Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Campaign against Wightman Road closure
Spotted in a local shop window..
Tags for Forum Posts: harringay traffic study, traffic
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Pat on
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Essentiallly, you are saying that all private car ownership should be banned?
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Permalink Reply by matt on
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Giving up your car ... great idea Neil. Did this a year ago and I feel so free without it! No real need for it. Free of all those bills, charges & fees and best of all, don't spend time dealing with car related issues or even have to think about it :)
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Permalink Reply by Abi on
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I've never felt the need for a car in London - and I commute to Hertfordshire and back every day. And funnily enough I'm fitter than most people without knowingly making an effort.
Always amuses me how whenever I ask friends for tips on visiting a particular foreign location, they will get about 3 sentences in before saying 'of course, as you don't drive you won't be able to see half of it and actually are you sure you want to be bothered going'? We always do bother going, and (perhaps with the exception of LA) being car-less has NEVER posed a problem.
It's one of those things people think they can't do without because they've never tried (disabilities excepting of course).
Try it.
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Permalink Reply by Alice Maltwood on
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I need a car for work! Would love to not have to drive but my job requires me to!
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Can you give me one reason why anyone can't survive without one
Yes I can, not everyone is lucky enough to be abled bodied, some people rely on their vehicles because of disability. My partner is a blue badge holder, can probably manage about 15 metres. She attends Hospitals further north and in central London about 4 or 5 times a month minimum. Basically what you are saying is I can walk, ride a bike, catch the bus and have no need for a personal vehicle and everybody else must have the same requirements and dependancies that I have. Simply not true and quite selfish.
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Permalink Reply by JoeW on
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Godfrey, I have every sympathy with this. My father-in-law had dialysis three days a week, for some reason only known to the NHS he was the first to be picked up by the hospital transport and the last to be dropped off so often spent well over two hours travelling each day. His wife doesn't drive but a couple of times I was able to offer him a lift and I know that it was a huge relief for him on those few days to be in a car with a family member.
However I still support filtering Wightman since (a) most of the 114,000 vehicles per week on Wightman (or on Green Lanes for that matter) are not blue-badge carriers on the way to hospital (many of them could cycle or walk or use public transport, and ALL of them could use the intended A-roads) and (b) I believe that the benefits of filtering Wightman far outweigh any extra journey times for road users (particularly since, unlike during the 2016 bridgeworks, filtering this time will be accompanied by mitigation measures to reduce the disruption).
There is another answer to the "selfishness" accusation on the LW website here.
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I think the authorities are starting to recognise the problem. The road infrastructure is overloaded and building new roads just induces more traffic. Public transport is also at capacity and building new infrastructure - like crossrail or trams - takes decades. Meanwhile London's population is still growing and by the time any of that is built it will already be overloaded.
There has to be a huge shift to walking and cycling to make it work. Haringey has invested in cycling proficiency training and bicycle repair courses but I'm afraid most of that money will be wasted unless the cycling infrastructure is made safer and more attractive. I don't downplay the inconvenience it might cause at first, or the political difficulty in implementing it (pretty sure we'll be seeing a Baroness Ahmet of Harringhay Park if she pulls this off!), but schemes like filtering Wightman Road are really the only way forward - and because filtering Wightman is basically a road layout change it's probably also one of the cheapest solutions to the problem.
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Permalink Reply by JulieB on
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I'd like to see a clamp down too Neil!
My friends daughter and another girl got knocked over last year by a crazy driver doing exactly what you describe in your second paragraph. The girls were waiting at a pedestrian crossing and the driver was weaving in and out of the bus lane, lost control and ploughed into them. They were very lucky to survive and even luckier that neither had any life changing injuries.
I regularly get beeped and gesticulated at for sticking to the speed limits, and for daring to slow down to safely turn off St Ann's Road into my road.
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If you don't mind me asking, what is the source for your data and is the average time in mean or median. Also what is the time period for the figures - weekly, monthly, etc. When I was using the 29 to travel back and forth to Camden during the bridge work, my travel time increased by about 30 minutes. Often it was quicker to walk from Manor House to Icelands. Walking my son to school was also significantly more dangerous due to impatient drivers or buses siting over the crossing sections.
Overall, my experience of the bridge works was very negative. I also disagree that closing Wightman will be a benefit to the whole local community. It will be detrimental to residents of the Gardens and the Parade and will also affect the wider community of Hornsey, Crounch End and Ally Pally. However, proponents of the Wightman closure seem to want to ignore the potential downsides for non-Wightman residents. I note that one commenter living on the GL side of the ladder also expressed very negative views of the experience of the bridge works.
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The data is from Haringey's transport consultants who would have got it from TfL's GPS tracking systems. The charts were presented to the third Steering Group meeting - there's a link to all the presentations on the LW page here.
The problem is people's anecdotal memories are very unreliable. For example you just said your 29 bus to Camden "travel time increased by about 30 minutes" but back in July last year on this thread here you said it was 15 minutes.
So maybe a few minutes between Salisbury and Manor House, a few more by Finsbury Park (which was badly affected by roadworks on Stroud Green Road at least some of the time), a few more somewhere else because of some other cause. Plus partial closures of the GOBLIN generally putting more load on the buses and roads like Seven Sisters.
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Previous comment was based on the trips taken at the time. I have no idea of the average weekly mean time that my journeys took as I did not record each journey, however, taking the bus to the office normally gets in in at around 8:40. In many occasions that I took the bus, I would not get in until after 9 unless I left the house much earlier. If I were to put a range it would be 15-30 minutes, but again I don't have actual times for each journey. In terms of anecdotal memories, I can only report my own experiences, which were mainly negative, especially related to the increased amount of traffic on GL and the dangers it posed when crossing with my son. I notice that you are still in denial that there are very real downsides to the current propsosals for nonresidents of Wightman. The bus data is not helpful without context.
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