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Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!

Oxford Street to be pedestrianised by 2020 ... so Wightman Rd ...

 ... can surely be closed to through traffic in the future, as it currently is during the bridge works. If the planners can deal with the re-routing of all those buses and taxi journeys away from Oxford Street for the pedestrianisation plans, it must be possible to do this for Wightman Road as well.

Living Wightman would do well to have a chat with the new Mayor's office.

Tags for Forum Posts: traffic, wightman bridge closure

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One point of order, car ownership is not expanding.

Very interesting contibution from Antoniette back in April to another discussion started by Julia Smith titled Imagining Possible Futures for Wightman Road; 

'Well in the spirit of the post, which I believe (Julia can correct me if I've misinterpreted) is that there is no clear cut "good option" but only "shades of grey" options, so let's talk realistically about the possibilities...my suggestion would be to make Green Lanes a red route, with bus Lanes operational during peak hours in both directions, and no parking at any time of day....then return the parking on Wightman Rd to parking fully on the road thereby making a much less attractive rat-running option but still allowing the Ladder residents/businesses the option of using Wightman as access in/out...slowing the traffic down so cyclists aren't intimidated etc and allowing people to use the pavements as they were intended. That doesn't cover all the problems in the area, but I think that would be damned good start.'

Noticed that the lights stay green twice as long now for traffic turning right from Turnpike Lane into Green Lanes.

It was a good idea when I wrote it and it's still a good idea now!
If you think about it, the problem of the volume of traffic on Wightman Road didn't "emerge", it was created by moving the parking onto the pavements. If you had to wait to use a passing spot, no through traffic would bother using Wightman Road.
Actually Antoinette exactly that kind of scheme (using parked cars to make routes less attractive) is used in the roads south of Seven Sisters Road (Queens Drive etc). The car spaces are diagonal to the pavement so they effectively reduce the street to a single lane. Definitely worth considering.

I'd say the main thing that makes those routes less attractive is that they are closed off with gates to prevent rat-running (although I think that's a side effect rather than the original intention).

Andrew - You're right. In the 1980s I lived in Wilberforce Road - which runs parallel to Blackstock, south of Seven Sisters - when it, Finsbury Park and Queen's Drive were barriered because of kerb-crawling rather than rat-running (slow traffic, then, not fast!).

I haven't lived there for almost 30 years so have no idea of the current effect on general traffic, but I would say that a) all those roads are much wider than Wightman, b) there are lots of roads off Blackstock to the west that easily relieve congestion and c) Green Lanes to the east is also far wider there than in our area and has barely any retail premises, so north/south traffic flow is much smoother to begin with and people don't need to use the closed-off roads as short-cuts in the first place.

I suspect the (coincidental) benefit of traffic reduction in these streets is because the problem was different to begin with and there are enough escape routes elsewhere for traffic to use, unlike the position in Harringay with the impenetrable walls of the railway on one side and the Gardens on the other. If GL was as wide in Harringay or didn't have the shops then people wouldn't have to use Wightman just to get through the area without sitting for hours in traffic jams.

I was going to make a suggestion about angled parking but got distracted, did anyone else add this idea to the interactive map?

(I was distracted by the fact that most of my proposals on the interactive map received an almost immediate negative comment from someone called Sethron, followed by a few dozen downvotes.

I googled Sethron, it seems this is the name of an evil magician in a 1990s video game. But could Sethron actually be a real magician, using his nefarious powers to subvert the interactive website voting mechanism and submit multiple "thumbs down"?

No, unfortunately it turns out to be very easy for one person to submit multiple votes.)

Or maybe your ideas are just unpopular...one of those thumbs down was mine ..just one btw

I think you're just a bit mean Antoinette.

Infamy, infamy, they've all got in for me...

Angled parking:

I think the above road is a bit wider than Wightman, however I suspect Wightman could have angled parking on one side, removing parking on the other side altogether, and still leave space for a single lane for cars and a cycle path. Returning the pavements to pedestrians. Someone with better trigonometry than I can hopefully work out whether it should be 60, 45 or 30 degree angles.

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