Our urban policy is based on snobbery - time to change.

"Oh god we're going to get absolutely dreadful urban policy for five years, all targeted at the awful Britain of out-of-town shopping centres, massive car parks, Frankie and Bennys and giant cinemas"

This Tweet from Daniel Knowles, a journalist at the Economist who, as far as I know, lives in London, sums up everything that is wrong with the snobbish, anti-suburb urban policy beloved of planners and politicians trapped in Le Corbusier's planned, controlling city fetish. I'm sure we're not far away from a reference to agglomeration theory and extended quotations from Michael Porter and Richard Florida.

What strikes me most about this comment is the shamelessness of its snobbery. It's not that Knowles is simply criticising urban policies that reflect the realities of lives in towns across the UK but that he does so in the manner of somebody fishing out a soiled pair of someone else's knickers from the bottom of the laundry basket.

Some things, however, bear repeating again and again and one of them is that over 90% of journeys are done on roads and most of those are done in private cars. Railways, trams and other fixed line systems really don't provide a genuine alternative to the private car. We can shift a few people onto these systems where they track busy routes but they can never match the complexity of urban travel patterns. Buses are better but even then, given operating costs, it's difficult for a bus network to fully track the dispersed nature of travel.

In Knowles' world the answer is to deny people the flexibility of private transport - something less problematic for the city-dwelling wealthy than it is for the small town and suburban working- and middle-class. This restriction is justified by an anti-car ideology underpinned by an elitist disdain for the lives of these ordinary people. What does it matter, think such folk, if those people in small towns and suburbs can't get to out-of-town shops or cheap eateries the way they can now.

Given that the direction of technological travel for transport is towards zero emission vehicles, autonomous and digitally-enabled systems it still confuses me why we're so stuck in that early 20th century Le Corbusier model of urban containment and mass transit. These technological changes demand a different transport ideology, one that recognises dispersed populations, complex travel networks and human autonomy. The problem is caught in the snobbishness of the anti-suburb world view - these places are dullsville, filled with dreary people leading boring lives involving giant cinemas, chain restaurants and out-of-town shopping with big car parks.

The problem for these metropolitan snobs is that you can't base your national urban policy solely on a sneering dislike for towns and suburbs. So such people subborn the environment, friend to the NIMBY, as justification for an anti-car, inflexibility. The snobbishness is wrapped up as caring for the planet and allows arguments for more railways (which the visitors to out-of-town shops, big cinemas and Frankie and Benny's seldom, if ever, make us of) to dominate transport debate. It defeats me why this is the case since simple maths says this is the wrong strategy - if nineteen out of twenty journeys are on roads even doubling rail capacity barely scratches the surface of demand, assuming that we've built a rail system that meets actual journey needs.

Yes we need better transport systems, yes we need better urban policy but if what we get is elitist snobbery wrapped up in greeny-greeny saving the planet then it is not going to work and, worse, means ordinary people doing ordinary journeys in their ordinary lives will be made to pay more because those snobs don't like big car parks at out-of-town cinemas. These are the sort of people who don't like Christmas house bling - these are not good people.

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