Forum topic: Fox Lane low-traffic neighbourhood

Tom in your post #5702 you mix respondents to a petition which not everyone by any means knows about or can be bothered to engage with, with the whole community . The stats relate to signatories only and-can’t be extrapolated to therefore be 95% of the community The petition started with the aim of opposing the scheme. Of course most people who’ve signed it are against . There has Been a big attempt to whip up anger on this issue and it’s not doing anyone much good.

Low traffic neighbourhoods bring communities together. Planting bulbs for Spring in the Fox Lane ltn. Dozens of people on bikes, walking and scooting whilst the planting went on.

It would seem a traffic camera is going up on Conway for emergency vehicles.
I did ask a month ago if they had keys.It would appear they didn't. Funny how £100k in 3 weeks from the other 2 cameras means that now the council believes they are not too expensive to install.

What a misguided place for a camera,it should be nearer the Grovelands/Old Park Road end end but this is just another example of the council and emergency services muddled thinking.Any emergency vehicle trying to access Lakeside ,Grovelands,Old Park Road etc from Ulleswater will have to battle the long tailback on Aldermans Hill ,and it won't help Selbourne at all. In other words lives are still at risk and both the ambulance service and council have not realised that simply closing roads will increase response time. A Conway camera won't help much.Please keep recording videos of stuck emergency vehicles.

On the upside I have bought a second car now and parked it on Fox lane so do not need to sit in the traffic.The kids now both have mopeds and actually seem to be going out more .
The other upside is that,as a resident of the Lakes the air is cleaner ,less noisy ( I hear birds singing in the morning and owls hooting at night) and my house is up in value about £50k ,which is handy since I don't plan on living here for too long now.

At least I have an upside to mitigate the inconvenience of travel.For the surrounding areas they have nothing but more noise and pollution,suffering businesses,longer travel times,and kids having problems getting to school.Thay have gained nothing but more misery.Not one thing ( unless they fell a warm glow thinking of me drinking a quiet coffee in my living room on my gentrified estate)
That is why ultimately this scheme has to be stopped.Barnes isn't going to do it.
We all need to consider voting Labour out at the next locals (May 2021?).What is the local Tory stance on reopening should they win?

TTFN
Lets let democracy decide.

The Council always said it was a live trial and they'd be ready to make changes as needed. It's great to show the Council listening - and I'd trust the London Ambulance Service to know where changes should be made . Emergency vehicles get stuck in traffic because there is far too much traffic (they get stuck all over London regardless of whether there's an LTN or not) - the good news is LTNs encourage people to switch to other modes for short journeys reducing the total amount of traffic (as the excellent St Monica's case study on this site shows). It's Tory central government policy to encourage and fund LTNs. A similar plea to 'vote out' those supporting Cycle Lanes failed miserably last time - Labour held the Council and the anti cycle lanes/LTN candidate for Parliament lost to supporter Bambos.

One undoubted conclusion of my reading of LTN and other traffic related posts is the extremely high level of awareness of traffic based pollution. I’d make a guess that no one inputted to the council’s air quality action plan consultation in 2013, and when I stood in for the Principal Pollution Officer in 2015 to present some background, the situation was clearly hitting virgin minds. We’ve come a long way since then via high profile expert communication from the likes of Professor Frank Kelly, and campaigning from eg Doctors against Diesel, The Times newspaper, and more recently Mums for Lungs. So it’s now a pretty much a given; our air is dirty, and reduces our lifespan. It’s an issue much wider then traffic and more specifically more than simply the traffic outside on our own street - traffic itself is one of the core issues, wherever it exists. So I think the focus is better on the “what” rather than the inevitable focus on the “where” when traffic is being addressed.

I absolutely agree with Karl Brown. There are many pros and cons to the LTN but for me the pollution argument is the clincher. The reduction in traffic related air pollution in Waltham Forest since they introduced their LTNs has been remarkable. And it's not just the LTNs that are improved, the whole area shows a reduction in NO2 and diesel particulates. In the 1960s we had the Clean Air Act to get rid of London Smog. The trouble with modern pollution is that it's invisible so it's not seen as such a problem. But it is. We owe it to our children to act.

I thought that the CCTV car parked at the end of Fox Lane all day, with its petrol engine running, was doing a grand job in pollution prevention!

It is bemusing to me that the PGC Weekly Newsletter adopts such a pro stance on this topic each week. Is the role of newsletter, which reaches a wide segment of our community, to provide a balanced view on current matters impacting PG? Perhaps it is not, but when there are clearly so many issues with this trial, presenting such a blissfully unaware positive stance seems irresponsible and can only be further dividing our community inciting anger and frustration amongst those not so keen. I was personally staggered to see the traffic on Bourne Hill this morning, with the queues in each direction meeting adjacent to Broad Walk.