Professor Ian Walker:

We did a massive swathe of work with the staff and student population in my old university and found the reverse there. We found that staff were much more concerned than the students. That was about eight years ago. It is to be hoped that has shifted. Predictably, I will agree with Dr. Lunn again. I want to add some hope too. Some interesting and convincing work has come out of the human geography world about what it calls the reverse causality hypothesis of attitudes. We tend to think we have an attitude towards something, think it is a good idea, and therefore we do it. The geographers have been arguing that it can work the other way around. They say that if people's environment changes in such a way that it obliges them to behave in a certain way, the changes are that their attitude will come round and become positive to that behaviour. Psychologists will understand that from knowing about cognitive dissonance and so on.

This suggests that there is truth to the notion of "Build it and they will come". If we create liveable streets, neighbourhoods, pedestrianised shopping areas and so on, there will be an initial backlash. We have seen that repeatedly. We know people have concerns.

This work shows us that, in practice and in theory, once we can get over the initial pain, much of the time - although not all of the time - attitudes will shift and become more positive as was the case with the example of the congestion charge. This has a potential practical implication from a policy perspective because it strongly suggests that there is a natural timing to making these large disruptive changes within electoral cycles. It is probably not a good idea to do these things six months before an election, but perhaps six months after an election becomes a slightly more preferable point from the perspective of elected members.