roads

Twenty Years On

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

This January marks the twenty year marker since thousands of people from all round the country converged on the Hampshire, Berkshire border for an often gruelling campaign against the Newbury Bypass in particular and new roads in Britain in general. It’s a familiar story by now, or at least ought to be; what can happen when people come together to protest, of how far both sides are prepared to go when a line has been drawn in the sand, of the hope and bitterness, of the inspiration and grinding attrition of states of muted and mutual conflict.

It had gathered a sense of near inevitability by that point; the culmination of years of campaigning and of the desire to push through what was then one of the biggest road building programmes in the UK’s history. There is much you can say, looking back. Certainly the timeliness of doing so probably speaks for itself, with the latest resurgent road building programme; everything that was fought for stands in peril once again; the landscapes and the hope for a manouvre away from ongoing car culture and all its implications for the climate.

That can be banged on about indefinitely and there’s clearly scope and a case for doing so while we are faced with such retrogressive policies. But, if that case ever seems predictable or reductionist, there’s a lot to be said for that time that was about more than simply a battle with the state. If we came to protest, we also came from an instinct simply to gather itself; to live on the land among like minded people and to find as we did a sense of a very real kinship. We came to escape urban life, to make the most of a chance just to live as a people, back in a place we could truly call home.

It was one of the defining, and sometimes tragic, aspects of the time then that people who felt so keenly connected with nature answered their heart’s calling to put themselves right at the front, to fight against and witness what was being done to this country for the sake of apparently insatiable demands for burgeoning infrastructure. Evictions, ongoing actions and more traditional forms of protest all both inspired and took their toll and there are many I know who, while they’d never have had it be another way, left sufficiently scarred just to want to move on.

At the same time, many felt moved to join ongoing movements; against genetic modification, against global free trade and all its repercussions, seeking to cut off the head of the beast rather than fight piece by piece the tentacles each new road represented. At times, along with many more, I’ve sought a return to those kind of days. And they certainly hold a currency of experience and example for anyone protesting now; against new roads or fracking or dubious nuclear deals.

But, while it might sound naïve, there’s a sense too that these protests shouldn’t really be necessary at all. There’s a sense that people shouldn’t have to put their lives and health on the line due to the culpability of governments. That direct action is still a necessary stopgap when official policy seems out of kilter (at best) if not an example of the very worst a state can do (and in this sense the ongoing campaign against fracking couldn’t be more important), there’s also a feeling at times that there is potentially a wider game; that of the potential for mass behavioural change, for the catalysts of a newfound environmental consciousness that need not be necessarily allied to protest overall. Though when lobbyists and corporations still threaten so much, the role of protestors is clearly as needed as ever.

But for my part at least, direct action is no longer an option. The stress of evictions, the minimal food and grinding months of attrition all conspired to mean that activism is a thing I cannot now repeat. And many more find that frontline campaigning can still be too emotionally and psychologically fraught. But while protest is currently crucial, we can remember too that wider stories can persist; of waking up, of how we lead our lives, of how we see to and relate to the world, of what it can feel like to live close to the earth, whether as part of creation or something more immediate; to see her as the relation she is, not some tableau of resources for the taking.

Environmental responsibility starts with every one of us, removed from any sense of ‘us or them’. It can help spark campaigns but can also fuel another sense; what it means to live well and as lightly as we can. Remembering stories can light up our times, but history more often bears echoes of itself rather than perpetuating more exact repetition. People can learn from what happened at Newbury but I also do not doubt that they can be every bit as imaginative and pioneering as anyone involved in the nineties. Ideally there should be no need for division down partisan lines, just as surely as we all have to see our way beyond the machinations of the poorer aspects of the modern world.

Inspiration can take root in many forms. Perhaps what’s needed more than ever is the currency of enabling greater benevolent change, of how a people can be when we hear the call of our hearts as well as that of the planet. In truth of course there’s never really been a separation – the lie that there has been has helped shape so much of our world. Remembering this unity is perhaps the most important, and still urgent, task that we face.

Landscapes

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

Probably one of the more major repercussions of the recent Tory electoral catastrophe is the apparent green light it gives the government to plough ahead with their gargantuan resurgent road building programme. By way of a reminder, that means the continuation of some 238 schemes; more than 76 bypasses, 48 link roads, 12 link roads and 56 widened roads. All in all that’s some 772 miles of new or widened roads. It’s a reversion to old Tory form, given apparent legitimacy by a panicky response to our economic situation where any kind of fiscal stimulus is seen as the only way forward.

Too bad then that the weight of evidence is stacked up against the long-term efficacy of building our way out of congestion. And too bad that figures show that levels of traffic may have actually been plateauing these last ten years if not on a steady decline. But that hardly seems to matter in the new paradigm of Conservative consensus. Let’s just build our way out of recession, whatever the logic or evidence may actually be.

Many people I know would rather not drive were it not for the exorbitant costs – and frequent overcrowding – of public transport. A unique opportunity of potential behavioral change is being lost by at best indifference but in all likelihood a cynical rejection of a genuine chance for a true modal shift.

Though of course while that’s true, it cannot all be laid at the feet of the government. While a probable still-sizable majority of folk own and frequently travel by car, it can be argued that procurement of roads is simply responding to popular demand. For most people in the UK, regular car use is a fact of life. For families in particular or for most living anywhere particularly rural, they’re often a seemingly unalterable crutch if not actually outright indispensable. Their advantages in getting people exactly where they need to be at any given time, their capacity for shifting stuff as well as people apparently give them a huge upper hand.

That’s the logic of car use; an undeniable one for so many. But their plush if pathogen-laden interiors insulate people in more ways than one. Not only is the immediacy of the natural world removed from us as if by a veil or the displacing effect of rapid movement, but the true costs of the roads that facilitate car use are equally hidden. Not just the landscapes and communities marred or removed but fiscally too; the cost of roads are rendered obscene at a time of supposed tightening of belts. It has been estimated that each metre of new road costs in the region of £25,000. And that at a time when, as we all know, other vital services in local councils are being cut to the quick; real, vital services that make a huge impact on people’s daily lives here and now.

It would be easy to say this was tragic. Tragic because we could be at a genuine crossroads for major changes in how we get about. Not some throwback where cars are got rid of altogether, but shifts in overall behaviour where car ownership is no longer some kind of mechanised Holy Grail for individuals and families alike, where lift sharing and car sharing clubs can truly take off, where trains are affordable and spacious, where we cultivate a different sense of distance, a different sense of respect for the places we pass through.

If it wasn’t for the prospective loss of so many places you could say it was more like a very black farce; at least as far as governmental policy goes. In times of financial hardship a clear choice has been made along ideological, not practical grounds. It has less to do with the grinding pressure of congestion and everything to do with car manufacturing, oil and road building lobbies. It’s just a happy accident for them that so many of us are suckling on the petrol-headed teat.

And the roads themselves; vanguards of development, offering a dream of easy freedom. For another few years till another is needed, steering the masses away from hard choices, fostering an easy way of doing things, taking us further to escape what we’ve done to our immediate locality. They lock us in to six-laned roads, to half-lives on the motorways where everything is flat and air comes stalely through the vents.

Who wouldn’t be free of all this if we actually believed we had a choice? A choice that might not always be as gratifying or easy as jumping in the driving seat at any given moment. But one which offers another kind of freedom; freedom from the drudgery of roads, from the financial yolk of keeping a car on the road, a freedom to be able to really look at and travel benignly through the landscapes and places around us.

Otherwise we only enforce on the wider world the landscapes already within us. If we are wired to machines every hour of the day, if our heads and souls are so full of a never-ending media, if we are so transfixed with affairs of the day or the latest app or who in the public eye is saying precisely what about precisely who and all the while the world at our windows is crying out to bring us all closer and home to our natural gifts, our natural inheritance just to be out in creation – is it any wonder that, if we cannot hear that call, then all the moors, the woodlands and the ancient fields seem a little bit more abstract as we weigh their cost; expendables to modern life, pleasant irrelevancies that mean little to economies of luxury and pace while all the while we let ourselves grow poorer by degrees, the world suffers and one day we wake and find ourselves surrounded by a wasteland, crying out how was it that we let it come to this?

We all of us have choices still, whether as individuals or as part of our society itself. For many, car use remains alluring and undeniably convenient. But it’s clearer than ever it comes at a huge cost. Perhaps it comes down to that which we consider most important; our landscapes and communities, the wildlife we should act as stewards towards, or an open road, however temporary, the ability to pass unhindered down the screeslope of prediction and provision. We cannot wish some all-or-nothing, either-or where every journey amounts to an irredeemable castigation. But choices remain and we cannot continue to deny that new roads ultimately serve no one; they may help cut congestion for a time but we all have to pay a long-term price. We have to ask ourselves what kind of country we really want to live in. Will we be remembered as a generation that sacrificed so much while propping up policies discredited decades ago? Finding our way into a different future is largely a question of will. It’s a real sorry state of affairs then that our current government seems so intent on building the last things we need.

After the Tyranny of the Convenient

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

It started a long time ago; those first rough voyagers of speed kicking up dust in the villages. Then a tide of Model Fords and the opening up of previously hidden inroads to the country. Black and white, the early images come to us like cinematic semaphores; comedies of Keystone cops and early reels of high jinks in ever growing towns in unknown stretches of Californian dreams and burgeoning Mid West cities, while in Europe ponies and traps were suddenly old hat and a million horses in London and their every growing tides of manure were superseded by black motors to add to the smog, weirdly and infernally echoing the tides of black-clad pedestrians, the black hats and umbrellas pushing for space in a town where everyone keeps to themselves.

In many ways the motor car was one of the key innovations of the century, facilitated by an industrial model where the workers themselves were increasingly dehumanized then shunted away almost altogether. Its one great clarion call was the way in which it opened up horizons. Distant prospects were suddenly made close. Families experienced the kind of travel almost akin to teleportation in its speed and sense of ensuing displacement. It came to be seem as a kind of cornerstone of liberty, its costs not clear to many at first, like cigarettes that were considered good for the throat.

But of course it only ever accelerated. Read accounts of people walking country roads in the seventies, their dismay at the rising tide of roadkill; shocking in the sense that it was shocking at all to us and our conditioning to the sight of flattened animals. And then the great monsters, the great modern roads – marching across the land leviathan like, ripping up hillsides, tearing neighbourhoods in two, almost Stalinistic in their scale of social and literal engineering.

And now we have the reality for so many – the conditioning to life on the motorways; the dulled sense of drudgery of endless concrete, the feeling of confinement, the sense of being nowhere at all but trapped in a kind of high-speed neverworld where there is almost a sense of not moving at all; vehicles glide from side to side and distance is distorted, time itself feeling rinsed out.

But it’s a sacrifice many are willing to make – pragmatically or reluctantly. For still a huge majority in this country, cars are the transport of choice – and they are thereby locked into the economy they represent; the financial outlay for keeping a car on the road means that that choice becomes locked in – few can afford that and regular train travel as well. That many are sick to the teeth about this and that they would very willingly embrace a move to the railways were they reasonably priced is of course one of the great scandals of the age.

But for many, cars continue to hold an allure that makes motorways a cross they are willing to bear. The endless adverts, the pull of ergonomic seats and carefully molded interiors, the obsession with performance of the machine itself – it represents a kind of wedding to the machinated world, a kind of semi-cyborg state of entrapment. And all the minor roads are sport and everyone’s cushioned in steel and polished glass and all too often never seem to hear the roar of tyre on tarmac they leave in their wake – a collective endemic whereby the air conditioning and stereo surround leaves people blind to the huge irony and madness of a nation in perpetual motion, choking the roads, snarled in inability or unwillingness to find their way out.

That our towns have been built around cars for so long hardly helps this. And for anyone out in the sticks where buses are largely the preserve of pensioners and even then are being cut to the core, cars have become a kind of no brainer. The speed they represent, their flexibility, the power they give to go anywhere at once at any given time, not limited by timetables, or routes or the absence of stations or lines – none of this can be easily dismissed.

But if we are to escape their huge costs – well rehearsed in so many places – there’s surely a need to try and do better. If rural communities are not always what they once were it’s interesting to consider how a different pattern of travel may change this. If the model of private car ownership could be successfully challenged and car sharing clubs received the kind of patronage they deserved it could prove transformative for many rural and suburban areas blighted by a kind of over individualization.

Equally, if people made decisions about where they lived based on their travel options; being somewhere that has good transport links and lobbying for them to be improved where they don’t exist it could liberate many people from the serfdom car ownership can so often represent.

But a shift away from private car ownership can represent a kind of change which could be considered something of a sacrifice. Yes, you might not be able to travel exactly wherever you wanted at high speed at the drop of a hat. But such changes can bring unsuspected rewards. There’s a lot to be said about different relationship with both a sense of place and of the experience of travel itself. It might take you longer to get somewhere, but you might come to know your surroundings a little bit better in the first place. You might have to make detours but that could take you to incredible places you might never have known about otherwise, or which you’d have been more tempted to rush through without a moment’s pause. You might miss the conditioned isolation of your own vehicle but even the basic communion of being in a peopled carriage can increase your sense of connection with humanity at large.

Moving away from individualized cars might mean turning so many things we take for granted on their head, but it can lead to lives that are more dynamic, connected and enriching. If that in any way represents an inconvenience it could also mean a liberation from the vast cost of running a motor. It could mean life with a better sense of priorities that bolsters, not separates and drains communities. And just as it would shape our experiences it would have huge ramifications for planning and how we organise and give precedence to other forms of transport. It might mean we sang the praises a little more often of those other liberators – the bicycles that opened up so many rural vistas back in the eighteen hundreds, the huge terminus railway stations that each form a kind of cathedral to models of modern transport that bring people together, not to mention the sense of dependability of shouldering a bag and knowing that, with time and a sense of great adventure, your boots can take you anywhere you wish.

Over the Tarmac: the Spring

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

If you had to a state a point where the government bid a final farewell to any green credentials, it arguably came with the budgetary autumn review way back in 2011. The 45 road schemes laid out back then have been augmented since by another 150 so that now we seem to be facing a road building programme on a par with the ‘Roads to Prosperity’ schemes of the early nineteen nineties. Those schemes characterised in so many ways the last Conservative government just as the protests against them were symptomatic of wider dissent.

Of the roads planned today, 42 are pretty much direct revivals of those proposed in the ‘nineties and form part of a picture comprised of 76 bypasses, 48 link roads, 12 ring roads with another 60 more minor projects. The whole programme is being estimated at costing around £30 billion. If the figures for the roads built in the previous decade and a half are anything to go by, we can expect a fairly substantial overrun of these early financial projections.

Taken together the roads would affect National Parks, the Norfolk Broads, Areas of Outstanding National Beauty and several World Heritage Sites. They also of course represent a dramatic sea change in transport policy from on high with aspirations to curb car use and promote public transport looking more than a little forlorn. And with road transport emissions accounting for well in advance of twenty percent of UK carbon emissions, the policy effectively scuppers one of the more malleable means by which we can effectively rein these in.

It’s more than a little ironic that vast amounts of cash are being pumped into new infrastructure at a time of austerity so caustic that the upkeep of existing roads is being jeopardized. As a means of funding new roads, the government are looking at schemes such as public-private partnership deals whereby future taxpayers are often lumped with the ‘hidden tolls’ for roads under construction today. But there is still a huge immediate pricetag being picked up by central and local government.

But resistance to all this is growing, most notably with the groups affiliated with the Campaign For Better Transport’s ‘Roads to Nowhere’ campaign. And particularly vigorous protests have been taking place at Combe Haven Valley in opposition to the Bexhill to Hastings Link Road. Earmarked by the DfT themselves as “one of the worst value for money schemes in Britain,” the road’s route has been the scene of incredible acts of front and tenacity as trees have been occupied, camps set up, the less than proverbial bulldozers stopped in their tracks and work effectively delayed for many weeks.

At the time of writing, the DfT have not yet confirmed they will fund their allotted share of the scheme – some £56 million out of a total already spiraling above the £100 million mark. East Sussex County Council are forecast to spend a projected £70 million on the road at a time when it is making wider cuts of the same amount that stand to leave adult social care and children’s services particularly badly hit.

Somehow though, to see the camps spring up, to witness the energy of those making a stand and the sense of release in the process, there seems more in the air than simply a fight against old-school and deviant infrastructure. To go to Combe Haven and see the people in the oaks, to see and hear the pristine valley in the last few days before it’s due to be severed in two, the struggle seems iconic of so many other situations in the wider world. At a time of unprecedented ecological loss, the fact that here in the UK we are losing our ancient woodland at a rate even faster than that impacting the Amazon, any attacks on existing woodland should be more widely recognised for the carnage they really are. And at a time when the government seems deposed to outdo all previous levels of contempt they seem to hold large segments of the population in, there’s something that feels particularly fitting in people staking a common claim in the ground that’s due for destruction and stating enough is enough.

The gruelling conditions on site at Hasting over the previous few months are testament that none of this is necessarily easy. But the rewards for those engaged are clearly evident to see, even in the grip of bitter winter; the knowledge that when people act together there’s a very firm hope for turning round situations that might otherwise prove intractable. But just as the protests of the nineties took years to reach their final culmination, Hastings is just the first major manifestation of the kind of outcry that needs to be taken up more widely if the hydra-like heads of these hundreds of schemes stand any chance of being properly defeated.

This article originally appeared in the spring issue of the Transition Free Press.