We must support the Kensington road revolution

The hellcats of Hans Town will mix it with the bullies of Basil Street.

Jet-setters who like to use the back streets of Knightsbridge as racetracks for Bentleys and BMWs and treat Harrods as a local convenience store are suddenly in the frontline of the war of civilisations. They don't like it.

Many of them are refugees to London from the machinations of mullahs and ayatollahs and perhaps saw the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea as a safe haven, as menacing as a Cotswolds parish council.

They were wrong. They are in the grip of ruthless revolutionaries. The campaign to bring "shared streets" to London has moved onto their patch and that, one objector told the Standard, means "beggars, prostitutes, drug dealers" and an unprecedented "level of anger".

Kensington and Chelsea council may have the most archaic residents parking in London but on traffic management it is a knight in shining armour.

Under the guidance of a former deputy leader, Daniel Moylan, it has struggled to lead the capital into the new age of street design.

First in Kensington High Street, then in Sloane Square and now in Exhibition Road and Basil Street, it is attempting to introduce what is common practice in towns and cities abroad but is anathema to the reactionary 4x4 crazed inhabitants of its borough - the concept of shared space.

Since the concept demands a counter-intuitive shift in perception, it needs constant restatement. Like most people, I used to regard traffic separation and pedestrianisation as the way forward for traffic in towns.

Yet from Italian hill towns to American metroplexes, motor vehicles have not been replaced or excluded as the lifeblood of living settlements. They remain a part of city living.

We are conditioned to assume that, because cars are big and fast, they cannot co-exist with other road users. But cars are driven by people with eyes and ears.

They become lethal only when drivers are turned into zombies by concentrating on signs above and below their normal line of vision. They race as fast as they can between lights and crossings.

Shared or "naked" streets regard vehicles as people on wheels. They have a right to a share of public space, though not in any unique or privileged sense.

For half a century vehicles have been treated as metallic things, to be disciplined and dragooned by traffic engineers, with a forest of signs, lights, one-way streets, kerbs, railings, crossings and general delay.

As a result, drivers have no time or incentive to negotiate space with other street users. They just bully their way across town as directed by the engineers.

Most accident spots are near bus and cycle lanes, school gates and zebra crossings - in other words, where traffic is supposedly most regulated. The regulation merely leads to drivers being distracted. By making everyone feel safer, the engineers have made them less so.

It is a classic of health-and-safety dirigisme, stripping all street users of personal reliance and responsibility and causing accidents as a result. The most dangerous people in London are the road engineers. They encourage drivers to kill people.

Shared space removes all street clutter and visual distraction. The street is deliberately made to seem more confused, "policed" informally by the eyes and ears of its users.

Cyclists and jaywalkers go from being the most anarchic (and accident-prone) road users to being the most effective policemen.

Such schemes are in place in some 400 towns and cities across Europe. They can no longer be called exper-imental.

All have led to fewer street accidents and shorter journey times, as vehicles are no longer stopped at red lights but merely slowed where they encounter other road users.

What Kensington and Chelsea should do is take its conservative citizenry somewhere shared space is working.

If they cannot afford a trip to the Netherlands or Germany, they should visit Ashford in Kent. Here the local council, in collaboration with the designer Ben Hamilton-Baillie, took a leaf from the work of the Dutchman, Hans Monderman, and turned their town into the most progressive in England.

In the new shopping area, all distinction between road and pavements was erased and shallow drainage gullies redesigned by a local artist, with new lighting and street furniture.

The roads have acquired a new dignity and people comment on a new sense of community and courtesy. Cars must make their way gingerly through other road users, but since they are no longer held up at red lights their average speed has risen.

Astonishing as it may seem to the enemies of progress, the accident injury rate in Ashford has fallen to zero. Even the far more modest scheme in Kensington High Street has led to a 44 per cent cut in accidents.

The most popular objection, that such spaces must be a danger to the blind and disabled, is simply not proved in practice. They are safer for the blind, aided by special crossing points and a dramatic rise in driver care and courtesy.

In a hilarious attempt to fight the Basil Street scheme, residents have produced an artist's impression of their neighbourhood under shared space, with cars, cyclists, pedestrians, pushchairs and wheelchairs jostling for space between awnings and passers-by.

I can see that to those used to cruising the avenues of New York and the boulevards of Paris it must seem chaotic. Yet the picture displays the informality of an Italian piazza, the best advertisement I have seen for shared space.

My one complaint is that Kensington and Chelsea is so half-hearted in selling this revolution to its citizens. Indeed all London is in the traffic management Dark Ages.

The Mayor, Boris Johnson, who should know better, is still inert. He could draw up a shared-space map of central London in a weekend - starting with the whole of Mayfair - and launch a campaign to civilise the streets of the capital.

It would be his finest legacy. He can start by crushing the reactionaries of Harrods.