Harringay online

Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!

I hope all you who have the vote in Harringay will remember tonight ( and certainly other nights to come ) and at the next election vote out the incompetent shower responsible for the introduction of the LTN.

My weekly 5-minute journey from Wightman Road to Green Lanes took 45 minutes, including  30 minutes to go the length of Hampden Road. Yes, I know that there was a burst water main. But in happier times traffic would have been distributed across the roads now blocked off and not confined to Green Lanes. Yes, I know that I could have taken a bus to sit in the same traffic jam as I did this evening but in any case there aren't any buses between my house and the bottom of Effingham Road. 

I understand the concerns of those residents living in the LTN who hope that the pollution in their streets will be reduced but don't the residents of Green Lanes, Turnpike Lane and Wightman Road breathe ? don't their children have lungs ?. Where did the Council think the LTN traffic would go ? 

And please don't suggest to this disabled person that I could have cycled.  I couldn't.

Tags for Forum Posts: low traffic neighbourhoods, traffic

Views: 9073

Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

I wouldn’t want to have to organise a civil disobedience protest against an LTN, what would you do? Has anyone tried protesting with the aim speeding  up traffic before? it’s always usually the other way around.

Also should you be successful and speed things up a bit you become a victim of your own success as new drivers then get attracted to using the road and slow things down again. 

I guess you could slow down the vehicles of those that support the LTN effort (but not many of them probably use cars). 

You also can’t vote people out in Haringey, that’s practically impossible. 

Thinking it through logically, I think it’s the idea could be an immovable beast and to use the pun, a one way street they we need to get used to. 

I'm going, I don't have a car to leave behind. I'll ask some of the others about that! 

AndrewAW1 — Can’t post this in the correct place because your comment no 8 is the end of that section. I find it very, very hard to believe that Woodlands Park Road carries anything like the number of vehicles using Ladder roads; I live round the corner from it, and at any time of day it’s practically empty, while, thanks to the existing filtering system near the school, any  vans, lorries, etc making deliveries are already diverted onto adjacent roads such as mine. 

As for the council’s “evidence” on traffic reduction, the piece you quote reads as merely an aspiration or belief to support their policy; are there actual stats for vehicles on the roads quoted v the number on all the Ladder roads?

Yes, merely closing BBL would send traffic into unfiltered streets. But isn’t this exactly what happened when Enfield put their LTN in and shunted all their traffic into Haringey? Ladder residents have been waiting twenty years for the Gardens LTN to “bed in” and all that traffic — which now mysteriously uses their roads instead — to “evaporate”, as we’re always told it will. LTNs just push a problem sideways unless there are viable alternatives, and Haringey is nowhere near providing any.

This is why it's important to base these decisions on data rather than anecdotes. Things may have changed since the last comprehensive count but I can't see that there have been many drivers for change before the LTNs.

Woodlands Park Rd had ~ 25k cars in a week. Warham,, which is by far the busiest ladder road, had ~ 18k and the average ladder road is about 10k.

Counts can all be seen here https://batchgeo.com/map/8f870459dcd152cb5b094cf677476094 which will probably answer your question about ladder roads too.

I don't really see how the closure of the gardens drives traffic on to the ladder. It might change the distribution (Warham for instance) but they aren't going in the same direction. I've been around the area for 20 years+ and don't remember traffic being much different to now on Green Lanes and the ladder. I've lost count of the number of times I got off the bus early to walk because the traffic isn't moving.

I’ve lived on Warham since 1984.  Green Lanes used to be far worse than it is now.  Getting the bus by what is now the Tesco Metro to Manor House during the rush hour was a half hour journey.  Getting off the bus at Manor House I used to walk to home and my husband took the bus.  I always got home first.

The problem was that every Garden road and Ladder road disgorged a constant stream of traffic onto The Lanes, holding up every junction.  The increase in traffic on Warham wasn’t the Gardens closure per se but the active directing of traffic from St Ann’s Road up Salisbury Road and then via Warham to Wightman as a way to avoid Green Lanes.
 
The one constant in all these years is Green Lanes.  It’s easy to throw the blame at Haringey but as it is a priority route nothing much can change unless TfL are on board and I get a feeling that they aren’t inclined to be so.

Michael — I entirely agree with you that GL is the perpetual thorn in the side, which is why I believe sorting that out is a far greater priority than using a big stick to tell LTN residents to walk everywhere. Haringey seems never to have taken a holistic view of the area’s real traffic problems and tried to make it easier for its residents to get around, because they’d rather make “four wheels bad, two wheels good” gestures with CCTV and flowerpots instead.

Yes, of course it would need major collaboration with TfL, the GLA, the DfT et al to make changes (eg restricting traffic flow at the N Circular junction, prioritising buses, removing parking, etc, etc), but that’s the nettle nobody’s grasping and why I get p’d off that the source of the problem isn’t being tackled. While people still need to commute from outer boroughs and other counties to central London, Harringay will always be in the firing line. Closing roads and hoping drivers will also be p’d off enough just to go somewhere else — which is fundamentally the LTN philosophy — while not providing viable alternatives for those who live in the LTNs themselves, such as better, more reliable public transport, is not the answer. If the council wants to change people’s behaviour, the alternatives have to be better, not worse.

The LTNs are designed to encourage people to use the alternative methods. We have two undergrounds, over four direct to central bus lines, and two overgrounds within a 1 mi stretch on GL. LTN philosophy is telling people to walk to your nearest transit as most people definitely do not have to commute via car to central everyday. that's a myth. 

Absolutely. I can just about see driving to work off you are going from Green Lanes to Watford for eg but anywhere within London not so much.

Allegra — Two points: first, bus services are as good as the traffic will allow, so if extra traffic forced onto GL slows them to a crawl they are de facto far less appealling (even without the, for now, slightly-rescinded overall TfL cuts to services). Secondly, if, as I understand it, traffic surveys point very, very strongly to Harringay’s traffic problems stemming primarily from traffic originating outside the borough — ie Herts, Essex, Enfield, etc, — not from internal borough car movements, which are the tip of the iceberg. If so, commuters from outer London and neighbouring counties aren’t going to be influenced by buses, tubes or Overground in Harringay, hence my arguments in other posts here for GL needing to be the primary focus of attention, not side roads — and my perhaps not-entirely-serious suggestion of a campaign urging those in the outer areas to walk or cycle into central London. Probably not a message likely to be received well in Enfield, New Barnet or Potters Bar, for example.

I still don't see why someone from Potters Bar or Enfield or New Barnet wont get on a perfectly ok train from those places into central London.

This is what I never understand, where are all these people parking in central London, there surely can't be enough spaces for all of them.

Julie — Who knows? But there must be somewhere or why are they driving through (not to) Harringay? The council’s LTN csse is predicated on the curse of Waze sending drivers to “rat-run” through streets that — in my 30-year experience of St Ann’s — are actually some of the quietest in London, so the vehicles must be going to/coming from somewhere. Many commenters on here blame commuter traffic from outer London, Essex, Herts, etc, but I don’t know if this can be substantiated; perhaps they’re all on a mission from Hackney to Barnet or v/v….? This problem needs to be dealt with at source and in Green Lanes, not in the side streets.

RSS

Advertising

© 2024   Created by Hugh.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service