Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Proposed Safety and Accessibility Improvements for Wightman Road and Alroy Road Public Consultation
The changes to Wightman following the Harringay Traffic study have been revived out of the blue.
The main benefits of this should be slightly slowed traffic and less cluttered pavements.
The downsides will be:
- the loss of real pedestriancrossing points - gthe replacement of traffic islands with "informal pedestrian crossings", which many fear will be laregely ignored
- probably significant increase on parking pressure through the loss of parking places on Wightman road with the expectation that additional cars can be accommodated on the Ladder rung roads. This is set against the backdrop of wildly inaccurate parking space usage calculations. For example the Council calculate that my road has an overnight spare parking space capacity of 30%. Ask anyone who ives here and they'll tell you it's more like 0%.
The thread about these particular changes from the start of the year can be read here. (The full set of threads around the traffic study can be accessed by clicking the tag at the bottom of this discussion).
Please answer the consultation and give your views. Once it's done. it'l be too late to change for many years. Full set of documents attached.
Tags for Forum Posts: harringay traffic study, ladder parking changes, wightman road improvements
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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"I can't see that cycle safety and pedestrian safety are mutually exclusive." <- go up to Enfield and see that's not always the case. As cyclists are moved away from motor traffic they come into conflict with pedestrians, who were moved away earlier.
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Permalink Reply by maggie on
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At the consultation meeting last week the engineer suggested (as I understood it) that there could not be more zebra crossings because on tests drivers tend to speed up to get through zebra crossings when they are too close together and can be seen as several in a row however Whightman Road is not straight and it probably wouldn't be possible to see more than one at a time.
I think chicanes would be good, moving parked cars off the pavements would be good, more trees and planters would be good but the informal crossings are a waste of time particularly as it appears that both pedestrians and drivers have little idea what a red strip across the road means.
I support the suggestion of more zebra crossings and I also think there should be cameras or any other way of making drivers comply with the speed limit.
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It looks like the "informal crossings" (like "affordable housing") can vary in implementation. Recommendation is that the road is raised to the same level as the footpath. I don't know why they bother with "recommendations" in specifications like this, of course they'll be ignored.
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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Even if it is raised and painted red I do wonder if drivers will see this as a way of highlighting the change in highway treatment rather than a crossing.
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Permalink Reply by Maddy on
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I think a crossing point at the top of every Ladder road would just encourage drivers to ignore them all - if drivers customarily speed up to get through Zebra crossings, then surely the same would apply to 'informal' crossings (if anyone knew what they were in the first place). Better to have an good sprinkling of zebras and pelicans, which would slow the traffic down overall.
On a separate point, why does it take so long for the pelican crossings on Green Lanes to change after you press the button? They all allow traffic to keep moving for a good few minutes before they change to green for pedestrians, even when the road is either slow moving or sparse. It gives the wrong message - that pedestrians are much lower pritority than moving traffic - and encourages jay-walking. Who can I contact about this?
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Please don't use the term 'jay-walking'. It implies pedestrians are crossing illegally, which isn't the case because it doesn't exist in British law.
Only think I can think about the timing of the lights is that there's must be a minimum amount of time since traffic was last stopped. If you're unlucky enough to press the button before this has elapsed, you have to wait.
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Pedestrians had been "impeding traffic and causing too many accidents and deaths", one traffic police official said
Perhaps change to
Traffic had been "impeding pedestrians and causing too many accidents and deaths"
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I don’t think it’s one thing or the other, as you rightly say Andrew.
The removal of the traffic islands is non-negotiable if pavement parking is removed. With vehicles back on the road where they belong there simply isn’t room to have a traffic island; the space between the parked vehicles and the centre of the carriage way won’t be wide enough.
I’m assuming that the broad consensus is that getting cars off the pavement is a good thing (I certainly do) so the traffic island will have to disappear as a consequence of that. So the next thing to consider is with the traffic island removed, how will can it be made safe for pedestrians to cross. There is government guidance on the use of informal crossings (the proposed red strips) and above a certain daily volume of traffic they are not recommended as being appropriate. Wightman Road traffic flow go above this threshold.
So, if red strip crossings go against design guidelines and those that are in place currently (on Alroy Road) are ignored or, I suspect, not even noticed, what are the options left?
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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A couple of weeks ago I posted a link on this thread to Clive Carter's photos, aerial views, and other information about Wightman Road. Clive has now done some further work and there's a more direct link to an album he made, called "Designing in Danger" (DiD)
Here's the link (also set out in full below) which goes directly to the DiD Album. This is solely about Wightman Road.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/23097244@N02/albums/72157698293206974
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The informal red crossings at the Endymion/Alroy roundabout definitely do not work - yesterday I stopped to allow a man with a child in a pushchair to cross, but the person coming the other way stopped ON the red crossing, holding up traffic, in order to berate the man for crossing there! I don't think anyone has a clue what they mean, and you can't necessarily see before you turn the corner that there is any kind of crossing there.
I think there should be two new zebra crossings: one a few metres in from the roundabout on Alroy and one north of it on Endymion before the bend - they would be clearly visible from all directions because of the belisha beacons.
More generally we need a 'priority for pedestrians at junctions' rule - they have had it this France for years, though how generally it is observed I don't know.
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Permalink Reply by Protheroe O'Shea on
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Agreed. I use them every day and they are worse than hopeless they're dangerous.
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