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
-
Permalink Reply by Jamie Harper
-
JulieB and Don,
I note your arguments in the past against LTNs. Many were entirely logical and have subsequently been proven correct. They seem to rest of the lack of any evidentiary support for the council's case and the very large leaps of faith required to back the schemes on anything other than selfish grounds.
So, I'm a little surprised to see the support you both have for the extension of ULEZ and even the school streets initiatives. The latest and most thorough assessment of the extended ULEZ is that the ULEZ 2023 expansion showed no detectable impact on NO2. Further...
The study linked to above relied on actual, measured data, rather than TfL 'modelling'. The later resulted in complaints being upheld by the Advertising Standards Authority when wild claims about ULEZ extension's efficacy were made.
As for the School Streets, Haringey finds that active travel (walking, cycling, scooting) among students at the associated schools has risen by a derisory 3.7%. Those parents choosing to drive their kids to school has fallen by just 4%. Shutting the roads has, obviously, resulted in a drop in pollutants for the period they are closed. On safety or casualties, there is no evidence submitted by the council.
While School Streets are intuitively appealing, their implementation suffers from the same lack of rigour and analysis as LTNs and other traffic measures.
There is also fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of 'air pollution' that results in some being surprised that LTNs and policies such as the ULEZ expansion are ineffectual. So many of the pollutants and particulates originate outside of a measurement area, tinkering inside it will, by definition, have a limited impact.
Traffic is also analogous to the transboundary nature of air pollution. Ascribing arbitrary geographies, areas, or definitions of locality will ultimately lead to poor policy making and flawed measurement (see the inability of policy makers to logically define 'rat-running', or 'local traffic').
-
Permalink Reply by Dick Harris
-
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.
-
-
Dick: I’m sure you’re right about designated trunk routes, but I was using the term more loosely to reflect GL’s de facto status as a direct link from the N Circular to Manor House and vice versa, and hence its attraction to traffic to/from Enfield, say, and into/from central London. Yes, narrowing it with a northbound bus lane would make the capacity issue worse, but if the plan is to get people out of cars and onto public transport, the latter has to be an attractive proposition first, not a later add-on.
I’ve suggested filtering traffic at the GL/N Circ junction in rush hours to help limit demand, and in my wildest dreams even making the Endymion/St Ann’s stretch a bus-only zone, but this then just shifts the problem onto other roads (imagine the impact on St Ann’s and Wightman if the bus-only fantasy came to pass). GL is a shopping street but also an obvious link between places people want to go, so how do you prioritise the former but discourage the latter?
-
-
At the meeting several references were made to recently collected traffic counts. Does anyone know where these traffic records are to be found?
-
-
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...
-
Permalink Reply by JulieB
-
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."
-
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
Permalink Reply by Sarah
-
I was a supporter of LTNs when I lived in the proposed St Ann's LTN. Then right before the introduction of the LTNs, I moved to a boundary road.
I still support the LTNs. I think the bulk of the traffic belongs on the roads that were designed to carry more traffic. The smaller residential roads were never meant to be through roads.
What has changed is there are more and bigger cars on the road. London roads were not designed to carry the volume of traffic we now have. We have an excellent public transport system. We need to incentivise people away from travelling by car and towards travelling by public transport. That means LTNs and other measures such as traffic calming, it means bus lanes so pubic transport becomes more reliable, it means safe infrastructure so people feel comfortable walking and cycling.
- ‹ Previous
- 1
- …
- 3
- 4
- 5
- Next ›
© 2025 Created by Hugh.
Powered by
