Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
End through traffic on Wightman and on Ladder rungs!
John McMullan has made this proposal in various places. Maybe there’s an extended discussion of it in this forum somewhere, but what I’ve seen is scattered around the threads. In any case, I think it’s time to try to move this in the direction of concerted action, so here are my 2p.
We should begin a campaign to close Wightman Road to through traffic, along with complementary traffic controls at certain points on the rungs of the Harringay Ladder (exactly what and where these additional controls are would depend on the particular points at which Wightman is cut). This would eliminate through traffic from the Ladder, except on Green Lanes itself.
These roads are residential. The area has a combined population of over 10,000 (the population of Harringay Ward, most of which is the Ladder, is estimated at 13,700). We need to take this action in order to make the streets safe for children; to make the street a place of neighbourly interaction; and to make the air cleaner and healthier. Children should be able to walk to school and to parks; cyclists should have a safe north-south route through Harringay (Wightman would become that route).
Some further points:
· Road traffic reduction – don’t see this as a NIMBY proposal to chase traffic elsewhere: one of the aims should be to reduce road traffic overall. Roads accommodate traffic. There is ample scientific evidence that an increase in road capacity simply increases traffic, until at some point congestion chokes off the increase - at which point, highway planners call for more roads, leading to a spiral of ever-increasing traffic. What we see in the Ladder today is part of that spiral: several years ago, the Haringey council took two steps to reduce traffic congestion on the Ladder by making it flow more easily: it made all the rungs of the Ladder one-way, and it allowed pavement parking on Wightman to effectively widen the Wightman roadway. Both of these increases in road capacity have led simply to more traffic and faster traffic – the streets that are less safe for children, the air that is more polluted.
· The reverse is also true: a reduction in road capacity reduces traffic, overall. Somebody will rightly complain of increased traffic congestion, somewhere, as a result of cutting off traffic through the Ladder. But a reduction in road capacity will mean that overall traffic in north London will be reduced, and that will good for air quality, for child safety, for the safety of pedestrians and cyclists generally, and for the reduction of greenhouse gasses. Some may say that it would be better for the government address these problems in a comprehensive way, but such comprehensive treatment of the problem is, at best, slow in coming. By taking this local action, we can make a small contribution to the overall reduction of the problems caused by road traffic, and at the same time show public support for more comprehensive action.
· Half-way measures don’t do the job. Speed bumps slow traffic a bit, but are not sufficient to make the road safe. 20mph limits are nice, but there are no resources to enforce them.
· Whole Ladder: if you cut traffic on any one of the Ladder’s rungs, you just push it to another. For that reason, the Ladder needs to act together as one community.
· Other neighborhoods: for reasons discussed below, cutting off Ladder traffic might well reduce traffic in adjoining neighborhoods. More importantly, cutting off Ladder traffic should be seen as one step towards making the borough of Haringey a continuous quilt of safe, healthy, traffic-calmed neighborhoods. It builds on the work done by residents of the Gardens and other neighborhoods in recent years, and we should hope that it is followed by similar actions in other neighborhoods.
· We cannot know exactly what the effect on traffic in other neighborhoods will be – traffic engineering studies of the question would be helpful, although even there we note that such studies are far from an exact science: it may be necessary to experiment!
· Cutting routes through the Ladder will probably increase traffic on Green Lanes, but it will also help that traffic flow better. Most of the traffic to and from Wightman on the rungs of the Ladder crosses one or both lanes of traffic in Green Lanes. The constant merging in of traffic at several points along Green Lanes and the turns across Green Lanes traffic slow the north-south flow, including the buses. While Green Lanes would certainly continue to be congested after cutting off Ladder traffic, the near elimination of cross-traffic should improve the flow.
· Much of the cross traffic is coming to and from St Ann’s Rd and the various roads feeding through St Ann’s (Woodlands Park, Black Boy Lane, etc.). It also passes through a handful of short, heavily traveled residential streets on the east side of Green Lanes: Salisbury Road, part of Harringay Road, and Alfoxton Avenue. Similarly, to the north of the Ladder, much of the traffic on the Hornsey Park Road/Mayes Road is to or from Wightman; to the south, the same goes for much of the traffic on Endymion. By eliminating the Ladder routes, many of these trips that now cut through the adjoining neighborhoods would probably not take place.
Tags for Forum Posts: traffic
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Frederick Guy on
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Yes it's a one-way, part time bus land, but at the critical time of the morning commute, it works pretty well. If it weren't there (or if cars cutting through the ladder were turning through it), we would have much slower buses, and more cars on the road as a result. The Wood Green comparison is a good one: it's a bottleneck through which buses creep like snails.
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Permalink Reply by Itsjono on
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I agree completely with Ruben on all of this.
Can I suggest you take 5 minutes to fill this survey out;
http://www.haringey.gov.uk/smartertravel#survey
Might help transform Green Lanes!
Jono
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if the "not nice" feature was already there when I moved in, then asking the council to remove it so I can gain from it is just plain selfish.
Are you really saying that we should never try to improve the environment in which we live? Road traffic is a major contributor to respiratory disease, keeps kids trapped in the house, and is a major source of greenhouse gasses. If drivers were paying for all such costs they impose on others, your argument would hold some water. But they're not.
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Permalink Reply by Birdy_Too on
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Some folk live in a parallel universe to most of us. How do you think you get your Pilsner Urquell and Prosecco delivered, fairy dust?
There's a solar panelled bus for Te-Pe Valley in ten minutes, you may just catch it!
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Yeah, every single vehicle on Green Lanes is a delivery lorry or commercial vehicle carrying equipment for the hard working trader. That terrible gridlock in the Arena car park was entirely made up of white vans and Eddie Stobart lorries, stuck nose to bumper for hours!
Oh, hang on no it wasn't. It was private cars, wasn't it?
The delivery of goods and services argument has some weight, but it's far from the whole story. I think you might have been on the fairy dust yourself!
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The point I'm getting at is that London (and many other large cities) conurbation not designed for the volume of people (and all the side effects) and very little will change. You can close streets and roads like you can stop rivers and brooks but the water or traffic will be diverted elsewhere increasing in other areas.
Closing roads is not the problem reducing the traffic pretty much everywhere is. As you can see from another thread on HOL, local folk use their vehicles unwisely to travel a couple of streets when you could just use one of:
or one of these: 
Oh I pretty much cycle everywhere as does my partner even when I go in search of fairy dust.
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That's it isn't it? If we could just get people to realise how little benefit they really get from those 3 block car journeys we could free up road capacity for the things that really do need to be driven.
Though the idea of Tescos hiring an army of delivery bikes and shopping trollys for their home deliveries has a certain charm ;)
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Permalink Reply by aidan on
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I don't have much to add other than that I'm sympathetic to the proposal. The majority of households in Haringey don't own a car at all but we all have to put up with the effects of them.
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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As an old timer (since 1985) I do remember Green Lanes when the Gardens were open to traffic. Getting the bus down from the stop where Tesco now is to Manor House station took 20 or more minutes in the morning rush. This was mainly due to traffic turning off the Garden roads and on to Green Lanes. What we have now pretty awful but no where near as bad as it was then. I think the essential premise of this thread is right. The more capacity you give, the more traffic you get. I'm not completely convinced about the proposal to close Wightman to through traffic but I think it deserves proper consideration.
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The slowing effect of traffic coming in from the side is an important consideration here. I remember the same pre-Gardens' closure situation Michael describes on Green Lanes. Remember this when somebody tells you that the Gardens' closure simply moved traffic elsewhere: it may have moved some of that traffic to Green Lanes, but somehow the buses run faster. For a look at the contemporary Ladder version of the problem, stand at the bottom of Pemberton during the afternoon commute or on a busy weekend, when the northbound traffic is heavy on Green Lanes; watch the slow progress of the Green Lanes traffic as the Pemberton rat-runners are drip-fed into the flow. The lesson: more routes may mean more traffic, but they don't necessarily mean faster traffic. For a nice technical demonstration of this effect (one of the simulations/maps is of traffic flows in parts of central London), see this paper by Youn, Jeong & Gastner, The Price of Anarchy in Transportation Networks.
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Permalink Reply by Anette on
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I have read this discussion and laughed my head off. You're funny! Please tell me this is a spoof discussion, it's not serious.
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Permalink Reply by HoL Site Admin on
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Can I draw your attention to our house rules. In particular this one:
b. Please be courteous to other members. Whilst differences of opinion are inevitable, we do not allow discourtesy in the discussions. As a rule of thumb, we ask members to 'play the ball, not the man'.
Your comments directed at Frederick and John are highly discourteous. Please refrain from any further comments of this nature or risk the removal of your posts.
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