Title | Everyday discourses of climate delay in opposition to Low Traffic Neighbourhoods |
|---|---|
| Type | Journal article |
| Authors | Harriet Larrington-Spencer, Ersilia Verlinghieri, Rachel Aldred, Emma Lawlor and David Fevyer |
| Abstract | Climate change is unequivocal, and yet public conversations negating the need for urgent action remain. Discourses of climate delay, that create the sense of intractable obstacles to action, are one form of this. Within this paper we use Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) as a case study to explore how discourses of climate delay are produced within everyday opposition to road space reallocation. LTNs seek to reduce emissions from motor vehicles by using modal filters to create systems of streets with an improved environment for active travel, whilst making vehicle journeys more circuitous and less desirable. Analysing 33 go-along interviews with residents living in or near four new or planned LTNs in London and who oppose their local intervention, discourses of delay coherent with Lamb et al’s (2020) framework can be identified. Analysis shows how current discourses of opposition to LTNs are not limited to specific characteristics of interventions, i.e. effects on everyday mobility but often rooted in broader discourses of climate delay. However, tensions also emerge in the implicit assumption of the framework that climate change mitigation measures cannot be regressive. This means that articulations of social injustice and unfair burdens can be labelled as delay, rather than considering that identifying and addressing such injustices are the foundations of equitable and ambitious climate action. Overall, our hope is that the deployment of the discourses of delay framework to everyday opposition to LTNs (and climate mitigation interventions more widely) can help policy makers and others involved in their implementation navigate the substantial public backlash and drive forward transformative change. |
| Journal | Active Travel Studies |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publisher | University of Westminster Press |
| Publisher's version | License CC BY 4.0 File Access Level Open (open metadata and files) |
| Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.16997/ats.1811 |
| Web address (URL) | https://doi.org/10.16997/ats.1811 |
| Publication dates | |
| Published | 2025 |