On the surface, the national pavement parking ban is sold as a win for accessibility — a way to help people with mobility or visual impairments navigate streets without obstruction. But scratch the surface and the concept collapses under basic questioning.
In practice, it forces the majority of residents — including many with their own mobility challenges — to radically alter long-established parking habits, often reducing their own access to their homes, services, and communities. This isn’t how good systems are designed. Sensible policy balances competing needs, targets genuine problem spots, and fixes them with proportionate solutions.
Instead, we’ve ended up with a blanket prohibition that takes no account of local context, street layout, or alternative options — the hallmarks of a centralised, ideological approach. And that brings us to the real issue…
The Problem: A Transport Strategy Hijacked by Ideology
(Using my own council, East Dunbartonshire, as the case in point)
East Dunbartonshire Council’s Local Transport Strategy 2020–2025 is not a serious transport plan. It’s an ideological manifesto disguised as policy — built not around how people here actually live, but around how central government, activist planners, and unelected policy networks think we should live.
Don’t take my word for it — read it yourself:
Why call this out five years into a five-year plan? Because, like most residents, I assumed at least basic competence from our elected officials. I thought: Well, they must be trying to improve things… right?
Wrong.
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A Suburban Area Treated as Urban
Even if I was in favour of 20 minute cities, East Dunbartonshire is not inner-city Glasgow. It is a patchwork of commuter towns, suburbs, and semi-rural areas — places where car ownership is not a luxury but a necessity. Yet the council's strategy treats it as if it were a walkable urban core, applying the fantasy logic of 20-minute cities.
The entire policy framework is based on trying to push residents out of cars and into cycling or walking as the preference, followed by public transport — ignoring local geography, weather, family structures, health realities, and the poor quality of current public transport options.
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Safety? East Dunbartonshire Has Some of the Safest Roads in Scotland.
East Dunbartonshire’s rate of road traffic casualties is among the lowest in Scotland, with fatal and serious accident numbers well below the national average and steadily declining over the past decade.
Yet this already-safe area is the target of sweeping 20mph zones, road narrowing, modal shift targets, and punitive anti-driver design measures. Why? Because the goal isn’t to solve a safety or accessibility crisis — it’s to meet an ideological checklist imported from national and international policy frameworks.
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A Strategy Built on Perception, Not Reality
Rather than improving transport services, the strategy focuses on how people feel about travel:
“Reducing vehicle speeds will therefore reduce inequality by increasing the perception of safety in the most deprived areas.”
— LTS, p. 53
Perception. Not actual safety. Not mobility. Not opportunity. Just the optics of control.
The Equality Impact Assessment even admits:
“Those on lower incomes tend to travel by slower modes of transport including walking, cycling and bus. This reduces the ability… to travel further for employment opportunities.”
So they know slower travel limits economic opportunity — and still design a strategy to make everyone slower, instead of improving public transport speed, reach, or affordability.
Meanwhile, public transport is acknowledged to have serious safety concerns:
“Safety and fears of violence may also shape women’s travel behaviour. Women are more likely than men to feel very or fairly worried about being sexually assaulted and are also less likely to report feeling very or fairly safe walking alone at night compared to men (66% compared to 89%).”
— Equality Impact Assessment, Section 2.5
“Gendered abuse and sexual harassment are particularly associated with public transport with concerns around personal safety when travelling.”
— Equality Impact Assessment, Section 2.5
So what’s the visionary solution to all this? Cycling! — even for the elderly, parents with toddlers, people with disabilities, and residents living at the top of steep suburban hills. The documents present cycling as the answer to everything. Nowhere do they outline concrete measures to improve security and confidence in bus and rail travel.
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A Disregard for Local Demographics
The strategy treats East Dunbartonshire as a blank slate, ignoring:
A high percentage of older residents
Cycling uptake of just 0.7% for commuting
The reality of long commutes and widely dispersed schools and services
Overwhelming reliance on cars for work, errands, and care duties (over 85% of households have at least one car)
And nowhere is this disconnect more glaring than in the Equality Impact Assessment — the legally required audit of how protected groups are affected by policy.
Two protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010 are flatly dismissed as irrelevant:
“Pregnancy / Maternity – N/A”
“Marriage and Civil Partnership – N/A”
— Equality Impact Assessment, Appendix A, Section 2.6 & 2.7, p. 14
That’s it. No analysis. No explanation. No attempt to understand the real-world implications.
They write paragraphs on how women are “not a homogenous group” whose transport needs depend on age, disability, ethnicity, sexuality, and class — yet when they get to pregnancy they literally just write “N/A.” No explanation. No analysis. Nothing.
So — they tell us which religion owns the most cars, and include statistical gibberish… but can’t find one sentence on how pregnancy or marital status might affect transport needs. After which it says the likly impact of this unassessed group is "Neutral Impact."
Anyone who has been heavily pregnant, or accompanied someone who has, knows the reality:
Walking long distances becomes harder
Standing on buses is risky
Cycling is often impossible
Car access becomes more important, not less
And marriage or civil partnership? That shapes travel too — shared commutes, split school runs, caring for relatives, shuttling children between separated households. All of it is real, all of it has transport implications… and all of it was marked “N/A.”
This isn’t just lazy. It’s revealing. The equality framework here isn’t about real-world needs — it’s a box-ticking exercise. If a characteristic doesn’t fit the pre-approved ideological narrative (climate! bikes! net zero!), it gets waved away.
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“No Downsides”: A Strategy Without Trade-offs?
Across all the strategic reports, the tone is bizarrely utopian. The Environmental Report and Equality Impact Assessment routinely claim that the policies will have:
“No adverse impacts,”
“No negative implications,” or
“Minimal impact anticipated.”
This is policy-making in fantasyland — as if reducing road capacity, lowering speed limits, and restricting vehicle access will magically inconvenience no one, harm no businesses, and cost nothing to implement or enforce.
It’s an ideological bubble where every intervention is a win, every group benefits, and no unintended consequences exist. Which of course, is utterly divorced from reality.
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Not a Transport Plan — A Control Plan
This strategy is not built to serve the people of East Dunbartonshire. It is built to please Transport Scotland, tick policy boxes, and win climate credentials.
It is deeply unserious about public transport (its biggest promise is better bus shelters), utterly unrealistic about modal shift, and oblivious to the geography and demography of the area.
It demonises driving, offers no safe or viable alternative, and expects everyone to walk or cycle regardless of ability, weather, childcare, or distance.
East Dunbartonshire deserves a transport strategy grounded in reality — not activist ideology.
This isn’t working. It needs to stop.
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A Technocratic Fantasy Disguised as Transport Policy
East Dunbartonshire’s Local Transport Strategy isn’t just using buzzwords like “placemaking,” “inclusive growth,” “net zero,” and “social justice.” It’s working to a framework now embedded in Scotland’s planning system.
That framework is the “20-minute neighbourhood” — Scotland’s rebrand of the “15-minute city.” It’s not a passing fad from glossy brochures; it’s written into National Planning Framework 4 (NPF4), approved by the Scottish Parliament in 2023 and carrying statutory weight.
That means:
Every council’s Local Development Plan must reflect “local living” and “modal shift” away from cars.
Transport strategies like East Dunbartonshire’s are tied to delivering the policy, whether or not it suits our geography, demographics, or public opinion.
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As Neil Garratt AM put it:
“The 15-minute city isn’t a conspiracy. It’s just a bad idea.”
He points out that cities work because people can travel widely — to find the best job, the best shop, the best service. People don’t live in imaginary “urban villages.” They go where they want, and that’s what keeps a place dynamic.
Planners may picture cheerful strolls to a local bakery as birds sing overhead, but real life isn’t that neat. If there’s something better further away, people will go there — and rightly so. That freedom of movement is what fuels prosperity.
The snag is this: the only way to make a “20-minute neighbourhood” model work is to make longer trips harder, slower, or more expensive. Once the principle is in planning law, transport policy becomes a tool to steer behaviour in that direction — whether through fewer parking spaces, roadblocks, blanket speed limits, or pricing people off the road.
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Here’s where it gets stranger. The “20-minute neighbourhood” concept in Scotland is promoted by the C40 Cities network, which also pushes broader lifestyle changes. Its 2019 Future of Urban Consumption report calls for:
Halving meat and dairy consumption by 2030 (phasing out meat entirely by 2050)
Cutting private car ownership by 90%
Limiting people to three new clothing items per year
Allowing only one short-haul return flight every three years
Until I started digging into this, I had no idea the Scottish Government has already adopted the meat and dairy targets as policy guidance. That genuinely blew my mind.
We started with a transport plan. We’ve ended up in a space where official policy is telling people not just how far they should travel — but what they should eat, how often they can fly, and even how many clothes they can buy. I am uncomfortable with the direction of travel.
In London, this is still up for debate. In Scotland, extreme rules are already baked into planning and food strategy frameworks via NPF4 and the Good Food Nation (Scotland) Act 2022. These targets and principles are statutory, councils like East Dunbartonshire are bound to plan toward them — whether residents like it or not.
If we want to change direction, it’s MSPs and councillors who hold the pen. And that means speaking up now.