Low traffic neighbourhoods are a great way to make residential areas more pleasant through the removal of through motor traffic and opening up streets to more walking and cycling. If you go back a few decades, people used to plan their journeys using paper atlases, so residential roads were just that, streets used for access to residential properties. However over the past decade with the rise of the in vehicle GPS, residential roads are increasingly being used as shortcuts, especially when there is congestion on the main roads.
Low traffic neighbourhoods are a way to remove the motor traffic that previously stayed on the main roads, by opening some streets or junctions to only walking and cycling. All properties are accessible by motor vehicle, however only from a single main road, with no through access.
There are some existing low traffic neighbourhoods already existing, for example the area between Bramford Road and London Road in Ipswich where many of the streets are only accessible from one of the main roads.
Lambeth Living Streets have a excellent thread on who benefits from Low traffic neighbourhoods: