Harringay online

Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!

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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I don't disagree with you John.

In this case you've mentioned, if the Wightman-Westbury traffic is only a small percentage of all the traffic displaced by the proposal and it really does get displaced across 6 other roads then i wonder if that might be ok? It may not make such a noticeable increase on those 6 streets and it gives such a big improvement on the northern streets, around Ducketts Common and by a primary school.

Thats the type of debate we should be having though isn't it - should we really try to evenly distribute traffic across the Ladder or should the streets around schools and parks have a priority? If one street has had it bad for a while perhaps its ok to move some of the traffic to another street to give them a break? The precedent has already been set hasn't it, with other older schemes like the Gardens bollards?

In the Traders defence, i was at the forum meeting when the Gardens Community Streets improvement project was announced and one of the first people to get up an say anything was Shef and he said it was the Ladder that had the problems now and thats where the money should have gone.

I've been at a meeting where Shef criticised the gating of the gardens too but I'm not sure if he knows the story about the lady who swallowed a fly. Anyway, Shef is wrong, that money would only go to somewhere that did not have a big traffic issue.

The problem is that it will NOT get distributed evenly. People will go down the first street they can. They will certainly want to avoid Green Lanes before the junction with St Ann's. So if you get your gate in at Frobisher, Fairfax will wear it, as well as the traffic it gets now. Your mention of six roads as an alternative is just not common sense.

It is complete fallacy to think that small amounts of tinkering will have less impact on residential traffic volumes than large amounts of tinkering. Wightman, Wightman, Wightman. No other solution is fair.

It is impossible to fairly distribute traffic across the ladder but it is not impossible to eradicate through traffic.

Anyone up for some Urban design analysis?
It's a structured process you should go through to become
more informed, and interrogate a problem.
This should allow you to arrive at an informed design solution.
We can wrap up with a design workshop to offer solutions based
on our research. Need about 5-7 people, you can't fall out puting
it together, a lot of information already exists, it will take a week or two.

John, Alan, Alison, Ant, Buck, Mills, Berry, Me... No that's REM

Hi John. I don't understand the comment about Fairfax, remember part of this proposal is to change the Falkland direction, so all the traffic coming from the north of Wightman heading for Green Lanes should go down Falkland following your logic.

If you or anyone can come up with any sort of approach for getting the Wightman gates looked at i'd be happy to help with that as well, but no one i can find will seriously consider it. Think of this proposal as a stepping stone to Wightman, block off enough rungs and the traffic going via Wightman wont be able to get to Green Lanes. The Hewit switch, the great northern gate, there was mention of a Burgoyne barrier...who else has somethine? And, jumble things up enough and everyone can feel like they're gaining. Win win win!

Most traffic on Wightman is heading east/west across the railway, they don't want to be anywhere near Green Lanes. I'd be interested to know what was the proportion of people turning left and right outside the Queen's Head/Dogtas. I suspect a lot of them are headed for West Green Road (left turn).

I think you're right John. Anytime I'm at that junction there are four vehicles turning left and one or two turning right.

I keep getting asked if this is a serious proposal, so i've asked the council to comment, letting you all know here in the spirit of openness and transparency, the reference id is: HC-178984.

Ant, just email Cllr Nilgun Canver, who has told people that she will make the decision.

nilgun.canver@haringey.gov.uk

You may even get a reply today before the consultation closes.

I'm sure there's a valid reason, but why has this thread has been included in the Friday this week, and the one containing the discussion about the reversal of the traffic flow on Hewitt Road hasn't? That has been by far the most active recent thread.

It was in last week's Friday. We only put new posts from Friday to Thursday in the full mail out. If you check your Friday from 14th June, you'll see it. Third one down.

I see. I had assumed that because there's no longer the 'Bubbling Under' section, ongoing threads would be incorporated into the main section. Thanks for the clarification.

The mail out is getting very large now as you may have noticed! So a couple of months ago we dropped a couple of sections, 'bubbling', the gallery section and a couple of small ones. We now only include new postings on the site in the Friday.

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