Ministers prioritised driving in England partly due to conspiracy theories

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Ministers began considering curbs on cycling and walking schemes in March last year, one document said, “in response to concerns about 15-minute cities”, an urban planning concept that Rishi Sunak’s government has repeatedly mischaracterised.

Devised by the France-based urbanist, Carlos Moreno, 15-minute cities are a broad planning concept based on people living within easy reach of workplaces and schools, as well as local amenities, gradually reducing the need for short car trips.

TAN, which is being assisted by Dale Vince, the green energy magnate and campaigner, has sought a judicial review of the decision to scrap government guidance to councils introduced during Covid to help more people walk and cycle.

The DfT documents also show that officials repeatedly warned ministers that other aspects of the plan for motorists, notably the idea of potentially forcing councils to remove LTNs, were unlikely to succeed.

A DfT briefing paper for Downing Street in August warned that a full review of existing LTNs “could entail a very large piece of analytical work”, adding that “there is an expectation among media” that the plan for motorists would nonetheless target them.

However, the adoption of the idea, even as a long-term aspiration, by cities as varied as Paris, Bogotá and Oxford has prompted a wave of conspiracies about a supposed transnational plot to block people from travelling beyond their local neighbourhood.

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