Healthy Streets

A Play Streets scheme that closes roads to cars opened Clare Rogers’ eyes to the idea of roads for recreation. Now she’s part of a grassroots campaign to revolutionise cycling in Enfield – but the battle isn’t over.

A consultation on the Mini Holland proposal to make Enfield town centre bike friendly closes on Friday. Photograph: Cycle Enfield

My sister Sally started it when she sent me a video about Playing Out – the seminal Bristol project which closes residential roads to traffic so children can play freely – adding: “Shame you couldn’t do this on your street.” Nothing goads like a sibling, and two years later our Palmers Green rat-run was an official London Play Street. Each month traffic is blocked off for three hours and the children play out with bikes, scooters, balls and chalk. Our girls, aged five and eight when it started, love it. It was a revelation seeing the tarmac used for something other than cars, and we got to know our neighbours in a way that was not possible when we only used the street to park on.

The other revelation was the attitude of those neighbours who hated the idea. They organised a petition against the play street, and quotes from the time include: “Roads are for cars, not kids”, “We’ll be a magnet for paedophiles” and “Who’s going to pay when my car gets scratched?” Now these same neighbours have either approved the renewed play street order, or take part as stewards. I guess they just needed to see it up and running.

Clare and daughter Ffion test-riding their tandem

Sally, a dedicated cycle campaigner, hadn’t finished with me. She began drip-feeding me online glimpses of cities where cycling is a viable form of transport, even for children. I read in David Hembrow’s A View from the Cycle Path blog that statistically children are happiest in those European countries where they can travel independently – and that means riding their bikes. I began to feel frustrated about my daily use of the car to get the girls 1.5 miles to their school in Southgate. Then research was published showing that London’s air pollution causes thousands of premature deaths a year, mainly from vehicle emissions (the latest estimate puts it at nearly 9,500). Children’s growing lungs are the most affected. I left our diesel VW on the street and we began taking the bus to school.

From then on, I tried hard not to use the car. But this is a challenge when you have kids to transport – to friends’ houses, to after-school activities, to birthday parties on a Sunday when the buses are rubbish and don’t go where you need them to. We tried riding our bikes to school once a week, but for safety I felt we had to use the pavement, bumping up and down the kerbs of every side road and swerving around pedestrians. The younger one couldn’t cope with the hill and claimed she hated cycling, while the older one couldn’t cope with the younger one and claimed she hated her. We stopped. Meanwhile I knew that millions of kids in the Netherlands and Denmark were daily riding their bikes to school and friends’ houses on beautiful wide cycle paths totally separated from motor traffic. Like my sister says: “it’s the infrastructure, stupid”. Enfield has no cycle infrastructure worth mentioning, certainly nothing that would allow a child to cycle to school. One video she sent me of hundreds of children doing just that in Utrecht actually made me cry.

Then Enfield won a £27m bid from the mayor to become a Mini Holland, along with two other outer London boroughs, Waltham Forest and Kingston. This kind of money gets you decent infrastructure. Wide, semi-segregated cycle lanes are planned along five major routes, including Enfield and Edmonton town centres. The designs score around 70% under CLoS (cycling level of service) – no match for the Netherlands’ 80–90%, but a big jump from zero. I suspect a factor in winning the bid was Enfield’s current low cycling rates – only 0.7% of journeys – and the health impacts of depending so heavily on cars. Enfield’s primary school children have one of the highest rates of obesity in the UK, and its air pollution regularly breaks legal limits of NO2.

Suddenly, my ideal of children cycling themselves to school seemed a bit less out of reach – but opposition to our play street was nothing compared to this. Bright yellow posters appeared in shop windows along Green Lanes arguing that cycle lanes would kill every shop on the high street, cause congestion and pollution, and menace the elderly and disabled. It flew in the face of abundant global research to the contrary. At public meetings held by local Tory MP David Burrowes, people ranted: “What a waste of money!”, “Why not spend it on the NHS?”, “No one cycles around here anyway” and “Where am I going to park my car?”

I was shocked into joining the Enfield branch of the London Cycling Campaign, and a Facebook group called We Support Enfield Mini Holland that grew to 200+ members almost overnight. Cycling to campaign meetings grew my confidence on the road and showed me I could switch from car to bike for more trips. Now, while my eldest gets the bus to secondary school, the eight-year-old and I go by tandem. It has seriously boosted our quality of life – fitness, time together, and sheer joy. But the tandem is a stop-gap – every child should be able to cycle to school independently.

In November the first consultation (for the Green Lanes route) showed that 60% of respondents support the plans – so it turns out that the loudest voices were not the majority after all. But the opposition has now turned its attention to the Mini Holland plans to take all car traffic off the high street of Enfield Town. We risk losing the whole scheme if this part isn’t put in place, and we will lose an opportunity for our generation and the next to enjoy a greener, healthier area. Meanwhile, David Burrowes MP is holding a self-styled referendum of those constituents who live near the proposed Green Lanes cycle route. I hope the council holds its nerve. The battle is not over yet.

This article first appeared in the Guardian and has been reproduced with permission.