Businesses and residents in Bath are fighting net zero measures such as roadblocks, bollards, and digital permits, which they say will stop them from moving freely around the historic city.
Bath, a UNESCO world heritage site famed for its Roman baths and links to the writer Jane Austen, is introducing a raft of environmental measures aimed at achieving “a major shift to mass transport, walking, and cycling.” However, many residents are arguing that the measures are anti-car and anti-democratic, and that they are dramatically changing the way people live in and move around their city.
The Liberal Democrat-run Bath and North East Somerset (B&NES, or BANES) council declared a “Climate Emergency” in 2019, with a goal to make the city and the district carbon neutral by 2030.
‘15-Minute City’ Ideology
One project in Bath supports the “15-minute city” or “15-minute neighbourhood” urban planning concept, i.e., a city divided into neighbourhoods that can accommodate around 50,000 people across 20,000 households, and with amenities, work, and necessary services within a fifteen-minute walk or bike ride.
“This concept aims to foster an urban environment which supports you (residents) to meet your everyday needs in your local area, enabling you to ‘live well locally’ and reduce the need to travel,” according to BANES.
Schemes that emerge from such 15-minute city/net zero ideologies, however, include Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs)—which use barriers, bollards, road signs, and planters to restrict car movements—as well as Residents’ Parking Zones (RPZs), which require a digital permit to park a car in specific areas. In one area, 70 percent of residents opposed RPZs, yet they were still introduced by the council.
The town centre's "Ring of Steel" is pictured in Bath, England on Feb. 22, 2023. (Owen Evans/The Epoch Times)
The council said that key policies aim “to reduce vehicle emissions, encourage the use of public transport, reduce congestion, and ensure consideration and street space is given to people who wish to walk, wheel, or cycle.” Cycling groups and environmentalists have welcomed the measures.
‘Changing Our Entire Way of Living’
Caroline Horsford, a Bath local campaigning for the Free Bath Streets movement, told The Epoch Times that “no one has asked us if we want to change our entire way of living.”
“Changing the way we live, the way we shop, the way our kids our educated, how we drop them off at school, everything is changing and it is changing fast,” she said.
She said that every week there’s “a bollard or new rule” which means drivers can’t stop in, park in, or pass through certain areas.
“This is done without proper consultation,” she added.
Horsford claims that the council is refusing to meet stakeholders with concerns, such as businesses that have been impacted.
Free Bath Streets’ Youtube channel features businesses on a busy high street called Moorland Road, with one saying that their custom is down 50 percent due to the lack of footfall from parking restrictions in their area.
Horsford said that the council is also refusing to discuss the town’s “Ring of Steel,” which is negatively affecting residents and businesses in the city centre.
From ‘Anti-Terror’ to Anti-Traffic
Originally set up as a security zone ostensibly intended to prevent vehicle-based terror attacks in the town centre, campaigners believe Bath’s £7 million “Ring of Steel“—which consists of manually operated barriers that remain closed from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.—is a tool to make motorists take the flak for net zero measures.
Horsford said that there are also potential plans to divide Bath into four cells—similar to what is happening in other cities such as Oxford, which has strict rules on how often motorists can drive into the town centre and what areas they can access, and which some critics have termed a “climate lockdown by default.”
Some 15 LTNS—also referred to by the council as “Liveable Neighbourhood” areas—have been identified in Bath and North East Somerset. However, Horsford claims that there are 48 planned in total, but that the council won’t tell the protesters where they will be until after the elections in May.
“If you have 48 of these in a small city like Bath, you’re living in a rabbit warren,” she said.
The group says that their concerns are regularly dismissed as conspiracy theories, or that they “stoke culture wars.“
The World Economic Forum has profiled the concept of the 15-minute city.
BANES has signed up to a global network of mayors “taking urgent action to confront the climate crisis,” called C40 Cities. And the UK has legally binding targets of reaching net-zero by 2050, including British government plans on radically reducing carbon emissions by 2030 by phasing out petrol and diesel cars, gas boilers, and by changing people’s diets—while using behavioural science to achieve this end.
Screenshot from a video showing Alan Miller (2nd R), who launched the anti-restriction campaign Together, as he speaks outside No. 10 Downing Street in London, on Jan. 17, 2022. (Earl Rhodes/NTD)
The Together Declaration, co-founded by Alan Miller, was formed in 2021 in response to COVID measures with the mission to “push back against the rapidly growing infringements on our rights and freedoms.” Together has also developed a “Free Our Streets“ campaign.
Miller told The Epoch Times that it is “astonishing that when residents’ associations and shopkeepers and locals talk about the damage and harms from low traffic neighbourhoods and parking zones that have not been consulted properly, that some councillors and commentators decide to talk about conspiracists or the ‘far right.’”
‘They Desperately Do Not Want People to Have the Freedom to Drive Their Cars’
Graham Pristo, who intends to stand as a Tory councillor in the next local election in order to protect his area—which has an LTN barricade—told The Epoch Times that the rollout of the measures has “pitted neighbour against neighbour.”
“They desperately do not want people to have the freedom to drive their cars in the way we previously have done,” he said.
Pristo said he believed the council’s aims “may be good and idealistic,” but that what the town wants has to be “done from a position of strength,” suggesting that businesses and families have already been impacted negatively by COVID lockdowns and the state of the economy.
Graham Pristo is pictured standing next to LTN bollards in his area of Bath, England on Feb. 22, 2023. (Owen Evans/The Epoch Times)
“The town needs a good public service and affordable public transport to replace it, but at the moment buses are being cancelled at the same time cars are being taken away, the two don’t marry up,” he said.
Sam Smith*, a blue badge holder (i.e., a disabled driver) who is heavily reliant on his car, has struggled to get into the town centre because of the Ring of Steel.
He told The Epoch Times that originally, the council had wanted to bar all traffic from the town centre—including cars of disabled drivers. The council later walked back the limitations on blue-badge holders, however.
“Now they let them through and they have to show a blue badge like in a war film, like a sentry,” he said, adding that residents, especially the elderly, are upset at the restrictions.
An access point on the "Ring Of Steel" is pictured in Bath, England on Feb. 22, 2023. (Owen Evans/The Epoch Times)
On turning Bath into a 15-minute city, Smith said he did not approve of plans that modelled the town’s future on the city of Ghent in Belgium.
“It’s as flat as a pancake, has a ring road, and it has 24/7 public transport,” Smith said of Ghent. “Those are three things we do not have in Bath. Somebody has taken a cut-and-paste approach to someone else’s transport solution and just tried to apply it here,” he said.
“It’s the rationing of movement, in a free society when you start having to ration free movement by a car, which are legal to own, they are not illegal yet and they are highly taxed—people will start thinking ‘hang on, that’s not right,’” he said.
BANES did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.
