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 andy h on
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You seem to think that the LTN will only run for the 18month trail period.
I my be wrong (I often am ), but all I’ve read is that the trail will be “assessed” at the end.
I’m assuming that it is permanent .
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Permalink Reply by PeterPiper on
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Chris, I’m unable to speak to you latest response to Andrew, because of the platform’s limitations
However I think you are being a little disingenuous because the LTNs are not experiments, they are trials. As an experiment/example they have been proved elsewhere, think Waltham Forest, and numerous cities around the world, to be very successful. LBC wish to trial a similar approach for the community’s benefit, it’s part of their remit. As to benchmarks, others call them baselines and LBC have accumulated considerable data in the past, and prior to installing the LTN in St. Ann’s, think GLATS, but also look at the work done on Active Travel in the last ten or so years. LBH’s Walking and Cycling Action Plan (WCAP) has a long timeline, maybe 30 years, I think.
It is not just about counting cars, as you say, it’s a whole lot more such as getting better health outcomes for respiratory disease, diabetes/obesity, and stroke victims. It’s also about creating safer, liveable neighbourhoods which are not dominated by cars. So there are many metrics by which a LTN can be measured. Personally, at a time when the NHS is under so much strain, through lack of doctors, nurses, specialists, and hospitals don’t you agree that we need to try and mitigate this and reducing car travel in residential streets could be part of the solution. The medical science suggests that daily exercise through the simple expedient of walking more, let alone cycling is one way to achieve this. I know for some this may be an issue, but some exemptions have been put in place. It’s possible more may be needed, but no one knows until it’s trialled. Diet of course is also a factor, and there will be others such as poverty.
I will leave the climate change threats and science for others to discuss.
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Peter — Isn’t it time the Waltham Forest scheme — endlessly referenced by LTN proponents — was omitted from this local discussion? The Walthamstow Village “Mini Holland” scheme is on a completely different scale: it cost £20 million and involved swathes of landscaping, new pavements, urban improvements, creation of pedestrian-priority shopping streets as well as road closures — a major re-landscaping project completely different from Haringey’s flowerpots’n’CCTV approach to blocking streets. It was only possible because major roads such as Hoe Street and Lea Bridge Road had the capacity to absorb the displaced traffic and effectively turn the village into an island. As it was, even the local council admitted to a year-on-year increase in traffic on one “boundary road” from c 7,000 vehicles a day to 9,000, leading to complaints from its residents that their lives were less valued than those of residents inside the exclusion zone.
From one viewpoint it was a resounding success: residents of one specific enclave had their area re-purposed as a local, bike-friendly series of village streets. But at what cost to neighbouring areas and how much extra mileage, petrol consumption, pollution and congestion to those not fortunate enough to live inside the new ring roads?
What is proposed, or being enacted, for St Ann’s and Haringey is nothing of the sort: the council is merely blocking existing streets and telling everyone they should walk or cycle instead. There is no holistic approach to residents’ needs or understanding of the specific geography in this area that means arbitrary side street closures will not tackle the underlying problems.
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Don, - you often make good points in your posts, but I feel you tend to highlight the negatives rather than the positives. As a human race we, as I'm sure you recognise are in one helleva bad situation with the spectre of unstoppable climate change and global warning hanging over us and future generations. The extreme weather events we have been witnessing recently and over the past few years appear to be increasing rather than being blips in the continuum.
The scientists with a few isolated exceptions have pinpointed the build up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a major contributor and only a lessoning of CO2 emissions will mitigate this.
Since I first came to Harringay more than 40 years ago I have noticed an exponential increase in the amount of cars on the streets, particularly with only one occupant, which I surmise has been promoted by the ease of affordability and the invention of sat-navs, and dare I say it, the suppression of evidential research by a few mega corporations within the petroleum industry. Our streets were not designed for this type of use and are completely unsuitable for it in the main. New developments can of course take this into consideration.
Faced with the impending threats; despite efforts to dismiss the likes of Professor Lovelock, recently deceased, with his Gaia theories, or Rachel Carson and the publication in 1962 of her book "Silent Spring", at long last some governments have begun to acknowledge their ground-breaking work, and some still choose not to.
The ever adaptable human race is faced with a choice of continuing to pump ever more CO2 into the atmosphere and suffer the consequences, or change it's behaviour in a desperate attempt to prevent the worst of global warming affecting future generations.
Where does the St. Ann's LTN come into this you may well ask? The good folk of St. Ann's have been chosen to trial a solution for mitigation within the bounds of limited funds. It is bringing lab research into the real world. Of course there are limitations, and maybe some in the community do not wish to be considered as lab-rats just as much as they don't wish to be considered rat-runners. Hey, no one likes to be considered a rat under any circumstance. I doubt anybody at LBH is under any illusion that they have got everything right straight away, they would expect there to be teething problems, but only by trialing new hypotheses can a model for others be achieved.
Why not try to find the positives before commenting on the negatives? Give the scheme a chance, see what works and what doesn't. You would be up in arms over the expense if LBH were to suddenly impose LTN conditions borough-wide. At least credit the council in attempting to achieve net zero and drawing up plans for a 30 year programme whilst suffering the most stringent of cuts by a government that spends all its energies on causing division and leveling down.
The Waltham Forest implementation was, as you say, hugely expensive and the lesson learnt is that avoiding a climate catastrophe cannot be be done on the cheap, but its a model, and still a work in progress. Tax-payer money has been given to LBH through the energetic campaigning undertaken by some of your neighbours, it's down to the good folk of St. Ann's to either engage or stand on the side-lines and carp. As for Green Lanes, I know for a fact that the council is searching for answers, consulting with residents and users such as the traders as I write and has been doing this for a while, parking is an acknowledged issue. I counsel patience, take notes, good points & bad points and when the time is right share your views.
Would we be experiencing the current energy and cost of living crisis if instead of "cutting the green crap", David Cameron had promoted solar panels for householders, with skills training, jobs, and a realistic feed in tariff, of promoting the programme for insulating old, draughty Victorian houses, or creating new build regulations with sustainability at its core, or on-shore wind farms? The answer is probably yes, but not to the extent that it is, and at a fraction of the cost. Hindsight is useful if we use it to learn lessons for the future. Doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result is diminished responsibility.
We dismiss our visionaries such as Lovelock or Carson or even XR at our peril. The status quo is not an option, I'm sure you will agree. We are beholden to future generations to attempt to find solutions whilst acknowledging changes to our behaviours. Thee and me may have tried to do this in the past, it is now time for our younger successors to try, talking with young people suggests that climate change and global warming are their biggest concerns, not left & right politics, but a greater degree of consensus. We are human, we are fallible, but we must try not to let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Engage with your councillors at their surgeries, Mike Hakata was previously a councillor for St. Ann's so I'm sure he knows the terrain well. He responds to emails, so why not open a dialogue with him?
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Peter — Yes, there’s a tendency to emphasise the negatives, but it’s because I feel there’s an imbalance between the council’s exhortations and the reality. I don’t disagree with your analysis; I’ve read Haringey’s decarbonisation manifesto (and also am in touch with Mike Hakata), but it seems long on aspiration and short on practical steps. To persuade people to change, there have to be viable alternatives and visible signs of joint burden-sharing between the council and residents (I won’t repeat all my GL traffic and EV suggestions or local geography comments again). But there aren’t. Even with this week’s miserly financial settlement, TfL are still going to axe buses and increase tube fares; nothing has happened to improve public transport access or control through traffic in GL. Why should anyone want to abandon their cars when there’s no sign of the council taking practical steps to change anything or help make it possible?
I want the council to lead, not just issue instructions to everyone else to change their behaviour. The LTN was rushed through because “free” money was available, with the council egged-on by a very small local pressure group, but it’s not a comprehensive transport policy unless there’s wide-ranging support to make it easy for people to do things differently.
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Permalink Reply by jp quethiock on
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Harringay Online might want to find some sympathy for the residents of namesake Harringay Road. A one way road stuck between a set of lights at St Anns Road and another at Green Lanes residents there will now have to fill their lungs with the fumes from all the extra journeys undertaken by anyone who once went north through the secondary roads and must now join Green Lanes at a crunch spot there. The lights at Green Lanes usually give time for three vehicles to head north so traffic will simply gridlock on their street once post holiday traffic flows resume.
The LTN scheme is permanent if we are to believe the Council official who this week told angry residents on the Ida Road estate that they had better get used to it.
Democracy has always been a hard thing for this Council to understand and why should it when it can impose its will on people irrespective of their views or indeed, for boundary road residents, their health.
On the bright side, the LTN has united a very diverse community in the St Anns area in their opposition to the scheme. Their petition to the Council has reached 1900 signatures, more than double the number of people who agreed with the shape of the LTN. There was of course no consultation where one could disagree with it.
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I'm sure there are ways of covering the cameras without damaging them. A bit of direct (but responsible) action might get the message across to the council that this isn't wanted.
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With regard to carbon emitters waiting at traffic lights for the Harringay Road section, a simple tweak to the timings might mitigate this. It can take a while for this to be put in place due to the sheer number of traffic lights within London, but obviously if it proves to be a problem, then LBH should arrange for it to be done.
With regard to the petition to revert to the status quo, I wonder how many of the signatures are on the St. Ann's ward electoral roll. If they all are, they will have an opportunity to be heard at the next election. Wasn't the proposed traffic scheme on the party leaflets for the recent election? It was in Harringay ward for all parties, or at least the ones that came through my letter-box. All said parties supported measures of intervention regarding traffic reductions, so the mandate was made.
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