Forum topic: GOOD NEWS: There has been no increase in London's car traffic for over 15 years

When the LTNs were first proposed in this area, we were told that London’s traffic had increased 20% over the previous 10 years. Now it has been confirmed this information is completely false. There has been no increase in overall traffic in London, as Transport for London had known all along.

The 20% increase figures were widely promoted (often with extreme extrapolations to 2030) by Mr. Barnes (former Councillor Barnes ) and Better Streets For Enfield at the time of the implementation of the LTN “trial”. They arose from central government via the Dept. for Transport after they had conducted a survey known as the Minor Roads Benchmarking Exercise. Whilst the Dept. for Transport had previously agreed with TfL there had been no increase in traffic (in fact a small but steady decrease), on the basis of this one survey they changed ten years of measured data overnight.

I wrote to Mr Barnes in Feb 2021 explaining how it was impossible for traffic in London to have increased by 20% if you take into account the small increase in registered vehicles, zero increase in number of car trips taken and no increase in average journey times. It meant every car journey undertaken by every resident had to be 20% longer with no additional congestion to slow traffic down. There was clearly a problem in the survey’s methodology which even TfL reported in their Travel In London Report 13 (2020) section 3.9 around page 92.

I wrote to Richard Eason in October 2021 also explaining this and showing him the section of TfLs report explaining they disagreed with the Dept. for Transport and TfL continued to use the old figures not now in the public domain. Richard Eason is the council officer responsible for writing the final report for the Fox Lane LTN. Despite acknowledging my letter he included in the Fox Lane Final Report, section 25, “Between 2008 and 2019, the number of miles driven on Enfield’s roads increased by 313,000,000.” A figure he knew to be wrong according to TfL and has now been agreed by DfT to be zero, or possibly a slight decrease. The councillors made the decision to make the LTN permanent based on this report and presumably believing this information.

I also wrote this information on this site in Dec 2021 under the forum title “New chance to comment on Fox Lane LTN” #6271 and entered into many discussions with Adrian, Karl etc. giving them this information as well as facts such as:

1. Although a third of car journeys in London are only 2km or less this constitutes less than 5% of London’s Traffic.

2. As the average journey for the top third of car trips is 17km, these cars, along with buses, HGVs, LGVs etc make up about 85% of London’s traffic, none of which can be actively travel except perhaps by a few hardened cyclists.

3. If you remove ALL available journeys from the short trips to active travel , in Outer London you only need to delay the remaining traffic by one minute to go into a net increase in pollution and Greenhouse Gases.

4. Although cycling should be encouraged (and I’m in favour of cycle lanes providing they don’t increase pollution) it will have virtually no effect on air pollution in any meaningful timescale.

In #6307 (Forum “LTNs will increase pollution and greenhouse gases”) Adrian Day posted, on behalf of the “Better Streets Team” that this is “all in my head”, despite not being able dispute any of the logic, methodology, maths or source of material. Given the volte face by the Dept of Transport last week can we hope that Better Streets for Enfield puts a correction on its facebook page and explains that traffic has not increased as they had been told, or are you going to keep your members in the dark ? After all it is good news isn’t it ?

I’d certainly welcome an end to destructive LTN-linked protest: starting with the planters well over a year since, those near Old Park / Fox Lane were regularly filled with vegetable peelings and fruit remnants; that “protest” subsequently moved to the pedestrian marked section of the rail bridge, typically being dumped Wednesday or Thursday overnight. As well as someone’s food-bin, it will occasionally contain fast food remnants, sometimes even the wrapping. Hyper-local you must presume, since no one is going to walk their food bin too far, this weekly occurrence really needs to stop and the perpetrator “grow-up”.