Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
St Ann's LTN start date - 22 August
I'm not sure whether this has been shared elsewhere on HOL - can't see it in a search but...
We have recently received a note through our front door that the St Ann's Low Traffic Neighbourhood will be implemented on 22 August.
This is a heads-up for anyone living in or driving through the area between West Green Road and St Ann's Road. There will no longer be a direct route between the two major roads unless you are a bus or have a 'X2' exemption pass.
Woodlands Park Road, Black Boy Lane, Cornwall Road and Avenue Road will all be closed to through traffic.
The restriction points will be monitored by CCTV, so no doubt LBH will be issuing lots of PCNs! Drivers beware!
I attach two documents, one a map of the area showing the traffic cells as they will be after implementation, and the other the supporting document.
Tags for Forum Posts: low traffic neighbourhoods, st anns ltn, traffic
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LTN map.pdf, 834 KB -
LTN Doc.pdf, 1.1 MB
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Don on
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JJ B - I don’t disagree that things have to change; what I complain about is the lack of support provided. The government has outlawed new petrol vehicle production from (I think) 2030 — why isn’t Haringey already installing lamp-post EV charging points across the borough with a tariff negotiated for residents? Why isn’t the council electrifying all its vehicles? Why is the Treasury pressuring TfL to scrap or truncate bus routes across London? Where are Haringey’s plans to control trunk-route traffic in Green Lanes and make our stretch of it better for public transport (northbound bus lane, for instance)? If the intention is to get us shopping locally (and walking or cycling), why does Haringey continue to allow mega-restaurants in Green Lanes at the expense of useful small shops selling something other than kebabs? Where is the holistic, London-wide plan to reduce vehicle movements across the city and why is it left instead to individual boroughs to close roads and just shunt traffic onto someone else’s patch?
What’s lacking is any sense that there’s leadership in making changes, simply piecemeal tinkering at the edges. To get people out of their cars, the alternatives need to be in place first; otherwise, why would anyone swap a warm, comfy Honda (other makes are available) for a cold, miserable 29 bus stop on a wet January night?
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I agree, agree, and agree again.
But as you wrote..."it's cultural".
Leadership in the UK means you deflect on the EU and foreigners, hark back to Empire, vote for complete nincompoops and charlatans and let sh*t float all around your coastline.
I personally am trying to make an exit...
Voilà.
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Permalink Reply by Dick Harris on
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Don’s contribution above refers to the “notorious Wightman closure” in the context of the likely effect on bus movements. Assuming it is the six month closure in 2016 that he is referring to, I would like to challenge the implication that closing Wightman Road had a serious impact on buses. There certainly were some problems in the first weeks of the closure as drivers became used to the new situation, but the traffic study that was conducted before and during the closure avoided this period of turmoil.
Haringey Council took advantage of this planned lengthy closure to commission the “Green Lanes Area Traffic Study” and an immense amount of data was gathered and reported upon in 2017. TFL routinely collects statistics on bus movements and their data was included in the report.
In my opinion, the report shows that the times taken by TFL buses to traverse Green Lanes from Wood Green to Manor House was increased by no more than 2 minutes on an average of over 20. This not nothing but it is also hardly devastating – especially in view of the fact that no mitigating measures were taken to deal with possible problems.
As regards buses on Turnpike Lane, the situation was very different and, sad to say, the report was seriously deficient in explaining the reason. During the whole six months of the closure, the traffic lights at the Turnpike Lane/Wightman junction held the flow in both directions for non-existent traffic to turn into and out of Wightman Road. The consequence was that the flow on the Turnpike Lane – Hornsey High Street axis was unnecessarily delayed. The east bound queue often extended back beyond the junction with Church Lane which blocked the junction to traffic wishing to turn out eastwards. This one defect caused the 41 buses going eastwards to be hugely delayed and, presumably, the same applied to all other vehicles turning out of Church Lane. Possibly the queues reached back into Crouch End. However, TFL records for the 41 bus travelling in the opposite direction showed no such delays. The records for the 144 bus which also uses the Turnpike Lane – Hornsey High Street axis (but does not turn out of Church Lane) showed no such difference between the eastbound and westbound transit times. Implying that closing Wightman Road (which has no bus services itself) was the cause of dreadful delays to the 41 bus was misleading. Failure to change the traffic light sequence and manage the Church Lane junction is what caused the delays to the 41 buses eastbound. Obviously this clumsy blunder would not apply to any future rearrangements that restrict traffic using Wightman Road – indeed that may be why so much was recently spent on modernising this particular set of lights.
On the main subject of this thread (the St Anne’s LTN) I agree with Hugh’s position.
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Dick — Yes, I was referring to the Wightman closure for bridge works, and I’d stand by my bus-related remarks as regards the 29 specifically and the 141. OK, it’s anecdotal, but I was a passenger on numerous northbound buses that were terminated (!) early at Finsbury Park because the timetable couldn’t be maintained and I also saw plenty of buses being turned back prematurely at the Salisbury for the same reason. Other HoL contributors at the time reported similar stories, but presumably these truncations don’t appear in TfL stats because the buses didn’t actually run in GL. TfL’s records as quoted also appear to take an average of delays, but anyone travelling at peak times will remember that a 15-minute delay was the norm during this period — and for most bus passengers, it’s peak-time travel that counts (because they need to get to or from work), not an average over 24 hours that includes times when far fewer people are travelling.
I suggested above ways in which the council could — in my view, should — tackle GL before closing numerous side roads, not afterwards. If the rat-running problem is as severe as the council maintain (though there’s actually zero evidence of it in St Ann’s outside the three critical streets), extra traffic will be dumped onto already overcrowded and dangerous main roads (see Harringay 4eva’s post), creating more congestion, affecting all traffic and slowing buses even further, just as services are under serious attack from a cash-strapped TfL and will be less frequent and reliable as a result.
Ladder residents have complained for years about “through traffic” making their lives unpleasant (naturally, all their own cars don’t contribute to the problem…..), and Hugh for one has conceded here that making local journeys extra difficult and more time-consuming for Harringay residents shouldn’t be the main outcome of imposing an LTN. “Through traffic” is by definition trying to get somewhere, which is why I advocate, amongst other things, controlling traffic movements at the GL/North Circular junction. We can’t shift the railway, which is the single most important element affecting the area’s geography and which funnels so much traffic onto the already-dangerous GL, so the council needs to find a way of dealing with the reality, not grabbing money from City Hall so as to devise retrograde measures that don’t get to the heart of the problem.
Ladder roads have suffered for years from the closure of the Gardens; let’s see how closure of even more roads east of GL affects them now.
(PS: As requested, I’d add that I live in St Ann’s, but I’m nor a car-owner and have never driven — hence my concerns about public transport.)
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I can’t say that I have ever travelled to work on a bus but I never went by car either. The trains from Harringay were fine for me. Now that I am retired, I am more concerned about the disturbance to our living environment caused by through traffic using what should be our quiet residential streets. The following words are extracted from drafts I made at the time of the GLATS.
You may be right Don about defects in TFL’s figures but it so happens that my impression that bus transit times were not greatly affected accords closely with the journey time data collected by the GLATS for all vehicles traversing the study area along Green Lanes.
The opening paragraph of the 2017 final report of the GLATS includes the following sentence:
It aims to identify ways to improve transport and movement in an integrated and holistic manner, by taking an informed and evidence-based approach.
In such a case as this, where anecdote and subjective opinion provide little more than a hubbub of conflicting and largely disorganised views, the most important and uniquely useful information should have been the objective evidence itself. Indeed, it was for the purpose of gathering objective evidence that the study was launched and a very impressive body of data was in fact collected at a cost of over £200K.
As the leading consultant observed at a public meeting, this study presented him with more detailed traffic data than any comparable work that he had ever seen which augured well for a good understanding of the situation and new ideas for a solution.
Many people have anecdotal stories about particular bus delays they experienced but nobody except TFL records these things in a systematic form. Irritating delays to buses happened from time to time before the closure and they continued to happen after the closure finished.
I thought that the consultants and Council should have relied more on the factual data that they had expensively collected to challenge, elucidate or, where necessary, repudiate anecdotal evidence. Also to counteract data and conflicting opinions emanating from models based on less comprehensive data. Sadly, this did not happen and, so far as I know, little further use was made of the data collected even though this could probably tell us more.
Disappointingly, at a meeting where the results and report were to be discussed, the councillor in the chair did not begin by saying “finally, we have some high-quality factual data to guide us” but by saying something like “we all know how terrible the effect of the closure was”. In other words, let us all ventilate our own anecdotal experiences.
On the question of how the closure of Wightman Road affected other roads, the report showed that during the closure, traffic on Wightman Road was reduced by about 15,000 vehicles a day. The figures for the other A and B roads showed that Green Lanes picked up at most 3,000, Turnpike Lane 4,000, West Green Road 3,000 (the source of the Turnpike Lane increase) and Endymion less than 2,000. St Ann’s Road encountered a reduction. These figures suggest that more than half of the Wightman Road traffic simply disappeared. Either the journeys no longer happened or they took place outside the study area. This is further evidence, if any were needed, that in today’s world, the volume of traffic is determined by the capacity of roads. If the capacity is reduced, the traffic too will diminish. I would guess that the only things that influence a driver in choosing a route are convenience, cost and the law.
A transport economist might think that the effect of satnav systems in squeezing more vehicles through our roads is a sign of increased efficiency. I call it a blight on our living environment and I expect our elected representatives to do their best to fix this problem fearlessly.
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Dick - Yes, anecdotal evidence isn't always reliable, but it does reflect individuals' experiences. (For instance, according to the council, Bounds Green residents have already suffered badly because of Enfield's neighbouring LTN, which simply shunted all their traffic onto Haringey roads instead.} And surely, your figures show a reduction of 15,000 in Wightman traffic but a cumulative increase of 12,000 on the other roads you cite? Not exactly a 50% reduction!
I'd also make two points: firstly, in my reply to Andrew (below this one, I think), I queried the notion of "though traffic", as I think it's impossible to define. When Wightman was closed, Ladder residents constantly complained about "through" as opposed to "local" traffic, but there really isn't any way of identifying it. Your "short cut" is my "rat run"; nobody wants excess traffic in their own road, but they all want the right to drive their own cars wherever and whenever they like - including along other people's residential streets as well as their "own".
I previously suggested here that the council should limit traffic at the North Circular junction - an obvious source of actual through traffic, and one of the main reasons why Green Lanes is in the state it is. It's unsurprising, but very disappointing, that there are no evident plans at all to deal with GL, the prime cause of almost all the traffic problems in this area.
Secondly, since the original traffic study was done, there have been significant changes. the main one of which is that TfL is under financial assault from the Treasury like never before, and is about to slash bus routes across the city. You may not have used buses (I used a bus/underground combo when I commuted to Waterloo for many years) but thousands of people in Harringay rely on them every day for work and leisure journeys. Even with a very little "evaporation" of traffic from closed road areas, adding more displaced traffic to at-capacity roads is a fantastically bad idea when bus services are already being cut. Haringey as a borough is relatively poor and its population probably disproprtionately more reliant on public transport than in other boroughs. Without palpable improvements to public transport before the creation of LTNs the scheme will adversely affect many residents and make their lives more difficult. It's the wrong scheme at the wrong time.
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I don’t wish to elongate this thread unnecessarily but, as one of the group who followed the Green Lanes Area Traffic Study closely, I would prefer to see that splendid (and unique) piece of work used properly to inform related decisions. There probably are some useful conclusions that can be drawn from the study for the St Anne’s LTN. For example, it was obvious before the study that some traffic on the East-West axis approaches Harringay from the east with the aim of crossing the railway either at Turnpike Lane or at Endymion Road. The study gave a good indication of how much of that traffic came along the three available routes (Westbury Avenue, West Green Road and St Anne’s Road) and how much of it passed along ladder roads (and thence along Wightman Road) to reach its preferred crossing. It was also clear that some of the traffic on St Anne’s Road got there via more minor roads. Closing off Wightman Road (and the ladder) for six months led to changes in the routes followed by some drivers. They didn’t all simply turn along Green Lanes to reach one of the two rail crossing points. Some abandoned St Anne’s Road and stayed on West Green Road or even on Westbury Avenue. My own belief is that some chose other routes that bypassed the study area altogether and that some others did not make their journey at all (ie evaporation). The figures also showed a slight increase on St Anne’s Road in the SE direction which could have been traffic on the North-South axis which had been deterred by denser flows on Green Lanes. This SE increase on St Anne’s Road was matched by small increases on the busy minor roads which feed it and which the LTN is seeking now to control.
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Dick - Yes, let's not go on forever! A few short points:
In my view, the railway barrier and GL's role as an arterial route are the key determinants in Harringay's traffic problems. There are only two railway crossing points, so of course east-west traffic tries to reach them. GL is a major connector between the N Circular and routes to central London, as well as a busy shopping street. The council has made no plans whatever to improve the latter, or appreciate that the former can't be solved without creation of a new railway crossing - vanishingly unlikely. Closing side roads doesn't improve access to Endymion or Turnpike Lane, so where is that traffic to go?
The council acknowledges that existing main roads are at capacity. GL and West Green are far more dangerous than any St Ann's area road, but the LTN will push more traffic onto them.
There are only three problematic roads in St Ann's ward - the council has done no studies or provided evidence that rat-running is a major problem in the vast majority of residential side roads. The claim is that controlling only the three problem roads would push traffic onto other area roads, but no alternative ideas were prsented, apart from side road closures, to control flows on these roads.
"Through traffic" (whatever that is) by definition is trying to get somewhere - north/south or east/west in Harringay. Unless the objectives of the traffic are understood (the railway crossings, the North Circular) and if necessary controlled, closing intermediate roads is tinkering that will make life harder for residents while failing to solve the fundamental problems. Severing north/south connections in St Ann's forces those with legitimate reasons to go from the base of the area (roads off St Ann's) to the top (eg Wood Green) to use GL or Seven Sisters/Tottenham High Road, adding time, mileage and pollution on roads that are already overcrowded.
It's a fundamentally flawed scheme that won't solve anything.
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Permalink Reply by Sarah on
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It is, if you assume that the overall traffic will remain the same. But it cannot. We must end our dependence on cars.
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On the narrow question, Don, of Interpreting traffic data. Perhaps I was unwise to summarise the results so briefly in my earlier post. The first thing to know is the points at which the traffic was counted. For each ladder road there was only one counter. Wightman Road had four counters and St Anne’s had two. Only a proportion of traffic on Wightman travels the whole length of the road because many drivers use ladder roads to avoid using Turnpike Lane or Endymion Road. A vehicle can be counted several times as it passes through the study area. An increase in traffic on Westbury Avenue and on West Green Road will lead to some increase on Turnpike Lane but the vehicles concerned will be counted twice. When the ladder was closed off, the only alternatives were to turn north or south onto Green Lanes or to try Willoughby Road (which led only to Turnpike Lane so these cars would have been counted a third time).
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I mapped the counts out here https://batchgeo.com/map/755af18996a0bf416c274b9b65d4ca8d for anyone who wants to see this a bit easier.
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