Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Harringay Traffic: Thoughts, Problems, Solutions
I have been on HoL for many years but I have been stunned recently by how many posts there have been on traffic and traffic related issues in the last 3-6 months. In terms of issues of the day for our community this is clearly huge!
I was just posting on a different thread and it occurred to me that we need to try to draw together some of our collective knowledge and experience in order to try to do more than collectively shout into the internet to vent our spleens.
As you may be aware the council have taken a pretty brave step in recognising the collective mismanament of our roads in the last 20 years. The sustainability of piecemeal closing or alteration of the road traffic network so that traffic is concentrated on an ever diminishing number of roads to the detriment of those communities and the political myopia (indeed active intervention) that has allowed Wightman Road to become a defacto trunk road has been highlighted by the closure over such a long term of the railway bridge on Wightman.
This is the issue the Green Lanes Traffic Study will aim to address. Its first Stakeholder Group meeting is to be help on Thursday 9th June. This is one of the forums through which residents will be able to feedback their views. There are several organisations that will be part of the Steering Group (see the Terms of Reference doc for the membership as of May, this may change). If you care about what is happening, you should feed your views in through the various members that may best represent your area, Gardens, Hermitage, Woodlands Park, Ladder, HoL, Wightman Rd, etc, or your councillor.
In the mean time I wanted try to do three things. I want to draw together people's experiences in order to:
1- Hear the anecdotal thoughts occurring to you.
- I have head people say they are now happier sending their kids from the northern part of the Ladder to South Harringay for swimming lessons
- People have remarked that there is less fly tipping
- It seems the traffic that is moving up and down the Ladder (rung roads and Wightman) is moving in a far more considerate way- its less aggressive
- Traffic on GL and Turnpike is more aggressive, blocking crossings
2- Try to frame the myriad of problems, before and after the closure.
- 120k vehicles a week on Wightman (pre closure)
- Houses being shaken to pieces by HGVs (pre closure)
- Inability of traffic to turn out of Turnpike Lane in the GL leading to congestion (post closure)
- Busses not moving on GL (post closure)
- Increased congestion on GL and the time taken to get from A to B (post closure)
3- Identify solutions and ideas (however nutty)
- Close Wightman completely
- Introducing a pricing mechanisms for vehicle using local roads
- Better traffic management interventions to get folks out of cars in going to their places of worship or taking their kids to school
- Improved or altered road infrastructure to allow traffic to run more freely and not be held at pinch points
- Clear parking out of the bus route on GL
In the ideas one or more of you will throw out will be part of the solution, and while the Stakeholder Group is not a decision making body, at least this is a forum where these ideas can be heard!
Tags for Forum Posts: harringay traffic study, traffic
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Gordon T on
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"except for access" is on the 7.5t weight limit sign at the bottom of my road. So it's conditional, not absolute.
Otherwise none of the plant working on the bridge could gain access to the north end of the work site! Unless all the road blocks on Wightman were removed temporarily (ducks).
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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I suppose that's where the problem lies. It would be easy to claim that your juggernaut is only driving along to get access to somewhere on the Ladder.
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HI everybody- I just wanted to alert you to the fact that any changes made to the traffic around Green Lanes also has an impact on a much bigger area. For example, the Wightman rd closure has had a big effect on traffic in Hornsey and Crouch End. I live near Priory Park and we are experiencing gridlock every day now along Hornsey High Street, Middle Lane, Tottenham Lane and Priory Rd. The pollution is much worse, my children's asthma is terrible recently and i do wonder if it is because of the stationary traffic outside our window for hours each day! I get the W3 back from work and the journey used to take me around 50 minutes from Oxford Circus but every night this week it has taken me at least 50 minutes to get from Finsbury Park! The traffic backs up from Turnpike Lane, all along Hornsey Lane and Priory Road which means the traffic from Tottenham Lane and Middle Lane can't turn onto the High Street so basically the whole area becomes completely stuck. On Wednesday the W3 bus driver chucked everyone off the bus at Middle Lane because we had been at a standstill for 15 minutes and he gave up. I think any traffic schemes would need to look at quite a wide area, not just the roads adjacent to Wightman. Otherwise it's just shifting the problem somewhere else.
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Completely agree Elinor. If there is to a future scheme involving Wightman and Green Lanes there needs to be real work put into how the areas that feed into GL/Wightman are managed. For instance Justin Guest has talked on this site about how just minor changes to the timing of the lights at the Turnpike alone junction could have a positive impact on traffic coming from the west. One of the reasons we've ended up with the traffic problems on Wightman is because that wider view was never taken when making ad hoc changes to lessen problems in discrete areas. The cumulative impact was never really addressed. That why I think that the much wider traffic study underway at the moment has the potential to come up with solutions that don't have unintended consequences.
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But does the current traffic study cover Hornsey and Crouch End? I get the impression that these are important areas to consider, but that there probably is no need to go even further away than this.
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Permalink Reply by JoeW on
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These probably need filing under "nutty", but I'll submit them anyway:
"Mexican Bollards". Each road has a bollard at the end, all bollards electronically connected. At the beginning of the day all bollards are up except on the first road. Once a vehicle has entered that road, its bollard goes up and the next road's bollard goes down. This continues in round robin fashion (and would look a bit like a Mexican Wave, if all the bollards were in a line), until it's the first road's turn again. At the end of the day all roads should have taken an equal share of the day's traffic.
Alternatively there could be a "Quota System", whereby a gate or bollard on each road permits a predefined number of cars to enter (equal, say, double the number of households living on that road - remember that less than 40% of households in Harringay have a car), then shuts for rest of the day.
I had a few other ideas most of which weren't fit for publication, but included:
- New Riverbus (perhaps with a Bubbleworks-style water ride in the underground section);
- Funicular Railways for all the steepest sections of the ladder;
- Lawnmower Racing Track on Duckett Common (or similar feature allowing the local young farmers to let off steam); and
- a Subspace Teleporter outside the Salisbury.
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Another alternative to my previous bollard proposals would be a system of rising bollards at the end of each Ladder "rung", electronically related to traffic flow on Green Lanes. There is detailed information available about traffic flow from the bus network (that is how the lcd bustop signs know when the next bus is due).
So the bollards would normally be up, but as soon as GL traffic flow deteriorates below a certain level, the bollards would go down. Like a valve system alleviating pressure on the main road.
The data should be available although the algorithm used would need to be carefully designed. I can picture vehicle users gaming the system by starting to driving slowly in front of a bus for a carefully calculated distance in front of their preferred ratrun.
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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There's this. There really was little more to say from the first meeting.
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In addition to my earlier suggestions for minimising Wightman traffic (here and here), here's a couple more that don't minimise it completely but should deliver a significant reduction.
Solutions for ratrunning usually involve either closing roads (make them into cul-de-sacs) or else make them one-way in such a way that it does not benefit the through traffic (i.e. the traffic might be able to enter a one-way system but eventually ends up doubling back in the direction whence they came).
So here are a couple of possible one-way solutions. They both start by making Wightman one-way south-bound, with a no-left turn at the bottom onto Endymion. Then:
1. EITHER make all the ladder "rung" roads one-way eastbound, with a no-right turn at the bottom (like Hewitt)
pros: largely eliminates the possibility of north-, south- and west-bound ratrunning
cons: doesn't entirely eliminate the possibility of eastbound ratrunning e.g. Hornsey High Street traffic wanting to avoid Turnpike Lane could cut down Wightman, down a rung and then back up Green lanes to get to West Green Road or Westbury Avenue. Also, would need to be CCTV at the end of every rung to enforce the no right turn (though the rungs around Duckett Common might not need CCTV if Willoughby was made one-way northbound).
2. OR make all the rungs one-way westbound.
pros: largely eliminates the possibility of north- south- and east-bound ratrunning
cons: doesn't entirely eliminate the possibility of west-bound ratrunning e.g. southbound Green Lanes traffic wanting to head west could enter a rung, cut along Wightman and continue west on Endymion. This could be alleviated if it were possible to prevent Green Lanes southbound traffic turning right into a rung (perhaps with barriers or central reservation).
Note that making Wightman one-way might allow space for a segregated cycle path too.
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The average traffic volume on each of the 19 Haringay Ladder "rungs" is 9,860 vehicles per week (over 1,400 per day).
(Not surprisingly the average is higher on the 9 westbound rungs than on the 10 eastbound rungs - westbound is 10,545 vehicles per week, eastbound is 9,242).
The rungs are residential sidestreets where the residents themselves own around 100 vehicles. I guess these, plus visitors, deliveries and tradespersons, account for around 100 of the 1,400 journeys per day. The rest - over 90% - is ratrunning (vehicles with no business on the residential sidestreet, but which are cutting through instead of using the intended major roads i.e. Green Lanes and Turnpike Lane).
1,400 vehicles per day with >90% ratrunning would be bad enough, but it's actually far worse for some "rungs", because there is no way to equalise traffic across all 19 rungs (other than my own certainly hilarious but probably impractical "Mexican Bollards" proposal). Hence Warham has over 2,500 vehicles per day, Fairfax has nearly 2,000, Frobisher has over 1,900, etc.
I've summarised several suggestions (here, here and here), for eliminating or minimising the ratrunning, has anyone managed to think of any more? I understand the consultants running the Green Lanes Area Transport Study will shortly be making available an interactive website where we can "pin" all the different proposals (plus the associated proposals for Green Lanes red-routing and minimising traffic elsewhere e.g. Hermitage, Salisbury) to a map and vote them up or down. I have a feeling the interactive map is going to get very cluttered very quickly so will be useful to have a clear idea of what the main proposals are before we start.
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How about opening up the roads through Finsbury Park (the actual park)? This would give cars an alternative route to Green Lanes to get to and from Seven Sisters.
I'm pretty sure this one needs filing under "nutty", but maybe useful to examine the reasons why. Why do we put the needs of a few thousand park-users, birds and squirrels above the needs of 10s of thousands of road-users each week?
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Not a bad idea!!! Seriously !!, If we then cover the new river ( plenty of space to sink foundations either side) there could be a Wightman relief road all the way to turnpike lane/ hornsey rd. Might chop up the the ladder and cut Wightman towards the bottom but it would solve most of the problems and not cost that much.
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