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Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!

The LCSP (traffic sub-group) and Living Wightman have contributed recently in the development of a resident led submission to Haringey in relation to traffic and the Ladder. I am pleased to share the "Fresh Start" document with you below. I have also copied the email circulated to the LCSP membership setting out the context of the Fresh Start document.

I am also pleased to share a joint letter from the LCSP and Living Wightman to Haringey setting out a request to extend the current Wightman closure until the Green Lanes Traffic Study reports back in December.

We welcome any constructive feedback and thoughts, and importantly ideas!

Justin Guest

Chair LCSP Traffic Sub-Committee

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You will no doubt be aware of the fact the Green Lane Traffic Study is in progress. To contribute to this process the LCSP has coordinated with the Living Wightman Campaign to prepare a resident led submission document that has gone to the council. The “Fresh Start” document aims to characterise the problems faced by many Ladder residents as the Ladder has increasingly become a sacrificial zone as a result what has historically been weak traffic management planning on Green Lanes.

The document sets out the impacts of this weakness in planning, and how the application of ever more pressure on a narrower subset of roads in the borough to act as a relief valve has affected the Ladder.

The document is designed to provoke thought and offer insights to decision makers and influencers who may not be familiar with the area. The document goes further in proposing a partnership between the council and residents in what will hopefully be a long term effort to fundamentally change the profile of traffic flows across the Ladder and surrounding areas.

We also jointly make recommendations as to actions that can be taken to begin making meaningful progress in reducing the traffic burden on the area. We recognise the solution may not be a result of a single intervention, and as a result, as the Green lanes Traffic Study progresses, the Fresh Start document is designed to be a living document, which we hope to add to at appropriate moments and re-circulate to keep the discussion alive.

For those of you with feedback you are welcome to contact myself in the first instance.

Please also see attached the joint Living Wightman letter agreed at the last LCSP meeting requesting a temporary extension of the Wightman closure until the Green Lanes Traffic Study reports back.

Please note, the traffic sub-group will aim to meet next week. We do not have a date yet. We welcome the ongoing participation of Ladder residents, and if anyone would like to come along, or represent their road please let me know. You will be most welcome.

Tags for Forum Posts: harringay traffic study, traffic, wightman bridge closure

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It is a well put-together document and certainly makes the case for why residents of Wightman would prefer the road to remain closed. But I'm not sure how well it reflects the views of all Ladder residents - only relatively few streets were surveyed, of which Wightman was one. There are also a few inconsistencies and unsubstantiated claims in amongst all the charts and data.

A percentage of residents thought noise levels had increased since the closure - it was suggested that this might have been due to the bridge works themselves, but as none of the surveyed streets were particularly near the bridge I think this unlikely. Living on the Green Lanes end of a ladder rung, about a hundred yards from an all-day traffic jam, I can say that noise levels from GL are significantly up - more traffic overall, more starting and stopping, more agressively hooting horns.

Also we are now getting all the lorries for Jewsons up our street, including some very large vehicles that are clearly unsuitable for any of the local residential streets (including Wightman: this definitely needs addressing!)

My perception is also that down here in the dip it is more polluted and dirty than before - though I concede it must be lovely living in fresher air up the hill. It does make me reluctant to walk out onto GL though, and I don't think the document addressed the increased pollution for walkers, cyclists, shoppers and people trying to be good citizens and take public transport on GL. (never mind the poor people living there).

Simply speeding up the flow of traffic on GL does not mitigate the fact that with Wightman no longer available, there will inevitably be more traffic on GL - talk of 'evaporation' etc does not reassure.The document claims that -'Interestingly we are increasingly seeing days when traffic flow on GL are as good if not better at peak times as before the bridge closure' but there is nothing to back this up and it doesn't match my perception and that of my neighbours, despite the relative 'lull' of the school holidays.

Finally, the photograph of men playing football in the street was one I took - they were actually right next to the fenced-off bridge, so effectively in a cul-de-sac. I doubt anyone would actually play footie out in the street elsewhere on Wightman or Ladder rungs as they still have traffic, including fast-moving bikes. A small point, I know, but just for clarification.

I have read the entire document, and have taken from it that Whightman road residents indeed have a lot of time on their hands. This document is however rather meaningless, and it would be a travesty if any changes were made on the basis of it.

4% of the ward population was surveyed, which is being talked about as 'statistically significant'. This is clearly absolute nonsense, as this is in no way a representative sample, and no effort was made to make it so.

There is no sources for the majority of the data. For example, where does the bus time data come from? Why has rush hour journey times not been included. Certainly, anecdotally I have noticed a much increased journey time.

I could go on pointing out the flaws, but I don't have time to reference all of them.

In short, this document is meaningless, and just an illustration of NIMBY'ism at its best. It would have been helpful if those who had compiled it had at least read about basic statistics before creating it.
The bus times were supplied by TfL and do include rush hour. The sample size is statistically valid. If you look at some earlier posts in this thread the confidence interval for a sample of this size is discussed at some length.
As previously mentioned, the confidence interval is irrelevant if the sample is not representative.
In what way was the sample unrepresentative?
I'm surprised this isn't glaringly obvious, but to explain I will give an example.

Suppose I wished to survey a school (year 7-11) and wished to find out if they liked school dinners. I have done calculations and have found that 50 is a statistically significant sample size.

I then ask the first 50 year 7s in the lunch queue, 'Do you like school dinners?', and 80% reply yes. I cannot then conclude that the majority of the school likes school dinners as I have not made the sample representative (by school year, but also by other characteristics such as gender). I have also not selected by sample randomly, to the contrary, it is what is known as a biased sample, as the first children in the queue are more likely to like school dinners.

The sample taken by 'Living Whightman' is not representative of the ward. To do so, the sample would need to representative of the area in terms of geography, and other characteristics such as car ownership. There has also not been any random sampling.

Therefore, this study is flawed, and it would be absolutely false to conclude that the majority of the ward is in favour of Whightman road closure. We cannot even conclude that the majority of Whightman road/ladder residents are in favour of the closure, due to the manner in which this study has been conducted.

This is such a glaringly obvious methodological flaw that I'm surprised that no one with a basic knowledge of statistics pointed this out at the planning stage. (This level of statistics is covered in gcse maths)
But the bulk of the respondents were randomly sampled. The table shows those those roads where they had been door knocked end to end but most of the responses came from either people passing a point (Harringay station for instance) or people who responded to a link taking them to an online version of the questionnaire. That's how a sample size of almost 1,000 was achieved.
As I explained, that is not random sampling. Sampling mainly from a small number of streets is most definitely not random, and sampling people passing a point, or via a link introduces a level of bias. There is also no attempt to make the sample representative.

A valid sample would have been representative of the area by characteristics, and also truly random (ie involving a random number generator to survey certain addresses).

This survey disproportionately includes those who would benefit from the road closure, and is therefore inherently biased and flawed.

She's right you know Michael.

Responses from people passing a point are biased towards people passing that point and not all other points.

We know that many, perhaps most, of the residents of Harringay are not members of HOL and may not have access to social media. So the sampling is biased towards a particular population which is not representative of the whole.

The map with shaded areas indicating traffic management around the borough is hilarious.

The whole of Finsbury Park is traffic managed? The railway line along Wightman Road? In Stroud Green the whole area North from Oakfield road is shaded except Denton Road, when actually all these roads are open to through traffic (Mayfield Road, Inderwick Road, Uplands road etc.)

The Arena retail park?

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