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Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!

Rise in number of Lorries and other heavy vehicles ignoring the 7.5t weight limit on Ladder roads

I live in Lausanne Road and have noticed a dramatic increase in the number of lorries, concrete trucks and other large vehicles using our road and the nearby roads- particularly Hampden Road.

This is really making me worry - it's a fact of life that people in cars will use the ladder roads as a cut through, but the heavy vehicles are making quite an impact on my personal quality of life, and I'm sure many other local residents as well.

The specific problems with Heavy vehicles using my and other ladder roads(I'm not sure how many others have weight restrictions as well) are:

1. Weight(obviously)- road humps and heavy vehicles are certainly causing the earth to move in our road! Humour aside the impact from loaded trucks hitting the speed humps is so noticeable that it MUST be causing damage to the nearby houses. We have a 3 storey house and it can be felt strongly on all floors, even though we are not directly opposite the road hump. In our road so far as i'm aware the terraces do not have deep foundations but sit on the good old london clay which I hear anecdotally tends to make them more prone to cracking etc from this sort of impact.
2. Noise - the heavy vehicles are particularly noisy - especially skip trucks with their lovely chain percussion. In our road they start coming through in convoy between 6 am and 6.30am.
3. Speed- The trucks also nearly always break the 20 mph speed limit.
4. Damage- Road surfaces are noticeably breaking down. Hampden road seems to gain a new pothole every day and it hardly seems that long ago that it was repaired. There's damage to nearby houses- see point 1, and also , ironically also damage to the signs at the end of the streets indicating that the trucks should not be entering and bollards knocked over/down at the street entrances....
5. Safety - they're huge, and they speed and they're just downright dangerous. Removing small children from a car with a speeding loaded lorry bearing down on you in a narrow road is not fun.
6. Size of the vehicles-. Ok they're big, sometimes very big. and they get stuck sometimes. It is pretty annoying having to wait around to get into your own street because some truck is trying to illegally enter and has got stuck in/on the specially designed narrow street entrance designed to keep them out...

Anyway, I guess everyone gets the picture here.
So what to do?
I've reported the damaged weight restriction sign at the entrance of Hampden Road to the council- reference C58317 for any Hampden road residents or others interested.
I've spent an entertaining 40 minutes calling around Haringey council , who actually have a 'moving vehicle enforcement' department but apparently don't deal with this issue -enforcing other signs yes, but not weight restrictions. So, actually it is the Police Safer Neighbourhoods or Traffic teams who will (hopefully) deal with this.
I spoke to Kate at the above mentioned Police , and she was very helpful and has logged the issue. I've spoken to a few people in person about this and they have also seemed concerned. Perhaps it is more specific to Lausanne/Hampden roads or is the same thing happening elsewhere on the ladder?
I would really like anyone else who has a problem with this to also report to the police on 0208 808 1212 and quote ref: CAD3030/16 May . The police are also interested in details of registration etc of any vehicles which we notice breaking the law in this manner.

Now- a little word. I am not some sort of control freak who imagines that all trucks with from now onwards will be banished from the ladder roads, but this is a volume problem in part and I really really feel that we are on a slippery slope if these restrictions are not enforced. The ladder is the obvious cut through and with building work at Hornsey station (which is where I've seen the concrete trucks come out and go straight down Hampden rd) and New River Village and endless other trucks going east/west particularly to access the industrial park on tottenham lane it doesn't look like it will go away. Not to get too *woo ooo* about it but isn't there also going to be a concrete factory over the other side of the railway sometime soon?
I am around at many different times of the day and evening and feel I'm pretty well placed to make a judgment about whether there are more trucks using my/Hampden rd. It is serious folks... there really is an increase in volume.
I'd love some feedback from others on this as I really can't believe I'd be the only one to have noticed....

Oh , another point on action- Kate at the police has suggested any I/we contact some of the companies involved directly to alert them to the fact that it has been reported to the police and perhaps they might like to have their drivers use alternative(legal) routes to avoid penalties.
The 3 that spring to mind at the moment are:
O'Donovans, Murphys and I'm not sure who to contact specifically but whomever is in charge of the work going on at Hornsey station on the Mosque side.
I've just spent the morning on this, so will have to update later about possible further calls...

*phew*
I'm off for a cuppa I think....

Tags for Forum Posts: 7.5t, Ladder traffic solutions, Lorries on the Ladder, Wightman Road, concrete factory, hampden road, heavy lorries, heavy lorry, hgv, lausanne road, More…lorries, lorry, skip, speed humps, traffic

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I think it's time to complain again about the missing 7.5 ton sign at the top of Hampden that mysteriously disappeared months ago.
funny you should mention that...it's been gone for ages, in fact do you know if it ever returned after my original post? I can't remember having seen one there in years. In the last couple of days i saw a big grabber truck bashing into what's left of the sign and actually driving over the road works signage crushing it before carrying on blithely down hampden... the trucks stop for no one I gather.
In this case it was a C&S builders merchants truck(huge one with a grabber arm) at 11.10am on the 7th May. Sadly I didn't get the registration number. And , no it didn't stop on Hampden so wasn't driving down for access.
These guys have been using Ladder Roads frequently lately, I have two of them on film.
Yes Birdy - sounds familiar - two GCL lorries piled up Falkland on Friday morning at speed, making the entire house shake. I got the registration of one of them...
Maybe we should create a thread or blog specifically for recording the company name, time, reg number and photo/video if taken. It would be easy to compile the data and submit to the various companies and suitable authorities.
I did this with O'Donovans and by and large it has worked.

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