Help! I’m trapped in a 15-minute city

It’s a nasty moment when you receive a letter informing you that a fortnight ago, at a specific number of minutes past an hour, your car was photographed turning into a side road which, at the time, you had no idea you weren’t allowed to turn into.  

You vaguely recall the junction. There was no ‘No entry’ sign: just a torrent of words (‘except’, ‘through’, ‘motor vehicles’, ‘access’) that you didn’t have time to read. That outing will now be forever sullied in your memory by the £65 fine. Protesting ‘but the sat-nav told me to do it!’ is as ineffectual, legally speaking, as Adam bleating to God that ‘the woman gave me fruit from the tree and I did eat’. The punishment is still enforced.  

The lesson you learn from Britain’s new Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs): drive outside your own local district to a place where you don’t know the weird local rules, and you’ll inevitably make some small mistake and be forced to donate a chunk of money to another borough or county council. This is not just a London and Oxford problem; LTNs are being planned for Hereford, Brighton, Bath, St Andrews, Newcastle, Portsmouth and Leith, among many other towns and cities. New road-blocking planters were set on fire in Rochdale last week by angry locals. Though against civil disobedience, I couldn’t stifle a guilty sense of delight at seeing those green but aggressive planters in flames. I’m not sure which is more loathsome: the ‘planters and bollards’ method, which makes it physically impossible to drive through the new blockages, and slows emergency ambulances down, or the ‘cameras and confusing signs’ method, which, though helping ambulances, rakes in fines from inadvertent rule-breakers.   

Both methods are highly interfering to us all trying to live our lives, and are imposed on us by money-hungry zealots.