Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
“Opposing LTNs is not about culture wars”
Probably more people on HoL than at the council read The Guardian, but, if you haven’t seen it, this piece in today’s paper edition (and online) by Joseph Harker reflects on the consultation process his council did — or didn’t — go through in creating their LTNs and could be worthwhile reading for Haringey councillors when the next round of closures is proposed. His point about carrot and stick is crucial to the whole debate (though the title of this post is taken from the printed article’s heading and may not appear in the online version).
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by JulieB on
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Thank you for sharing. This is how I feel about Haringey Council, they only listen to the people who agree with LTNs and ignore everyone else.
This paragraph from the article is spot on for me, "Those who oppose LTNs are not rabid petrol-headed rightwingers who want to burn up the planet: they’re mostly just ordinary people trying to go about their daily business whose life has been made miserable."
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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There is also the misery of traffic taking a short cut through your street which has just started, as it does every weekday, at 6am as I type this.
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Permalink Reply by Guy on
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6 am-ish was often when I’d be quietly delivering groceries to an elderly friend in her final years.
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Spot on! We do use our cycles or ebikes as much as health allows, but having a disability and a business to run does make us essential car users. You're villified as a car lover by the LTN lovers, and villified as a cyclist by the anti-LTN people.
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Permalink Reply by Robert Pike on
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It was the Tottenham Tories, Haringhell and their rabble on Nextdoor who turned this into a culture war. A bit like this East Dulwich opposition group. The St Ann’s LTN has gone through two ward council elections now and to date anti-LTN parties and their handful of supporters (less than 100 I believe) have roundly failed. The facts and data speak for themselves - the St Ann’s LTN has liberated ordinary working class residents who don’t own cars in social housing from the blight of rat running traffic. Even in boundary roads traffic counts show some falls in traffic numbers. Outliers being the crazy junction with WGR and Langham Rd, and on that matter we should be asking why are more measures not in place and why we need to have uncoordinated roadworks every four weeks.
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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YES. The lack or absence of electoral support for the fanatical anti-LTN Tottenham Tories was demonstrated in the 2023 Tottenham Hale by-election where the Conservatives campaigned against LTNs almost exclusively.
It was a de facto LTN Referendum. The untruths, hyperbole and even hysteria of the car-owner Rights Party were rewarded with a small fall in vote-share. And after months of campaigning, the local Tories energised residents with the issue so much that overall turnout … fell by 7%.
If the tiny Tottenham Tories thought this was a vote-winner, they were wrong. It was more of a bye bye election for this "issue".
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For me, the key point in this piece is that "Ultimately, the main problem with the LTNs is that they are all stick, no carrot. For all the restrictions and the penalty notices, there has been almost zero improvement in public transport."
This is a London-wide problem: TfL keep cutting bus routes, while London has been dubbed "the most congested city in Europe" – partly because those promoting LTNs seem only to see them as shifting car drivers from side streets without any acknowledgement that increasing traffic on main roads is disastrous for bus routes, delaying vehicles and forcing early termination or truncation of journeys. Locally, the myth of traffic "evaporation" was also exposed when Enfield created an LTN on their side of Bounds Green; all this did was to send their vehicles into Haringey (nice for Enfield, of course), so Haringey then had to respond with its own tit-for-tat LTN, pushing yet more traffic onto main roads.
Anti-LTN supporters in local elections may have been just a "handful", but my memory suggests that only around 700 people in the whole of St Ann's voted in favour of the LTN (maybe two handfuls), much helped by what looked suspiciously like an astroturf campaign that managed to get only pro-LTN leaflets through local letterboxes. It was hardly an overwhelming endorsement of the policy.
Before any local LTNs were created, Mike Hakata (relevant cabinet member) and Anne Cunningham (relevant officer) promised that changes would be made in Green Lanes to mitigate the influx of traffic from the new zones before they were set up. Not one thing has been done, in GL or West Green Road, to improve public transport or prioritise bus services and – as I've said on HoL before – in my view, only sorting out GL will alleviate Harringay's traffic problems. Unfortunately for all of us, that costs real money, and nobody so far has been prepared to stump up when flowerpots and CCTV on side roads are so much cheaper, even if they don't solve the problem. As Joseph Harker says, "all stick, no carrot".
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helped by what looked suspiciously like an astroturf campaign that managed to get only pro-LTN leaflets through local letterboxes.
I know that Haringey Living Streets were putting pro-LTN leaflets through letterboxes and this was done entirely independently of the council with no support in creation, delivery or funding.
If others wanted to put anti-LTN leaflets through letterboxes there was absolutely nothing stopping them. The fact that they didn't bother isn't some kind of conspiracy, just them choosing not to do so.
I'd agree that Green Lanes needs sorting but I suspect the fairly virulent response to the initial LTNs has put the council off tackling these things.
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Respectfully, Andrew, the claim that Haringey Living Streets volunteers are “entirely independent” of the council is incorrect. As usual, there is more to these things than first meets the eye. Aside from Cabinet members briefing their meetings demonstrating alignment, if I'm not mistaken, Haringey Council has a live purchase order with Living Streets Services Ltd, the trading arm of the national charity to which HLS is affiliated. The national Living Streets charity recently received £5 million from Active Travel England, from which Local groups, most likely including HLS, are nicely resourced (e.g campaign materials, staff time, and programme support). So while volunteers may well have wandered the streets to deliver leaflets in the rain, they may have been driven, at least in part, by support, funding, and resources that are not available to opposing residents. No conspiracy, just a structural advantage that may be worthy of acknowledging here.
Here’s another example: "The Council welcomes the support from Living Streets and agree that encouragement on its own will not get more people cycling." (source: www.haringey.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2024-02/lip_consultation_co...
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TfL spends £7.9bn a year on one of the world’s most comprehensive transport systems. That’s pretty carroty.
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THIS reflects a car-centric viewpoint and (typical) car-owner entitlement.
Low traffic neighbourhoods are here cast as a stick (punishment) whereas they should be seen as the carrot!
The biggest problem is that the council's LTN carrot is not big enough.
Public transport in London is already and probably the most extensive in the world, but no amount of expansion is likely to encourage died-in-the-wool petrol heads to switch. Car-owners are simply not under enough pressure or incentive to shift.
Haringey Council's actual stick is the small charge they make for CPZ use. If the council were serious about encouraging walking and cycling, then they would increase this charge by a small amount every year, in order to encourage "modal shift".
The traffic is terrible
Buses would run faster if there were fewer cars on the road.
If there were fewer cars on the roads, cyclists and pedestrians would face less danger.
Privately, car-owners would prefer to see fewer cars on the road in order to speed their own journeys, but are so intellectually dishonest, that they cannot admit this publicly. They would rather others gave up car-ownership.
Publicly, the Borough's minority of car owners might say that, as many who want to own cars should be able to and the council should accommodate them. Haringey Council has been pandering to the minority of car-owners for decades.
As the conservative Haringey Administration dithers on transport, neighbouring Boroughs are making real progress. Until there is a more energetic and enlightened Administration, this is set to continue.
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For the record, I am not a petrolhead and have never had a driving licence or car. I support public transport; believe me, I did my time on the crime-ridden bendy buses on the 29 and have spent more hours waiting in freezing rain late at night at Manor House for any bus that had room on it to arrive than I care to remember!
Right now, an injury makes walking (and tube journeys) more difficult, and I take more minicabs and fewer buses. So, for example, I’m conscious that a (Hackney) LTN has added a mile — I checked — to a regular clinic journey, for instance; which seems a dubious public benefit. Yes, of course London’s lucky with its overall public transport, but TfL is actively cutting bus routes, while in Camden, for instance, LTN closures have made Parkway and the high steet so congested that bus journeys are far longer. Here, Green Lanes is ever more congested, with the same result. And if Oxford Street is pedestrianised, it’ll be a no-go zone for those with mobility problems.
Despite what some councillors seem to think, not everyone can cycle (or walk). Getting traffic off residential streets is good, but it doesn’t disappear — it just goes elsewhere (my previous Bounds Green example). Since where it goes increases congestion on bus routes, passengers suffer more delays, less frequent buses and more unreliability. It’s not an incentive to leave a car at home, it’s just more aggravation. If Haringey dealt with parking and deliveries on GL between the Arena and Turnpike Lane, created a northbound bus lane and traffic light bus priority, and worked with TfL and the DoT to control traffic flows at the N Circular junction, I’d be more in favour of the LTNs. But, despite the promises, there’s absolutely no sign of any action at all, and, until there is, nothing will improve.
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