Spurred on by the suggestion of using the Green Lanes regeneration as the opportunity for getting some wider traffic improvements made on the Ladder, and with the idea of chipping away at the problems one at a time, here is a proposal which would almost completely eliminate non-residential through traffic from all of the northern Ladder roads.
The north of the Ladder are the five streets Frobisher, Lausanne, Hampden, Raleigh, and Sydney, along with Wiloughby Rd and Duckets Common. This is an area of similar size to the Harringay Gardens, which gets a lot of car and truck traffic travelling through as a short cut and not stopping in the area.
Here is a single small, simple, and cheap fix that would almost completely eliminate all of that through traffic:
Installing a gate preventing traffic entering or exiting from Frobisher Rd to Green Lanes (also see red circle on the map at the bottom for the location).
Along with eliminating the through traffic on the residential streets it would also eliminate that traffic from the streets along two sides of Ducketts Common giving a dramatic improvement to the quality of one of Harringay's few green spaces. But wait, there's more, if all that isn't enough this would also relieve congestion at the busy Green Lanes / Alfoxton / Frobisher intersection allowing the traffic there to flow more smoothly.
An initial reaction might be to think this traffic must just get displaced onto other Ladder roads, but no not really, most would get displaced onto Turnpike Lane and Green Lanes, "A" roads which is where that through traffic is supposed to be anyway, not on residential streets.
There is a possibility some of the East bound traffic coming from West Green Rd might still be tempted to detour via Falkland Rd. The solution to that is to switch the direction of Falkland Rd, which would make the detour not worth it and the traffic would instead go up Green Lanes and left onto Turnpike Lane, which is exactly where we want it. The Falkland Rd residents already want their direction changed anyway, and, if the Hewit Rd change goes ahead then this Falkland switch will aid that by adding another West-to-East road to share the Hewit traffic. So win win win all around!
What do you say, how about it?
Update: Instead of the Falkland direction change (crossed out above) it turns out that a better solution for this and Falkland Rd is to have a No Right Turn in to it from Green Lanes, see here for more.
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The fact that Ant is directly linking this page to Hugh's comments suggesting that "...Chipping away at the problem is the ONLY way we'll have a chance of a Ladder-wide solution." says to me he is taking inspiration from those comments and coming up with a potential solution for the area that he lives in, just like you have been trying to do for Hewit.
I don't know why you think this post is obscure? Plenty of other people have commented and it came up in the same fashion that every other post appears. Hopefully both of these posts will be included in the Tueday Ketchup email to make even more people aware. The Green Lanes scheme was left out of the email last week - consider how much more attention it would have been given if it were included.
There are 11 pages in that discussion thread you refer to, which must be hundreds of posts by lots of people, i didn't set the tone and mine certainly wasn't followed. I'll let others judge, you can see all my comments in the HoL archives, there was one other which I chose to delete but it said nothing like what you are suggesting.
In case the previous link i gave to the archives wasn't explicit enough for some people to check, here are my 6 posts on the topic to that very big discussion thread with hundreds of posts from lots of people which Barbara is talking about - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Could we stay with the northern gate subject in this discussion thread?
Barbara, other roads are getting less traffic yes, but not much less. How come you guys are being molly coddled and the rest of the ladder has to put up with 1100 cars and vans a day in some cases? How far back do you get traffic Jams in Hewit in the evening? In the mornings the traffic jams at the top of the ladder last for an hour. What this really means is that Wightman Road residents are the ones with the worst problem. Me me me!!!!
We'd run out of milk and coffee this morning, grumble grumble, so i had to go to the shop to get some. While out i went by the Falkland Rd corner and stopped for 2 minutes and counted the cars. 9 went into Falkland Rd in that time, a lot of them vans and small trucks but i didn't record any details. That was about 7:15am so not even quite peak time yet but say the busy times are 7 - 10 and 4:30 - 7:30 that would be 9*30*6=1620 and say half that volume from 10-4:30 so 1620+877 so over 2500 cars per day.
Maybe in the absence of the holistic traffic survey we could all spend 2 minutes counting cars around the neighbourhood to create our own survey?
I took another two minutes out of my life today and counted cars as i went by Wightman Rd at lunch time. Was a bit hard using my phone for the clock because the screen goes off after 3 secs and the cars whizz by so frequently its hard to keep count as well as keep unlocking the phone screen...49 in two minutes so using the same calculation method as before that would be around 30000 cars per day.
As someone else has pointed out, you would need to allow turns that are currently not allowed around the other side of the common. For instance, travelling north along Wightman and you want to get to Westbury Ave? You'd need to allow a right hand turn from Wightman Rd into Turnpike Lane and that's just not feasible.
That traffic going up Wightman needs to not be there in the first place and then there is lots of room for changing phasings and turn rules. The downside is that this traffic would go up Green Lanes which is only an A road (the A 105).
Traffic travelling north along Wightman wanting to get to Westbury Ave would currently be going via one of the 7 Ladder rung roads with a direction of west-east, right? So this change would remove Frobisher as one of the options and that Frobisher traffic would get spread over those other 6 roads. Is that right? If so that doesn't seem like such a huge downside given the dramatic improvement on the northen roads and around Ducketts Common.
I think any solution that takes traffic from one ladder road and distributes it to another is not neighbourly, to say the least. This is the ONE think that worries me about the Hewitt Road proposal, it sets a precedent for moving traffic from one residential street to another. Sadly it all belongs on the blimmin A105, although that is where the Harringay Shopkeepers "live" so we know why it's not down there.
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