Imagine.
You’re a car-owning resident in a newly-instituted low traffic neighbourhood (LTN).
Day one, morning: you are irritated that to get to work/the kids’ school, you have to make 3 left turns to get to the main road, instead of one right turn.

You grumble that this adds 50% to your journey distance but, as yet, you don’t make the connection that it is 1/4 mile, so you were previously driving 1/2 mile.

Day one, evening: on your return from work, you forget about the bollards. You follow the direct route and find yourself stopped, and having to park, 100 yards from your house.

At this stage, you forget that the only way you ever actually get to park your car right outside your house is by snicking into the space on a Sunday morning when there are no commuters parking for the tube and your neighbours are at the garden centre, then not budging it, ever.

So this goes on for a little while. After a week, or two, or three, you start to notice that there is less traffic than there used to be. You notice how the street is quieter- or it would be, were it not for the racket of local kids playing footy in the street outside.

Then you notice people passing on scooters or bikes, and you start to think, “if I got one of those, I could cut my time to walk to the corner shop and back by two thirds”. You were terrified of cycling because, in your youth, you remember too many close passes with cars.

But you figure that without the traffic, it’s probably OK now, so you get a bike.
What a revelation!
By now, several weeks, or a few months, has passed. Especially with the lead times for buying a bike in times of Covid.

Then, a leaflet clatters through your letter box. The council is asking for your opinion on the LTN and the measures they have taken to implement it. If you can be bothered to fill out the questionnaire or go to the citizenspace online, you have positive things to say.

Now, imagine if you were asked for your opinion in the first few days or fortnight.
Your response might well be negative, because that, so far, is your lived experience.

THAT is why anti-LTN astroturfers get in so early. Why they are so aggressive. Why they bellyache about “lack of [prior] consultation.
They *know* they have to strike hard and fast. They have to strangle the LTN baby in its cradle, because as time elapses, their window closes.

And *that* is why the council has to hold its resolve - the legal provisions, of Experimental Traffic Orders, assume and indeed mandate full consultation with residents during the term of the trial. They can adjust it, or even reverse it if residents really, really don’t like it.

Experience suggests that this rarely happens.
Experience also suggests that some councils, who lack the resolve or are only going through the motions to please the Party Leader, succumb to the shrieking from the OneAstroturfers.