Forum topic: Fox Lane low-traffic neighbourhood

Fully appreciate not everyone can walk or cycle and sorry to hear of your long journey. However every property in an LTN is accessible by car. It's worth noting that a child is killed and 37 seriously injured every week on our roads, many walking to school; a low traffic neighbourhood reduces that risk. There is indeed a full consultation on this trial - so your 'ask' is granted.

The scheme is benefitting thousands of residents , Richard Carlowe. They can now sleep at night, safely cross their road and actually talk to each other in the street. Pellipar is not cut off from Fox Lane - anyone can walk or cycle across the bridge. Counters show thousands use the cycle lanes every week - and now it's safer to get to them thanks to the ltn, more will do so - and remember everyone who switches from car to bike leaves you more room for your car (which btw takes up the space of around 8 bikes!). Finally objectors keep moving the 'no entry' signs - putting lives at risk.

I'll be sure to tell my 88yo mother that she can cycle across the bridge to get to her Doctor's surgery on Broomfield Avenue (another ridiculous dead end btw) now rather than spend an additional 10 minutes by taxi, at additional cost. I'm sure she'll be thrilled.

How lovely that the residents, who bought a house in the area knowing exactly what the traffic was like, can talk to each other in the street. What a relief for us all.

According to reports, a cyclist uses the bike lane on Green Lanes every 3 minutes on average. And that was during the height of COVID. That is, in truth, a pathetic return on the millions wasted.

Those bikes take up space on pavements that pedestrians can use (a bike takes up about the space of 4 pedestrians btw). The pavement is now not wide enough for a wheelchair where there is excess street furniture or bank queue barriers.

All I can say, Brian, is that if a few days of problem traffic on Oakfield has brought you to breaking point, it’s fortunate you don’t live on Amberley.

There are people in their late eighties who cycle, walk and use mobility aids - all of which would be a much safer trip from Pellipar to Broomfield Ave now the LTN is open (and avoids the nuisance of finding a parking space). But if, understandably, your Mother needs to go by cab then a few extra minutes is not much to ask. And imagine if each of those cyclists every 3 minutes was car..... Good luck with your campaign to open up Broomfield Avenue!

What strikes me about all this is that most contributors see the issue through a car (vehicle) windscreen, i.e. from the perspective of adults and especially adults who are drivers. Meanwhile quite a high proportion of the population are children whose development matters. What is best for them, and how does it stand against drivers needs?

Personally I'm not really knowledgeable about the territory so I'm not qualified to form a sound opinion, but - as I have written in other contexts - there are well-qualified people who think that children have the suffered most from the car age and I wouldn't want to add to that. Children generally are less able to walk/cycle to school as I did from a very early age - in my case a few days after my fifth birthday - supervised by the big girls all of six/seven years old .

Perhaps someone more knowledgeable about the needs of young children than me will comment because, whatever the decision, the needs of everyone should be taken into account.

Finally, young and elderly people at the other end of life are not usually, or ever, the decision-makers. Quite a few thinkers have commented on that; we should do the best we can to meet everyone's needs.

You say ‘objectors’ move ‘no entry’ signs! Wrong! Some selfish person in The Mall took the Oakfield Road sign and placed it in their Road, regardless of the fact that they already had one at both ends of their street but that person was happy to leave Oakfield Road with none so please don’t label all objectors as potential life takers!

I posted on Next Door to see what the local reaction was to the enforcement of the scheme in Fox Lane and there were over 240 comments within a few days. The only one I want to repeat here is the following which shows the impact the scheme has had already on a local business ironically using electric vehicles:

NB this was not sent by myself but the business owner.

---

Copy of email I sent to Cllr Barnes.

Dear Councillor

My family run a small local dog walking service in Enfield. We run 2 vans (was 4 before covid and we are struggling now to rebuild) and a high percentage of our customers live in and around The Lakes Estate.

Our business model is that we collect 4 dogs at a time and take them to a local park - normally Trent to exercise them.

As a company struggling to recover we are keeping careful records of time and costs. Please allow me to share some of them with you in relation to the last week. I hope you will find this useful at the consultation in October regarding your scheme.

Our van that covers the Lakes Estate area drove on average an extra 19.6 miles per day this week and took on average 55 minutes extra to serve all of its customers.

Those extra 19.6 miles took the total mileage beyond the range of our all electric van so all 483 miles this week were travelled in our older diesel van.

This is just one van operated by a very small company. I shudder to think of the costs to both businesses and the environment when you multiply this by the number of vehicles used by postal services, delivery services, online shopping vehicles and all the other vehicles that have multiple pick up/drop off locations in the affected area.

Just as an aside. While collecting dogs today I saw a council vehicle stop at the junction of Fox Lane and Old Park Road, remove the post, drive through, replace the post and then drive off. This was at about 1.45 pm today. Is it one rule for the council and one for everybody else?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this.

Kind regards

Just for your info - I got the same cut and paste reply that other contributors on this forum have already reported.