Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Oxford Street to be pedestrianised by 2020 ... so Wightman Rd ...
... can surely be closed to through traffic in the future, as it currently is during the bridge works. If the planners can deal with the re-routing of all those buses and taxi journeys away from Oxford Street for the pedestrianisation plans, it must be possible to do this for Wightman Road as well.
Living Wightman would do well to have a chat with the new Mayor's office.
Tags for Forum Posts: traffic, wightman bridge closure
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Charlotte A on
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Quite. The poor residents and workers on Turnpike Lane for one, who must have it worse than GL, given it's the only route across now.
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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What about the residents in other areas (Crouch End for one) that have closed off their residential roads to through traffic. The bleating on the Crouch End facebook group truly was astonishing nimbyism.
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Natasha - I'm with you on this one. I have great sympathy for Wightman/ladder residents who obviously suffer from pollution and traffic noise (though Antoinette, for one, on here seems to be almost a lone voice in saying that she will welcome the Wightman reopening even as a ladder resident), but failure to acknowledge the knock-on effect of closure on the rest of the area seems self-centred at best.
Human nature is that everyone thinks the problem is always "other people". I have asked on several threads a) for a definition of the "local traffic" that vocal closure supporters want to restrict access to, b) how people define the majority of Wightman traffic as "through" traffic and not "local" (since even Turnpike Lane to Endymion could be classed as a "through" journey) and c) if the same people can swear that they have never, ever, used a residential road in London as a short-cut - or "rat-run" as locals would no doubt call it.
Nobody has defined "local" and, unsurprisingly, nobody has sworn that they've never cut through somebody else's residential area - in London, it's impossible not to.
Of course instinct suggests that many Wightman journeys are by people who don't live in Harringay, but nobody actually knows because there hasn't been any research into journey start and end points. I count myself as a “local” because I live off Green Lanes, use local shops and work mostly at home. As a non-driver I sometimes take a cab from the cab office by the GL/St Ann's junction to Kentish Town or Gospel Oak, which uses Allison, Wightman and Endymion; by some definitions, this is a “through” journey, even though it starts barely 50 metres from the foot of a ladder road. So how wide an area would a restriction to “local” traffic cover?
As you say, expedient closure of Wightman creates major problems in Green Lanes, which both you and I are suffering from. Any solution has to consider the whole Harringay/Turnpike Lane/Wood Green area, not just one bit in isolation.
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I completely disagree. I was never bothered about the pollution on my ladder road. I don't actually spend more than a couple of minutes a day walking on my own road, I spend a considerably greater amount of time on Green Lanes inhaling fumes for a greatly increased period of time and at much higher volumes.
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I used to leave the house every day to a traffic jam belching fumes into my house. There were two ways to solve this and sadly only one of them was under my control. You're lucky if you didn't have that problem. You must live south of Hewitt Rd and are shielded by the gated gardens on the other side of Green Lanes.
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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I too spend only a few minutes each day walking along my road. However, I spend considerably longer living on it.
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You actually have to be pretty close to pollution to be affected by it though... once you are inside your own home, the pollution levels are neglible
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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That comment surprises me, Antoinette. Do you have some links to data which support your view? I'm especially thinking about the impact on children and older people when pollution levels are higher.
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No but I did have the pollutants measured in my own home by a friend who works at Kings College and happened to have a meter with them when they popped by for a coffee (I was just curious). The levels in my home were a 12th of the reading roadside, and that was before the Wightman Road closure.
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Permalink Reply by JoeW on
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"The levels in my home were a 12th of the reading roadside"
Does that mean spending 12 hours in your house is equivalent to spending 1 hour by the roadside? (I'm not sure if it's better to be exposed to a constant low level of pollution than a short period at a high level?)
Also I wonder if it follows that, since Wightman Road is twelve times busier than the average Ladder rung, that levels of pollution inside Wightman houses are the same as the level of pollution by the roadside on an average rung?
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No 12 hours of low level pollution is not as bad for you as an hour sitting roadside. It's much like passive smoking; sitting next to someone smoking is far more dangerous than spending 12 times as long sitting in the room next door to someone smoking. And again you're failing to recognise that moving traffic creates less pollution than stationary traffic. My figure was an actual reading from a monitor. Your extrapolation is just guesswork and ill-thought through in my opinion.
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Dunno Anoinette. My front door is about 12 feet away from the kerbside and when I opened my front windows (pre-bridge closure) the inside cills got covered in fine black dust. If particulates can get in so can invisible stuff.
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