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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

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I’m not a Ladder resident, so I only know what I pick up from HoL on the effect of the Gardens closure, but over many years and many threads I’ve seen a constant stream of complsints that Ladder roads suffer from traffic re-routed from the Gardens (alongside frequent allegations that that closure was gerrymandered into being by the presence of two councillors who lived there, usually delivered in a “ how unfair that we weren’t able to get the Ladder closed in the same way” tone of voice). I haven’t any idea if any of this stands up to scrutiny, but it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to imagine that northbound traffic that formerly tried to avoid GL by cutting through the Gardens — and perhaps then up Woodlands Park Road or BBL — looked to the Ladder and Wightman as an alternative. But I’m not a driver, either, so I don’t know if that’s how people think/thought.

I would take the comments about the gardens closure with a hefty pinch of salt.

Andrew — As I said, I’ve no first-hand experience, but a lot of Ladder residents seem to believe it.

This all started in Hermitage Road, a long time ago. There is no right hand turn onto Seven Sisters Rd heading north on Green Lanes. The next place after Hermitage was closed, that you could turn right to get to Tottenham, was the gardens. Once that was closed it also sheltered the bottom of the ladder as it was not worth turning east from Wightman until you got to Hewitt. Now of course there is no right hand turn possible at Hewitt so people use Beresford.

The story told of the Gardens closure is that a councillor in that ward needed a handful of votes at a selection meeting and they were available from four Labour Party members in Warwick Gardens. From what has happened to the price of a friend's house in Walthamstow compared to mine since they closed off one end of his street to traffic, shows the truth in what this is all about.

John, as I thought you knew, in most past years when I was an active Tottenham Labour Party member many shortlisting and selection meetings for Council candidates were sparsely attended. Selections could indeed be decided by narrow margins.
The exception was when Jeremy Corbyn was Party Leader and there was a wave of  hope and enthusiasm. Hundreds of new members joined Tottenham wards.

About Warwick Gardens, for the record, among former Labour Councillors who lived in that road, were the couple Ron Blanchard and Lucy Arnold.  Both are now dead.
Both were keen environmentalists; with worked-out and now widely accepted "Green" ideas";  way ahead of their time. They  were also two of the nicest and principled party members I ever met. They had a rented Council flat. Any notion that Lucy and Ron were motivated by property values is sheer nonsense. As is any idea that they would be part of some wrongdoing.

AndrewAW1 — Thanks for the link; I’ll take a look. I don’t know first-hand about Gardens traffic going through the Ladder, only complaints I’ve read on HoL (see my comments above), but, in my daily commuting days of more than a decade between Harringay and Waterloo, it was the sheer unreliability of the bus/tube combo I used that was so frustrating, because it wasn’t ever possible to calculate how long it would take to get along GL.

Mercifully, once I became a freelance in the 90s and started working from home in St Ann’s, I had a nice, quiet, traffic-free, peaceful, unpolluted road outside my front door, where learner drivers practised three-point turns and children went on cycling courses — though I now learn from the council that it was really a maelstrom of crazed petrolheads rat-running through the area 24 hours a day and I was just imagining that I could walk down the centre of the road to post a letter in the nearest pillar-box. Perhaps it was something I ate that gave me this dreadful delusion for the next 25 or so years?

As I write this Don, traffic has been thundering up my street, Warham Road, since 6:30am as it does every weekday.  From around 3pm it will start again until about 7pm.  The street next to me is Seymour Road. It is identical to my street - wholly residential and only suitable for a single lane of traffic. The data collected in the last traffic count shows relatively low volumes of traffic using Seymour.  If and when something is done to stop commuters using my street as a short cut to avoid Green Lanes there is a good chance that Seymour will be the next preferred route, so as a consequence of my street being made less attractive to traffic something will also need to be done to stop it being shifted to Seymour.  The same goes for every other “quiet” street on the Ladder.  If mitigations do not include them they will stop being quiet streets.

For those who have referenced Islington and the issues in their monitoring, Imperial College have released a paper on the LTNs there. Headline figures look positive both  in terms of pollution and traffic, both in the LTN and on the boundary roads:

LTNs reduced NO2 both within intervention areas (5.7%) and in boundary areas (8.9%)

Traffic volumes were reduced by 58.2% within LTNs and by 13.4% at LTN boundary sites.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1361920922003625

The report was covered on BBC London news this evening

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-63729618

Come on, Michael. As we can clearly see from this thread, people opposing the LTNs have no interest whatsoever in evidence or proof and the concept of patience and empathy. It impacts them, personally, today, so it has to go. End of. The selfishness and sense of entitlement apparent here in these comments is shocking and depressing. The world is burning, and all people care about is that Haringey, whose roads have always been congested, historically far worse than right now, are temporarily slightly more congested. We get the Earth we deserve, I guess.

Rory —  As one of the commenters here, I’m quite happy to look at evidence or stats — and I pointed others to crashmap.co.uk for irrefutable stats about how dangerous two “boundary roads” already are in comparison with those in St Ann’s where allegedly the major problem lies and why adding new traffic there is a terrible idea. As a walker/public transport user I’m in favour of making those better, but it has to be done first, not “maybe, if you’re lucky, after we’ve done everything else” if the idea is to persuade people out of their cars. Livi has given a cogent view of why buses often are so unattractive and I bet she’s not alone; I’m not complacent about climate change but I think Haringey has failed to tackle the real problems of Green Lanes, is attacking the wrong targets, and shows no leadership in putting its own house in order before lecturing everyone else. Leadership, not instruction, is what’s needed: wagging fingers and waving a big stick is an ineffective way to get people to change their behaviour, unless the carrot to encourage them is bigger. No sign of this here so far.

the big flaw in this study is the collection of data which was not completed independently.

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