WHAT’S the best way to engage a community? Proposing to chop down trees is a good bet. Planning applications for wind turbines are a no-brainer. Or you can introduce traffic restrictions that prioritise public transport – and bingo, job done.

I am not going to bang on about the Lendal Bridge trial except to say this: despite the negative public response, it achieved many of its objectives, particularly with regard to reducing bus journey times and reliability, increasing bus usage and improving the environment.

For now, we are back to business as usual, but, one trusts, with lessons learned. It behoves the critics to take a role in this, other than carping, because the status quo has to change for the sake of York’s economy, environment and health.

Many positive changes have been brought about as a result of people initially uniting against something. Freiburg in Germany became an eco city after groups from across the political spectrum came together to oppose a nuclear power plant. The renowned cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands grew out of the ‘Stop the Child Murder’ social movement in the early 1970s, after 450 children were killed by cars in one year.

Closer to home, the Copmanthorpe wind turbine protests have stimulated the community to look at including other forms of renewable energy in their neighbourhood plan.

York must seize the Lendal Bridge trial as an opportunity to revolutionise transport in the city. An independent commission is to be set up to examine how traffic congestion can be addressed and I hope this will be genuinely forward-looking rather than being a forum for political point-scoring.

Personally, I’d pack the whole lot of them off to Oxford to experience its transport policy first-hand.

Radical action has been taken in Oxford because the air pollution levels were so high. At the start of this year it became one of only two Low Emission Zones outside of London and the transformation is quite amazing.

I went back there at Easter to visit family and, heading into the city centre on the Park and Ride service, I noticed (a) the excellent off-road cycle lanes and (b) that there were hardly any cars. Oxford is now a city of buses and bikes. It has the highest bus use of any city in the UK and they are all either hybrid or electric vehicles that comply with strict tail-pipe emission standards.

Bus priority routes have bus gate enforcement, restricting traffic on the High Street (the main east-west route through the city centre) and St Aldates (heading south) between 7.30am and 6.30pm. Other streets have been permanently pedestrianised. The effect is of a clean, spacious and beautiful city, thronged with people and packed with thriving businesses.

So how do you drive cultural change? Engaging businesses in environmentally sustainable practices is critical, as they are far more innovative and take bigger risks than government. Last year I attended a talk at the University of York given by Sir Stuart Rose, the former chairman of Marks and Spencer, on the sustainability challenge for business. He said law-makers were “the last resort – sustainability has gone off the agenda” and called on businesses to take the lead.

The new M&S at Monks Cross is embracing this ethos, taking the learning from its three other Sustainable Learning stores as part of the Plan A strategy that Sir Stuart initiated.

I took the Number 9 bus out there for a personal tour around the building, which is rated BREEAM “excellent”, to check out the living walls, the solar-powered café (there are 600 solar PV panels on the roof), the rainwater harvesting system that flushes the toilets and the displacement columns that ventilate the building.

All credit to M&S : it’s a high-profile way of engaging people (there are plaques everywhere explaining the features) and the staff themselves are changing their lifestyles too, cycling and bussing to work (there is no staff parking).

That said, while the building may appear trailblazing to most of us, modern building regulations mean that these kinds of features should be standard in new builds.

And much more is possible: the first-ever PassivHaus supermarket (which requires no active heating) has just been built in Hanover and it’s part of a residential complex, not an out-of-town store, which is an inherently unsustainable model because it relies principally on car use.

Ultimately, cars are not the future for cities.

People are.