Firefighters delayed by Low Traffic Neighbourhood... because vandalised bollard wouldn't unlock

Logic would say that an emergency vehicle is going to make quicker progress along a street with next to no traffic than one jammed solid. So whatever gave you the impression that anti-LTNs were concerned with the speed of emergency services... 🙄

It was that and their concern for the less than abled...

Absolutely nothing to do with rat running...

often-peddled

I think it's quite likely that they feel these LTN barriers have been installed without appropriate local consultation, research or inclusion in local partys' manifesto.

That's certainly the case where I live where at least two LTN blockages have thankfully been removed after uproar from local road users. By stopping motorists from driving down one road they then had to drive down 3 other roads (doubling the original traffic on those roads) to get to the same destination. This caused them to travel 3x as far and significantly increased pollution and congestion on the alternate route.

"Feel" / "had to".

I've seen councils foist poorly-thought out stuff on their locales fairly regularly.

I've seen some pretty poor "consultation" efforts and doing things by fiat happens too.  But often there has been some kind.  And - albeit it often sounds like hot air - almost all parties / candidates now have some sop to "climate change" / "active transport" in their bumf.

However ... for a noisy minority of the complainants consultation isn't really the issue.  Their problem is "change".  And it will be a change to some people's routines.  But for them it's a "no way, no how".  It's never a good time, never the right place.

Yet somehow we do need to change.  (Many of the complainants will agree that).  We do need fewer vehicles / car journeys.

In a crude analysis it ain't the children, pedestrians, cyclists, old folks on mobility scooters etc. causing the congestion and local pollution now is it (fallacy links)?  And "traffic evaporation" is a thing.  Finally people living in places with less through traffic (avoid trigger acronym) overwhelmingly approve.  Once they've had time to get used to the change.

If only said authorities would help them with (locally) (even more) support for active travel and prodding the public transport companies.  Yes - current poor bus services - but some of the problems (e.g. peak times) could be that the roads are full of ...

There was a nationwide consultation about decades of car dominance sometime in the early 1960s, I remember my grandmother telling me about it. 

Every household, she said, received a government pamphlet setting out the options and scenarios and was asked to write in with their views.

Gran sounded a bit hazy about about what happened after that, and whether there ever was an announcement about it.  She did say was around then that every new housing area started being designed to control cars. 

Anyway folks, that now forgotten consultation is why there must be painstaking consultation and engagement every time areas like East Oxford are updated : to ensure that not a hair on a driver's head is touched.