Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Really P****d Off
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
Replies to This Discussion
-
Permalink Reply by JJ B on
-
Many Dutch own & drive cars but they are also cylclists. It is habits that must change. Individual car ownership us also very expensive…
-
-
Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
-
Thanks for your reply Rory.
I wasn't agreeing or disagreeing with you, by the way. I thought you were contributing to and trying to open-up the discussion by offering your personal take.
As I understand it, it's like one of the many varieties of the ancient Blind-men-and-the- elephant parable. Versions where, people eventually find ways to share their different personal positions and observations in order to get closer to a mutually agreed and accurate positive judgement.
~
I take a similar approach to your comment, Tina S.
Yes, our Council should - no must - pay attention to traders.
In the elephant parable all are partly right.
This variation may illustrate one possible perverse outcome if traders are not properly involved:
Six blind elephants were discussing what men were like. After arguing they decided to find one and determine what it was like by direct experience. The first blind elephant felt the man and declared, 'Men are flat.' After the other blind elephants felt the man, they agreed.
-
-
have you looked at Myddleton Rd? Their sales have massively gone down with decreased car access. And the local traders on Philip Lane are down on sales massively, too. Speak to staff in places like Expa or the Vape shop or Neighbours fish and chips a bit further into the BG LTN. They'll tell you their REAL experience. We have a shop on a boundary road in another borough and I can tell you, it's brought no benefits to trade whatsoever. Rather the opposite!
-
-
I'm pretty sure that Green Lanes isn't wide enough for 4 lanes of traffic, I can't remember where I sat that but definitely mentioned somewhere. I assume traffic lanes must be wider than parking spaces and that's why.
-
Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
-
In the morning they got as far south as possible on Wightman or through the Gardens before having to hit Green Lanes and then the reverse in the evenings. It was daft really as they just gained a few metres in the same queue and the fact that they poured out of the side roads caused much of the jam they were trying to avoid in the first place!
-
-
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.
-
Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
-
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.
© 2024 Created by Hugh.
Powered by
