Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Parking on Green Lanes
As I was going along Green Lanes the other day I was pondering as to why it's necessary to have so much parking on there?
It slows the bus and the rest of the traffic down, it makes it incredibly unpleasant to cycle along, it makes it far more awkward to cross the road, ...
Given the two tube stations, three train stations, four different bus routes, pay & display bays at the base of the Ladder Roads then who really needs to use this parking?
Is it down to the influence of the Traders Association (I remember the frankly bizarre proposal to replace the bus lane with more parking last year), is it council policy in order to maximise parking income, is it just a hangover from years gone by.
I see that there's a proposal to remove the Saturday morning Green Lanes loading and waiting restrictions and open up more of the residents bay parking to business use as well so it does appear that the Traders Association do have some influence.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Michele on
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I completely agree with you and raised this in the recent consultation about Green Lanes improvements.
Until a few years ago Green Lanes was a "Red Route" with a bus lane, used by cyclists and no parking on Green Lanes. After residents parking was introduced traders may have found that there was a lack of parking for their customers, but for whatever reason parking was allowed in the bus lanes. Ever since then the traffic is completely at a standstill in the evening rush hour and also on Sundays all the way from Manor House to St Anne's Rd.
There are in the meantime link roads between the gardens roads that visitors used to be able to park in free for up to 2 hours, but these were removed even though no one else parks in these roads.
We as residents need to speak up and call for restoration of no parking in the bus routes in rush hours and to restore some free parking in the gardens for visitors, so that traffic, and buses in particular, can move more freely and cyclists can be better protected.
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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Completely agree Andrew. I've watched from the bus stop as drivers leave a parking space on one side of the road, do a three point turn in the middle of the road and then park on the opposite side so they have a few less centimeters to walk to the shop. The priority should be to keep the traffic moving. Green Lanes is actually a four lane road but is always narrowed to one lane either way because of parking. My ideal solution would be for the outside lanes to be for buses and cycles only.
On other threads a lot of discussion has been going on about how to discourage through traffic from the Ladder roads. Make Green Lanes a more attractive alternative (where the traffic actually moves) would certainly help with this.
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Permalink Reply by JulieB on
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I completely agree Michael and this is pretty much what I wrote in the consultation document when the proposal for the GL improvements was sent around.
I have also witnessed people doing 3 point turns in the middle of the road to get to a shop on the other side - crazy.
I didn't realise that GL used to be a red route, to me this makes much more sense in terms of keeping traffic flowing and possibly cutting down on traffic cutting through the ladder roads to avoid the at a stand still traffic in GL.
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The traders suffer with the delusion common among shopkeepers in massively overestimating the amount of their customers that arrive by car. One trader claims that 80% of his customers arrive by car. By way of local-ish comparison, The Mall at Wood Green has 1500 car parking spaces for £1 an hour, but only 17% of people shopping there arrive by car. Shoppers arriving on foot or public transport also spend more than drivers.
Providing more car parking just encourages more traffic, the very thing that makes local high streets less attractive to many potential shoppers, while increasing the comparative attractiveness of car-free Mall-like environments. But the response from traders to any downturn in trade always seems to be a call for more/cheaper car parking!
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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.....on this case it may be no delusion. Remember, many of the traders on Green Lanes target a demographic who doesn't live in the area, or even nearby. The section of Green Lanes that runs through Harringay is something of a hub for Turkish families to come from all over London and beyond to eat, shop and socialise, yet the Turkish population in Harringay is small. So I wouldn't be surprised if a high percentage of the customers of Green Lanes traders do arrive by car.
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Permalink Reply by pamish on
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Survey needed. On a smaller scale, the Latin American market at Seven Sisters has families coming from across London and beyond - yes we have surveyed this. ( I once met a woman who comes from Reading just to meet friends and have a coffee within her own culture.) There is no free parking anywhere around, except a few spaces on the road behind, it's mostly residential parking. So they must all manage to get here without their beloved CO2-emitters. OK there is the tube station on site, but like Green Lanes we have loads of buses which are cheaper.
Best idea? Cut the cost of the tube after the rush hour, and add family tickets.
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Perhaps there is an element of that - but how significant? The council have some surveys which seem to corroborate this to some extent - Table 14 here suggests that Green Lanes has a proportionally higher number of visitors driving from further away than other areas of Haringey. But the same document suggests 80% who drive do so for less than half an hour, with up to 10 mins of that spent looking for a parking space, so the majority of people that drive may not be coming from that far away. This document doesn't however seem to survey the total proportion of shoppers that arrive by car.
Table Q3a and Q4 here 'suggests an overestimate [by traders] of the proportion of visits by private cars' (traders 65% Vs. GLA report 33%), while table 4.4 here suggests 8% of shoppers drive (for Crouch End & Green Lanes combined) and a different survey suggests (at Q5) that only 10% of 'local' people drive to the shops on Green Lanes (9% cycle, which is astonishing given the paucity of provision for bikes and the hostility of local roads, and indicates a huge latent demand for better provision, but that's a whole other subject!).
Getting back to the point - obviously there has to be a balance when carving up road space. But as the OP says, the balance seems to be tipping in favour of car parking to the detriment of other modes (particularly bus passengers). Doing so on the basis of potentially flawed opinions would seem a poor way to make important business decisions.
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A resident of the ladder I no longer shop in Green Lanes because of the heavy traffic, air pollution, the absence of pedestrian crossings and anger at the stupidity of local traders who want to make congestion worse when we have excellent transport links and the fact they appear to have so much influence on the shape of our retail and traffic management. Nothing in the Green Lanes project is addressing any of this. It would be nice if traders could learn that traffic will eventually put people off.
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