The Newbury by-pass, which was the road proposal that gathered most opposition, was consistently supported by the people of Newbury who voted for it in every local election. They wanted heavy traffic redirected from their town centre. It was opposed for the most part by people from out of town. The road protests in general were much more ideological in character, rather than arising directly from specific grieveances.
The core activists had been in the earlier Stop the City protests, where they did indeed develop a witty and dramatic set of tactics to make their point - which was anti-capitalist. They blossomed at a time when the organised labour movement was in near terminal decline. Against the sheer tedum of the TUC's modest appeals for the NHS, Stop the City grabbed attention.
It was after the British government, diplomats and NGOs seized the initiative on climate change, at the Rio summit, that grass roots environmental activists turned their attention 'from the global to the local'. They re-focused campaigns on to roads as a way of putting the action back in the hands of the activists. They were enlivened by the campaign against the Criminal Justice Bill, in particular its clauses against out-of-town raves.
It should be said that the campaigners won - to the detriment of everybody. They won because they were demanding something that the Conservative government had been dreaming of but never dared hope would happen: namely that there would be an activist movement that demanded cuts in government expenditure.
John Major introduced a moratorium on new road building which has led to disastrous congestion, and gasoline taxes that no US LBOer would pay. Worse still, they won the argument against building new homes, and the limits on green field building of homes are the reason why British house prices have risen higher than any, while new homes are simply not being built (as the Secretary for Housing, Yvette Cooper admitted last Thursday).