Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Wightman Road Improvements
Are the works current happening near Jewsons at the moment, the implementation of the results of the traffic study?
Tags for Forum Posts: harringay traffic study, wightman road improvements
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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Natasha, I have no choice but to accept that because 52% of my eligible compatriots who voted, chose to leave the EU, then we're almost certian to leave the EU. But, I thank God that no serious suggestion has yet been made that because 67% of my neighbours choose not to have a car i also must not have a car.
As to the majority of the borough having breathable air, I'm taking my data from that given in Haringey's new Draft Air Quality Action Plan (which you can read all about here.)
I agree that the east of the borough is disproportionately affected by bad air quality. I'm not making any special pleading for Harringay or Wightman here - just that they be treated the same as anyone else.
Andrew, I think the point holds whether we're talking about Harringay or Wightman. I'm happy to stand by my comment whether it's read as Wightman or Harringay.
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Permalink Reply by V&M on
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I have an issue with Wightman Rd being the only remaining cut through and thus getting far more traffic than any other road in the surrounding area, the majority of which is not local residents doing day-to-day things.
I have the lowest emission car I can afford (well within the ULEZ requirements) and will swap to electric as soon as it comes into my price range. I walk whenever possible, use public transport but yes, also need to have a car for work, and much as I've tried, I can't get the economics to square with swapping to a car share service instead. So it's not a blind or lazy choice, it's the best I can manage, with an eye on reducing the impact as soon as it is feasible.
I'd like to park my car within a reasonable distance of my house. If I can't do that any more, I'd like the trade-off to be an improvement for cyclists and pedestrians, and cleaner air for everyone. None of that is happening, which is the main theme of this thread.
So, what about all that is hypocritical? By all means carry on with the sneering but do you actually have a point?
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Do you have a reference for that 50% figure. It may or may not be an accurate figure for across the whole study area. I imagine areas like the Gardens and Hermitage/Vale west of the barriers are more like 90% local, but it’s certainly not accurate for Wightman, the Ladder, St Ann’s Road and Blackboy Lane.
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Permalink Reply by JoeW on
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I think even if your own cold vehicle produces a disproportionate amount of air pollution compared to warmed-up through-traffic, the biggest contributor will still be through-traffic on WR?
During the bridgeworks when WR was effectively "residents access only", the volume of traffic reduced by a factor of 10 or more e.g. a typical WR resident who normally sees 1000+ vehicles per hour passing their front door, saw less than 100ph. Assuming those 100 cold locals produce 5X the pollution as the 1000 warm rat-runners, about 2/3 of the pollution is still coming from non-local traffic.
There are several other issues which are not disproportionate too e.g. particulate emissions, noise, road safety, impact on cycling (I think most cyclists would be happy to cycle on a road with <100 vehicles per hour, but many would be discouraged when there are >1000)
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Ok, that gave figures that applied to the whole study area. It's not possible to isolate Wightman or Ladder rung road data from it.
The data Joe has given above provides a better idea of the tiny proportion of traffic using the Ladder that is generated within it. This accords with the reports of the Haringey staff stationed at the Wightman Road closures that more than 80% of traffic originated from out of borough.
Consider also that the level of car ownership is only just over 30% on the Ladder and that that the area contains only about 5,000 dwellings.
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That's right Tris, local traffic is very far from innocuous.
One way to encourage local residents to walk and cycle more frequently would of course be to reduce overall traffic on WR to <100 vehicles per hour.
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Permalink Reply by DavidJ on
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Hi Tris
I'm struggling a bit to understand the point that you are making here. I get the argument that car ownership/use is not a good thing. But I am not really sure how this helps with the Wightman Road debacle? If people living on the ladder owned and used fewer cars there would indeed be more space for people to drive through the area and more people would thus be encouraged to drive through the area.
I am not sure how this helps the environment and dangerousness of Wightman Road?
If you applied the idea across the London and beyond then you might have a point. At the moment however, expecting those on Wightman Rd to give up their cars so that everyone else can get about more easily in their vehicles seems counterproductive and even a little unfair.
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OK, but of course we do have data on this. Haringey ran traffic surveys before the bridge closure in 2016 and during the closure.
Wightman Rd was typically taking 15-16,000 vehicles a day (and well over 1000 HGVs) before the closure.
During the period when Wightman became access only and was therefore presumably only residents and visitors - traffic fell to around 1000 vehicles a day with just 10s of HGVs.
These are big differences. As the survey showed there is no other residential road in the area that has anything like that volume of traffic.
I cycle as much as I can - but I am now aware that Wightman Rd is even more dangerous than before. I know many, many people who will not cycle because the local conditions are so awful. My own children have grown up here but do not use bikes.
There are real problems here that need to be addressed. Having at go at the residents who live here does seem a little like victim blaming.
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I calculated 56% of traffic in the "green lanes area" was through-traffic here, and agree that it is quite likely that the remaining 44% contributes more than 50% of traffic-derived NOx overall since residents' cars won't reach their normal operating temperature for the outward part of their journey.
There was significant reduction in pollution across the whole area recorded during the bridgeworks - Here are the NOx figures before and during the bridgeworks. The reductions were significant, though not >50% even on Wightman Road, this will again partly be because of the disproportionate emissions from local traffic, but also because (a) emissions still disperse from GL and Turnpike Lane and (b) emissions come from other sources like domestic boilers.
We're still only talking about NOx emissions though. Problems such as particulate emissions, noise pollution, property damage from vibrations, road safety for pedestrians and cyclists - I don't think local traffic contributes disproportionately to any of those?
Incidentally, regardless of how you define non-local, if you live on WR then 90% of the traffic outside your door could be eliminated by adopting the road layout used during the bridgeworks. It eliminates cross-borough through-traffic, but also distributes local traffic more equitably on the local streets. I think this is an argument in favour of changing the road layout rather than a technology/road-charging solution which others have suggested - assuming locals were exempt from road charges, the traffic reduction on parts of WR could be much less significant.
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It's not quite as simple as that though, is it, Tris.
Below is the Haringey chart showing the before and after. Traffic was far from evenly distributed. Roads like Warham had close to 2,700 vehicles a day using the road prior to the closure. This was something like five times the amount using the average Gardens Road and was perhaps ten times the amount using roads like Vale Road in the Hermitage Sub-area.
During the closure the Warham total reduced to something like 700 or 800. That's more like a 75% reduction.
The three northernmost rung roads had proportionately even bigger reductions.
The results are just not as simple as you suggest. Neither do we know where the rest of the traffic using the road came from. A proportion will have been visitors to the Green Lanes premises looking fr parking; some will have been people looking for a way through. We just don't know. What we do know however, is that in streets with about 120 houses, only 33% of Ladder households own a car (see my earlier response). If all closure traffic in any particular road was generated by the residents living in the road, then some of them must be driving round in circles. In fact many local car owners only use their cars a few times a week.
I can't explain the figures, but I think it's misleading to draw hard and fast results from top-line data. Something much more complex was going on. Even the differences between the roads tells us this much. Why, for example are the numbers so low in Seymour? Do fewer people there own a car? It doesn't convince me. Why such drastic fall in the northernmost roads? So on and so forth
I don't however disagree that everyone should reduce their car usage and avoid taking unnecessary car journeys where possible.
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Tris - It really is not that simple. All you have done is add up the numbers of cars that pass the census point on the road. Those figures do not measure single journeys. One very obvious difference during the bridge closure is that anyone living on a ladder rung road and using a car had to make more journeys on rungs. That is - if you lived on an up road and wanted to drive towards Muswell Hill/Crouch End/Bounds Green you would have to drive down a rung road onto Green Lanes and head towards Turnpike Lane. That alone would account for more traffic on the rung roads.
Of course - the much bigger issue is your exclusion of Wightman Road from these figures. This whole discussion is about this road.
To adopt the same methodology as yours - the figures show that when you look at the ladder rungs and Wightman together there is an overall traffic level drop of 80%.
Even when you throw in Green Lanes into those figures you find there is an overall drop of about 51% in overall traffic on the ladder - (rungs and both struts - Wightman and Green Lanes).
I worry about the methodology here (but it is yours) - but anyway you cut this - those are big reductions in car journeys.
What the figures clearly show is that Wightman has levels of traffic that no other similar sized, residential road has. It cannot cope with this scale of traffic. Surely everyone can agree on that?
I do agree that everyone needs to make fewer journeys in cars - but the state of Wightman Rd is a big problem that has one obvious and real impact - it reduces levels of cycling.
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Actually I think most of the significant discrepancies can be explained e.g. the northernmost rungs were actually cul-de-sacs so many journeys by residents living below the traffic counter would not have been counted at all, whereas most other rungs were paired so every round trip would increment the counter on both rungs. In some cases two "up" rungs were paired with a single "down" rung which then saw correspondingly higher counts.
The smaller discrepancies will be accounted for by parking, roadworks traffic, some roads like Seymour are just less convenient to enter. I don't think we need to know the exact proportions of these since generally the effect of the road layout reduced traffic to <1000 per day, and <100 vehicles per hour at peak periods - those are the levels enjoyed by other local streets that are protected from rat running.
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