Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Harringay Traffic meeting Outcome
Exactly three weeks ago today, I added a post on HoL pointing out the failure to convene a traffic meeting about Harringay's traffic. Just over a week later, a meeting seems to have been hurriedly arranged at rather short notice. I'm sure the two events were linked only by coincidence.
That meeting was last night at Alexandra House on Station Road in Wood Green. I was expecting to see a handful of the locals who normally turn up for these things. However, I was surprised to find a large room with about 50 - 100 people, all apparently eager to hear of progress.
We were graciously met at the building's reception desk by traffic boss, Cllr, Mike Hakata. Joking with Mike and looking about his person, I asked him where he was hiding his magic wand. His coy and slightly embarrassed reaction rather set the tone for the evening.
The meeting began with a long and very detailed explanation about why it had taken so long to get yesterday's meeting set up. The room was then given a clear message. In a nutshell, we were given the standard explanation of the past twenty years, that doing anything about traffic on the Ladder is too difficult and that all possibilities had been deemed impractical. Cllr Hakata didn't discount that one day the Council would magically find the solution that has been so stubbornly been evading them all these decades, but for the time being the focus was moving away from reducing traffic volume and on to safety - and away from Wightman and the Ladder rung roads and on to Green Lanes. More on that in just a minute.
Below is a copy of the slide Mike showed to explain the decision to abandon traffic calming on the Ladder.
There was plenty of disgruntled reaction to the slide but surprisingly little direct dissection of it. Having said that, whilst I think most people understand the issue raised in the first point and few have any appetite for clogging up Green Lanes, one person did make the point that once again the Ladder seems to have come at the end of the queue and the bowl is empty. The resident pointed out that with all other through routes already closed off by LTNs or other traffic control blockages, of course options are now limited because traffic is now so concentrated on Green Lanes and Wightman Road.
With regards to the second point on the slide, which essentially indicates technical reasons why filtering won't work on the Ladder, I asked Mike how the filtering currently works for the two school streets. He confirmed what I thought - APNR, but he hurried to add some explanation that now eludes me about why that couldn't work on the Ladder as a whole. I didn't want to get into a pointless disagreement with Mike about that, but as I understand it the LTNs at Hammersmith and Fulham work very effectively100% by APNR, where residents' cars are registered and are excepted from penalties. Clearly it would need more research, but having rechecked my facts this morning, here's what Google AI tells us:
How They Work
Enforcement: ANPR cameras record vehicle registration numbers. Drivers without valid permits who use restricted roads as shortcuts receive fines, which can range from £60 to £130.
Access: The schemes aim to stop out-of-borough traffic from cutting through residential streets, but they do not prevent access to any location within the borough.
Permits and Exemptions:Borough Residents can travel freely through the camera points if their vehicle is registered in the borough.
Visitors to residents can be registered for access using the RingGo app or website.
Carers can apply for free exemptions if they look after residents within the zone.
Some services like Uber have a technical solution to automatically exempt their drivers during a pickup or dropoff in the zone.
Mike swept away further concerns about traffic volumes with a reassurance that those same Ladder School Streets schemes that operate so successfully with APNR are lowering not only the traffic of the streets themselves, they are also having a knock-on effect on the neighbouring streets. The message seemed almost to be that we'll have to content ourselves with that for now.
As to Green Lanes, there are some plans. Mike was at pains to underline how very expensive these plans would be and how many millions each part of the plan would cost. There was no detail on exactly what the treatment would be, but the aim is to target the safety record of the road, which Mike explained is very much the worst in the borough. What we were able to find out is that the plans would see four (or was it five) junctions being somehow remodelled to improve safety. There was no slide to show the details, but from memory, going from North to South, I think those junctions were Turnpike Lane, Frobisher/Alfoxton, Colina Road and Endymion Road.
Quite a number of people suggested that the best solution for Harringay's Green Lanes, costing a fraction of the proposed plans, would be to remove parking from the road entirely, but the room was told that there are no immediate plans to do this. It seems, for some reason he didn't explain, that whilst reducing traffic volume is seen as the key to safety elsewhere in the borough, in Harringay magic roundabouts (or was it junctions) are the trick. Cllr Hakata also seemed unable to give any reassurance that the Green Lanes plans would ensure that traffic wasn't simply displaced on the the Ladder.
Perhaps, unsurprisingly, the meeting ended in quite a fractious mood with Mike Hakata appearing to be rather testily batting away an unwelcome swarm of autumn bees.
Was I or anyone else at all reassured by last night? No, I don't think so. If anything, I left with heightened concerns about the future for our neighbourhood. This in the year before local elections tells us that they see Harringay as in the bag already, I guess.
I conclude with the cartoon I used for my recent post on this issue and somewhat retract the apologies I gave at the end of that post for my uncharacteristic pessimism.
Tags for Forum Posts: traffic
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Don
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Mark: From the Officers’ viewpoint this makes perfect sense. The Gardens are shut; St Ann’s Road already carries masses of traffic, exacerbated by the LTN, and funnels most of it into the ridiculously narrow Harringay Road before it gets to GL; the Salisbury/Warham junction is traffic light controlled and so offers the only point where westbound traffic can cross GL directly without causing tailbacks up and down GL itself. With Wightman as the western boundary of the road system and only two crossing points over the railway, east-west journeys across the borough are fraught already, so any move to close Warham is unlikely to be agreed. It might be possible to re-plan the St Ann’s/GL junction as two-way, with a left turn into GL, and Warham is already protected by a right turn prohibition from GL, so in those circs you might perhaps have more success, but the extra traffic directed down GL from St Ann’s as a result would probably still render it unacceptable to the council.
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Permalink Reply by Dick Harris
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Thanks to Hugh for taking the trouble to write a coherent account of the meeting. I shall make only a couple of points:
So far as I can see, the Council has not seriously considered any measures that would reduce the total volume of traffic passing through our area.
If I understood him aright, Mr Hakata said that when the LTNs abutting West Green Road had become operational and the immediate impacts had settled down, the level of traffic on West Green Road returned to its previous level. In my view, this suggests two things:
- That the traffic which had previously been rat running through the LTN streets had evaporated (which was in fact the aim of the LTNs).
- That the volume of traffic on our through-routes always tends to rise to its capacity. Once the capacity has been reached, some drivers change their habits (either they go elsewhere or reduce their journeys),
The key question to be considered when introducing an LTN is which streets are to be recognised as primarily residential (and protected from extraneous traffic) and which are to be recognised as available to through traffic.
Extraneous traffic is any vehicle that has no business being on that street, ie any vehicle not going to or from an address in that street (or group of streets).
As Mr Hakata began by saying, we have inherited a set of roads that were not designed for present circumstances. As it has turned out, even Green Lanes, our main shopping street, has limited capacity for carrying vehicles that do not have business in the area. Until Haringey Council is in a position to recognise this and take effective action to restrict through traffic (not only on the ladder including Wightman Road but also on its commercial roads that have too little carrying capacity) there will be no end to the blight of our residential environment and the unreasonable pressures on our local businesses.
Fiddling about with junctions and introducing more and better pedestrian crossings (desirable though those things may be) will not make much difference to traffic volumes – indeed some of the Council’s proposed measures are aimed at increasing traffic flows.
This much has been clear for several years and yet no serious attempt has been made to deal with the problem of excessive traffic passing through the area. The fact that proper provision for cyclist must now be made, means I think, that the need to deter through traffic can no longer be put off.
Do Haringey councillors have the stomach and the necessary powers to deal with this?
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Dick: In these debates, I always have a problem with the concept of “through traffic”, because there’s clearly no way of defining it. I don’t know if you drive or ever take a cab (I’m excluding taking buses, obviously), but if you do, then any time you’re not in the street where you live you’re “through traffic” to somebody else. For example, a St Ann’s resident using Mattison to reach Jewsons in Wightman, for example, is “through traffic” in Mattison; a Ladder resident turning off Endymion into, say, Victoria Road to avoid a tailback is “through traffic”. At what point do roads get defined as “rat runs” — and by whom? — and should “extraneous” vehicles then be identified and always banned from using them?
I doubt you’re proposing checkpoints on residential roads to exclude all non-residents, but non-residential traffic is a fact of life in any London street, and some exist to facilitate just that: in Harringay we straddle a major north-south trunk route in GL. Ideally perhaps, everyone would live within walking distance of their work, leisure, education and shopping needs, but we all know it’s never going to happen here, so managing it is the priority. Cllr Hakata has conceded that a Ladder LTN would just make GL worse, and JulieB’s comment elsewhere on this thread suggests that residents of GL, St Ann’s and WGR (the mis-named “boundary roads”) have already been sacrificed to increased pollution for the supposed benefit of the LTN enclaves.
I’m not going to repeat my previous post on here suggesting GL solutions, but I’d add that the GLA should require all utilities, council and “last-mile” vehicles to be electric to operate within the M25, and TfL should be properly funded to run cheap, fast, frequent and reliable buses, using dedicated bus lanes and with junction priority. Incentivising people to use public transport and improving roads to allow for it would be far more effective than closing side streets, forcing more traffic onto overcrowded roads such as GL and hoping (against the evidence) that drivers will just give up.
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Permalink Reply by Hugh
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i suppose that to get anywhere with arriving at a definition of through-traffic, you need to identify what the local area is, since most definitions of through traffic run along the lines of:
"...vehicular traffic that passes through an area without stopping there, as it is simply using that road or location as a route to a different destination.This is in contrast to local traffic, which has a starting point or destination within the area."
So, let's say you took an approach that 'local' is anyone living within the borough + a 1 mile radius from the location of the road (varying those figures as appropriate - or you could simply use a radius.
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Permalink Reply by JulieB
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I have never supported LTNs because I don't believe they work. I live within St Ann's LTN and it's not improved my life at all, in fact it's made transport worse, especially buses.
On the other hand, I do think schemes like expanding the ULEZ and School Streets have made improvements in terms of air quality and safety. I would like to see more of these schemes instead of the blunt instruments of LTNs which block more and more roads to (almost) everyone.
I do like your idea, Hugh, of using an APNR system to 'filter' non-Haringey traffic (borough wide) away from 'side streets'. I think this would be much more effective than LTNs.
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Don, before talking further about how to differentiate types of traffic, I would like to disagree with your assertion that GL is a major north-south trunk route. That might be a suitable description of the M1. The UK does have a set of roads called the Primary Road Network and I believe that any such road must comply with certain technical standards especially as to load bearing capacity. I think that there are only four such roads in Haringey, the A1, the A10, the North Circular and Seven Sisters Road and even these do not necessarily have the capacity to handle all the traffic that wants to use them. GL may run north-south (and so does Wightman Road) but its dimensions are simply not suitable for the demands being made on it and there is no feasible way of increasing its capacity. It follows that if more of the limited width of GL is to be used for bus lanes and/or cycle lanes we must expect it to carry less traffic of other sorts so let us get serious about finding ways of deterring/excluding traffic that doesn't need to be here.
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At the meeting several references were made to recently collected traffic counts. Does anyone know where these traffic records are to be found?
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I'd love to see these figures, too. To find out exactly how much traffic our representatives believe is so acceptable for Ladder residents that it doesn't require any action. Again, I wonder aloud how we have arrived at the situation where every residential street to the east to and to the west of Green Lanes have the right to cleaner air and no little or no traffic but the Ladder. Thought: if I subsequently get a respiratory disease, can I sue the council because they have, as policy, prioritised the health of other residents over mine? It's an interesting thought. We know how litigation and the fear of litigation can lead policy...
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The report that was produced before the St Ann's LTN was made permanent showed no reduction in pollution, and it went up by 10% on the boundary roads
The air quality section of the report concludes: "It has been found that, generally, there has been limited change in air quality at monitoring sites in the scheme area, and that any changes are similar to wider changes across the borough, indicating that the scheme did not notably impact air quality."
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Julie: This is tantamount to concluding that the LTNs were the wrong scheme in the wrong place at the wrong time. The major criticism of LTNs in general — not just in Haringey — is that they simply shift traffic and congestion from one place to another, and (allegedly) very often from middle-class residential roads to major trunk routes (“boundary roads” in LTN terminology, though that’s not what you’d call them if they’re outside your front door) where, typically, poorer people live because they already suffer from existing gridlock and pollution. Cllr Hakata appears now to have tacitly conceded this in his reasoning for not making the Ladder an LTN.
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What makes me really sad is that for years I have been a huge supporter of LTNs: the thinking behind them, the way they operate and the clear benefit for residents and the environment. But if my council has weaponised LTNs against me, where their introduction throughout the borough has demonstrably worsened my health outcomes, air quality and quality of life, I feel I have no option really, but to oppose them. Why wouldn't I, when their introduction has been wholly negative to me and my family and the firm council policy is to direct traffic away from all the streets that surround me and down my residential road. Tens of thousands of cars a week, most of them from outside the borough. I broadly supported the LTNs and defended them on Harringay Online time and time again, foolishly and naively thinking that this was a process which would benefit me and the environment in due course, if I trusted the process. What an idiot I am.
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