they tend to happen concurrently in my experience. here for example: https://www.greytogreen.org.uk/background

barriers/bollards: they're meant to stop cars from hitting people or driving in bike lanes or parking where they shouldn't. I like having them around. as for cameras, they're to catch people speeding, they mostly wouldn't be necessary if people didn't speed. and people speed mostly because the design of the road doesn't match the legal speed limit. see e.g. this[1]. so if you don't like cameras, you should welcome these redesigns.

but more importantly than any of that, could you please think about the other side of the ledger for a minute? "restrictions" on mobility are novel or hypothetical to you, but they're not for me.

traffic calming, restricted access roads, low-traffic neighourhoods, you think of these small things as restrictions on you because you can't go places quite as fast or quite as directly as you want, but for me they're lifelines. they let me get some places reliably and safely at all. on a road with 40+mph traffic, I can't use it unless there's a protected bike lane, and junctions designed with cyclists in mind (i.e. some degree of physical separation). and if that road is the only connection between A and B, then I can't get from A to B! pedestrians need barriers and refuges and controlled crossings and slowed vehicle speeds to safely get across busy roads. these things aren't luxuries, they're necessities for people who do not drive.

I've told you about getting around without a car in my city is fairly doable, because the local council has improved the infrastructure quite a bit recently. but that doesn't yet extend outside of the city's boundaries, even though there's no practical reason why it couldn't. so here's a story about those difficulties:

the city next to mine is close enough that cycling to it would be, in theory, a completely reasonable journey. a direct-ish route would take about 40 minutes; perfectly doable as a commute. but it's impossible because there is no such route. trust me, I've looked high and low for one, it simply doesn't exist. I've spent hours scouring Google Maps and Streetview, even doing reconnaissance trips to gauge the safety of certain parts myself, taking photographs, testing whether traffic lights detect me, etc. every route has many absolute showstopper segments where I'm exposed to high speed traffic with no physical protection whatsoever, and/or have to risk my life at enormous junctions whose design is completely hostile to my presence. I managed to get all the way there once, on a tangled indirect mess of side streets and unpaved tracks, taking over 3x longer than it had any right to. it was like finding the Northwest Passage. getting there by bus or rail is not quite as hard, but still far more awkward and unpredictable than it should be.

then I heard about govt proposals to alter one of the several motorway routes between the two cities: of the five lanes, make one into a protected bidirectional bikeway, and two others into a dedicated bus lanes. this isn't expensive, it's just paint and concrete barriers, and some alterations to the traffic lights and signage. but predictably, the comments on the news article were full of uproar about this imposition, a "war on motorists", it would supposedly increase congestion, and my favourite, "why would you build a bike lane? who even cycles there anyway?".

pity the poor motorist! I doubt any of them have ever agonized for hours over whether a trip of less than ten miles between two cities was even practically possible. such a failure of transport connectivity would be inconceivable in a modern Western country. yet situations like this are considered normal for non-drivers. we're expected to put up with not being able to practically reach places nearby, and be grateful for the smallest improvements, while billions are spent on motorways each year. and then I see conspiracizing about 15-minute cities, "restrictions on movement", "geofencing" and so on, and I just have to laugh. I've been de-facto "geofenced" by car-first planning for years, and so has everyone else who can't or doesn't drive (and there are a lot of us).

so if you want to halt these reforms, or think things should go back to how they were, what that really means is, you're happy with people like me living with harsh and pointless restrictions on mobility, far worse than cameras and bollards and congestion pricing are for motorists. for my part, I think motorists have simply gotten used to an unwarranted level of convenience, public subsidy, and politician's attention. the mild restrictions for motorists are enormously liberating for everyone else. and they are mild. you might have to take a slightly longer route, or walk the last hundred yards instead of parking exactly at your destination, or pay to use scarce road space that a huge number of other people want to use ... it's not that big a deal. a fairer balance between drivers' convenience and the welfare of other road users shouldn't feel like an attack on you.

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/7/18/how-street-des...