Belfast is the most car-dependent city in the UK with the average person in Northern Ireland making 81.5% of all their journeys by car, compared to 63% in the UK. Belfast is also one of the most polluted cities in the UK. In the first three months of 2017 one air monitoring station in the city recorded an annual average nitrogen dioxide reading of 50 microgrammes per square metre — 25 points higher than the EU legal limit of 40 microgrammes per square metre. 

According to World Health Organisation standards, the air in the city is dangerous to breathe and can cause numerous illnesses including fatal asthma attacks, increased risk of heart disease, lung cancer, respiratory diseases and strokes, suppression of lung growth in children, reduced growth of foetuses and cognitive problems. Across the UK Deaths from air pollution-related disease cost the NHS over £20bn per year — around a fifth of their overall budget.

The city also has the highest rate of obesity (not unrelated to high car ownership) and the highest rate of avoidable deaths in the UK, including over 500 deaths per year attributed to air pollution which represents more deaths per year than (ironically) road traffic collisions and passive smoking combined. One in three people in inner-city Belfast, where wards have high deprivation levels, own a car (which some studies show can be linked to high unemployment rates). 60 – 75% of households in these areas — lower Falls, Shankill, Crumlin Road, Oldpark, Ardoyne, New Lodge, Ballymacarret, Markets, Donegall Road — are without access to a car. 

In more affluent areas multiple car ownership is high — sometimes as high as three or more cars — with people spending on average 22% of their monthly earnings on cars, making NI the fifth most expensive region in the UK to own a car. Areas where car ownership is low or non-existent map almost exactly onto areas designated as having multiple deprivation, which in turn are the areas of Belfast that saw the highest number of paramilitary killings during the troubles. The long dark shadow of a 25-year bloody conflict continues to cast its complex, entangled, legacy across the city. 

As Northern Ireland’s biggest city Belfast is the primary destination for commuters with 30% of employment based in the city. 68% of journeys into the city are single occupancy, contributing to Belfast being the third most congested city in the UK and the tenth most congested in Europe. As with most cities in the UK, the main arterial routes into Belfast pass through or alongside inner-city neighbourhoods. Thus the effect of those commuting from outside of the city, from often more affluent areas, with higher (and multiple) car ownership, is felt hardest by those who don’t own cars, live in areas of high deprivation that have the worst public health and the least social mobility. 

Small but potentially significant changes like the Glider are being made which aim to tackle high car use. 15.2 miles of bus lanes and mixed traffic lanes connect the east and west of the city with the city centre. According to Translink, the service operator, 30,000 more passengers are now using the service as their primary choice of travel, equating to more than 4,000 car journeys every day.

Map of 19th Century Belfast (Image © Queen’s University Belfast).

However, for those living in inner-city areas, the problem is further compounded by the lack of suitable pedestrian access into the city centre. The 19th century grid that once knitted the city centre together (see the map above) and linked it with the surrounding neighbourhoods, was gradually dismantled in part due to a number infrastructure planning decisions. This process culminated in the construction of a road network (the Westlink, M2, and M3) that carved up the north and west of the city, cutting off historic neighbourhoods and rendering large areas of land, blighted by underpasses, undevelopable. Historic inner-city neighbourhoods already ghettoised by years of conflict are further isolated by poor urban planning.

In an already doomed attempt to address the failure of past transport planning decisions a multi-lane flyover is currently being planned in the north of the city which will punch its way through an already blighted area, leaving one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the UK even more disconnected — the past repeating itself. 

A combination of factors, including a history of poor transport planning and an unwillingness by those who can to consider other possible travel options, means that the middle-class car commute is inadvertently weaponised into a form of benign discrimination against some of the most deprived people in the city compounding their often complex economic and social problems for the convenience of a door-to-door (or door to car-park) commute.

So, what are we going to do about it?