London’s war on motorists isn’t helping anybody

Late one evening in Yangon in Myanmar a few years ago, I noticed a grey Morris Minor van patrolling the streets. It had an old-fashioned double–ended trumpet loudspeaker on its roof blaring out an amplified voice. ‘What’s it saying?’ I asked my guide. ‘It tells the people “It’s late! Stop drinking and go to bed! You have a busy day tomorrow!”’

That’s the spirit. We should get some of that in London. ‘Stop eating! Get on your bike! Pedal faster!’ Why has Covid brought out a rash of virtuous bullying? I have lost count of the number of times that Radio 4 has asserted that this plague needs to create a better, more caring, more aware, lovelier human race. (And if not, we can, of course, be ordered to be so.)

Now, in the middle of calamity, as we try to save a faltering economy, halt the return of a deadly pandemic, and resume normality, Transport for London (TfL), in league with earnest local councillors and encouraged by the government, has decided to take this moment to force Londoners to adopt a more worthy form of personal transport. They have arbitrarily closed off Park Lane, Euston Road, the Edgware Road and hundreds of other main arteries. Its ‘world-leading street-space for London’ will ‘stop rat-runs and make London areas access only’. Eh? How? These are the main roads. You may love this if you are fit and 20. The elderly think it’s bonkers. Ordinary working people with jobs and cars are simply confused.

I’m not anti-bike. I love them. I loved mine so much that in the early 1970s, I was just about the only bloke on a bicycle in central London (or so it felt). I used to haul it into the back of a black cab (particularly if I was a little drunk and unwilling to face the back wind of articulated trucks in a rainstorm).