Waltham Forest's "village" traffic management schemes have been highly successful. Hopefully, Enfield's road planners will be equally ambitious when they restart work on Quieter Neighbourhoods.
As 2016 draws to a close it's good to see work finally under way to restore to people the freedom to travel along Green Lanes by bicycle safely and securely - a freedom that has been increasingly denied for the past fifty or sixty years. Of all ways of travelling, apart from walking, cycling is the most benign ever invented, so it is absurd that some small steps to slightly restore the balance between this and far more problematical means of transport should provoke the levels of fear, loathing and fury that they have among some sections of the public.
Click on the map to enlarge2017 will see not only more progress on the network of on-road cycling routes in Enfield, but also the resumption of work to create a network of more than thirty Quieter Neighbourhoods throughout the borough. The map shows two local Quieter Neighbourhood areas - to see three more of the planned neighbourhoods, see this article from 2014.)
Workshops involving local residents began in late 2014, but the process of developing plans was put on hold in mid-2015 - presumably because the funding from TfL to create Quieter Neighbourhoods would not have been made available if the Council had been unable to put in place its cycle lane network.
In neighbouring Waltham Forest, another winner of the competition for Mini Holland money, the sequencing has been pretty much reversed. The process of restoring peace and quiet to residential pockets was begun first, work on cycle lanes along major routes such as Lea Bridge Road followed later.
Orford Road, WalthamstowLast summer local campaign group Better Streets for Enfield organised a tour of Walthamstow Village - the new name for the area bounded by Hoe Street, Lea Bridge Road, Shernhall Street and the railway line to Chingford (confusingly, not including the area round the parish church, formerly known as Church End but rechristened "Walthamstow Village" some time in the late 1970s).
The total transformation of an area that I was familiar with took me by surprise. I was obviously expecting an improvement, but nothing so dramatic. Noisy, traffic-clogged and fume-filled streets that had been used as rat-runs were oases of peace and quiet, where local people strolled with their kids and neighbours. There were plenty of cars in evidence - parked outside people's houses, and presumably used for longer journeys, while shorter trips were made on foot or by bike. The few cars that were moving were all going slowly, respecting the other users of the street.
You can read Clare Rogers' report on what we saw and heard (more accurately, didn't hear) on this website. This is how she explained the principle behind the "villages":
"The idea is to keep through traffic out of the residential bloc and on main roads, while residents can still access their homes by car via slightly indirect routes. This means that streets where people live are quiet and safe and form a good network for walking and cycling. Bollards or planters are used to close off or filter one end of selected roads to cars, providing a bit of extra public space at the same time."
Walthamstow Village - click on the map for a larger scrollable versionIn early November this year some provisional traffic figures were published for Walthamstow Village, indicating that the scheme has been extremely successful in reducing traffic. On twelve key roads in the village traffic fell by 56 per cent or 10,000 vehicles a day (on some roads traffic fell by more than 90 per cent). The Evening Standard reported that Walthamstow saw "an overall traffic reduction of 16 per cent, including a slight increase in traffic on two roads bordering the “village”. Traffic in Hoe Street rose three per cent and 11 per cent in Lea Bridge Road. There were no reported collisions between last September and April, compared with 15 between September 2012 and August 2015." There would also have been a marked reduction in air pollution and noise in the Village, which over time should result in improvements in the physical and mental health of residents.
Before Enfield's traffic planners dust off their ideas for our Quieter Neighbourhoods, let's hope that they will check out the successful Walthamstow schemes, draw inspiration from them, talk to their opposite numbers to find out what works and what doesn't. And I would urge anyone who is sceptical about Quieter Neighbourhoods to go and see for themselves.