It’s a nasty moment when you receive a letter informing you that a fortnight ago, at a specific number of minutes past an hour, your car was photographed turning into a side road which, at the time, you had no idea you weren’t allowed to turn into.

You vaguely recall the junction. There was no ‘No entry’ sign: just a torrent of words (‘except’, ‘through’, ‘motor vehicles’, ‘access’) that you didn’t have time to read. That outing will now be forever sullied in your memory by the £65 fine. Protesting ‘but the sat-nav told me to do it!’ is as ineffectual, legally speaking, as Adam bleating to God that ‘the woman gave me fruit from the tree and I did eat’. The punishment is still enforced.

The lesson you learn from Britain’s new Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs): drive outside your own local district to a place where you don’t know the weird local rules, and you’ll inevitably make some small mistake and be forced to donate a chunk of money to another borough or county council. This is not just a London and Oxford problem; LTNs are being planned for Hereford, Brighton, Bath, St Andrews, Newcastle, Portsmouth and Leith, among many other towns and cities. New road-blocking planters were set on fire in Rochdale last week by angry locals. Though against civil disobedience, I couldn’t stifle a guilty sense of delight at seeing those green but aggressive planters in flames. I’m not sure which is more loathsome: the ‘planters and bollards’ method, which makes it physically impossible to drive through the new blockages, and slows emergency ambulances down, or the ‘cameras and confusing signs’ method, which, though helping ambulances, rakes in fines from inadvertent rule-breakers.

Both methods are highly interfering to us all trying to live our lives, and are imposed on us by money-hungry zealots. Unless we protest about them, and implore ministers to put a halt to the road-blocking agenda unleashed by Andrew Gilligan and Boris Johnson in their pandemic-induced Active Travel frenzy – and mostly now implemented by Labour-controlled councils who love them for the money they raise – these LTN schemes, or Clean Air Neighbourhood schemes, or People Friendly Streets schemes, will ground us. They will put off anyone but the young and fit from going out, making us too scared to drive across town to visit aged relatives, and they will turn our residential districts into sad, eerily silent little fortresses edged with polluting traffic jams and closed-down shops. The ‘15-minute city’ won’t be much use when the local small businesses have had to close down for lack of custom. Most businesses cannot survive just on the clientele that can walk or cycle to them in 15 minutes.

I live in one of the worst-offending boroughs when it comes to the ‘signs and cameras’ method: Labour-controlled Hammersmith and Fulham. If anyone from outside the borough drives over Putney Bridge towards central London, they are no longer allowed to turn right, to get to Wandsworth Road or Wandsworth Bridge. All the side routes are blocked to outsiders. Yellow signs have been put up saying ‘To get to Wandsworth, turn round and go back over Putney Bridge’. Twenty businesses have closed down on Wandsworth Bridge Road since the pandemic, and this new outsider–repelling scheme is exacerbating the hardships for those trying to recover. The long-established local butcher, Randalls, lost 40 per cent of its income in the first month of the scheme, implemented in February. Lots of its clientele from the three neighbouring boroughs (all under a mile away) have given up coming, so bad is the traffic, so arcane the rules. Our local café, Hally’s, which employs 14 members of staff, has gone from making a healthy profit to losing £10,000 per month.

Use a bike or the Tube if you want to go to another borough, cycling-obsessives and car-haters might say. I enjoy cycling and the Underground as much as anyone, and care about the planet. But I’m fit and dependent-free. What about the elderly? What about a mother of three children under five who needs to get the five-year-old to school on a rainy morning? What about a delivery driver under time pressure, stuck in gridlock on the main road? And in my borough, public transport seems to be getting worse, not better.

Traffic levels and pollution levels are being ‘monitored’ while schemes like these are ‘under consultation’, but you can bet they’ll come up with the data they want, telling us that bus journeys are taking no longer than they used to and air quality is improving. But as young Jonah said on the radio call-in in Sleepless in Seattle, when asked how he knew his father had insomnia: ‘I live here, Dad.’ I live here. I know from daily experience that there’s a mile-long traffic jam belching out exhaust fumes all day on the surrounding residential main roads.

The peace and quiet of Britain’s newly traffic-less residential enclaves is not worth it for the misery and frustration inflicted round the edges. As Richard Aldwinckle, co-founder of One Dulwich, which protests against Dulwich’s new road-closure schemes imposed by Southwark Borough Council, said to me, these schemes cause the three Ds: displacing traffic on to boundary roads, dividing communities, and discriminating against the elderly and disabled. Dulwich, once approachable and friendly but now strangled on all sides by gridlock, has, like Fulham, become so hard to get into that thousands don’t bother to try, and businesses are suffering. East Dulwich, thanks to the closing of a junction, is in effect cut off from West Dulwich for drivers.

This is the new Corridor Britain, in which all traffic is gradually being forced into a few clogged arteries. If, on such a corridor, you happen to spot a nice-looking butcher, greengrocer or café, the risk of turning into a side road to park is too great. Once you’ve had your first fine, why would you?

This is exactly the situation that councils seem to want. Passers-through are the new pariahs. What were once ten-minute journeys now take three-quarters of an hour. The worse the traffic, the better councils like it, hoping we’ll soon give up driving altogether. But some people need their cars. And these zealots too will one day be old, infirm, lonely and confined to their homes.