Find out whose streets are worst for speeding and rat-running

Traffic count data recently published on the Cycle Enfield website gives a clear picture of the sheer amount of traffic using residential streets in the Fox Lane neighbourhood and of the prevalence of speeding.   The data was collected prior to the start of the phased installation of planters partially blocking the ends of many of the roads that intersect with Fox Lane and will be compared with data to be collected later this month and then after the installation of all elements of the Fox Lane Quieter Neighbourhood scheme.

A car every six and a half seconds

That their streets are used by rat-runners and drivers breaking speed limits will hardly come as a surprise to residents of Fox Lane or the streets on either side of it.  But while anecdotal evidence can be dismissed by those who prefer to give car drivers a free rein, the hard data now available has to be taken seriously.

Traffic counts for each road's "worst hour", ie the hour of the day with most traffic, clearly show that these residential streets are being used as through routes.  Predictably, Fox Lane had the most traffic - up to 548 vehicles an hour or one every six and a half seconds.  Maximum hourly counts for some of the side streets were also alarming:

• Meadway: 419 = a car every 8.6 seconds
• Amberley Road: 402 = a car every 9 seconds
• The Mall: 368 = a car every 9.8 seconds
• Old Park Road: 303 = a car every 12 seconds

Speeding cars in nearly every street

Of the 22 streets where baseline data was collected late last year, there were only three where the majority of drivers were staying well below the 30mph speed limit.  In all other streets the "85th percentile" readings - the speed at which the data shows 85% of vehicles were travelling at or below - was not far short of 30mph and in ten roads was over 30mph.  It follows that 15 per cent of drivers were going faster than the speeds shown in the table below, many of them exceeding the speed limit. 

The streets with the fastest traffic were Bourne Avenue, Burford Gardens, Caversham Avenue, Cranley Gardens, Derwent Road, Devonshire Road, The Greenway, St George's Road and Ulleswater Road.  We don't know what speeds the law breakers were doing, as we don't have the complete data set as we did for last week's report about Groveland Road, but if the Grovelands data is anything to go by, there would have been plenty of drivers going at more than 40mph and some in excess of 50mph (hopefully, the 70.4mph recorded in Grovelands Road last December was an "outlier".)

(Click here if the table below does not display properly.)

What happens next?

So far, only some of the planters shown on the diagram below have been installed.  Before the remainder are added,  "interim monitoring" will be carried out.

The final design of the Fox Lane QN - Click on the image to download the leaflet

A longer explanation of the council's phased approach to the quieter neighbourhood has been posted on the updated Letter to Residents of the Fox Lane area page, including a commitment by Cycle Enfield lead officer Richard Eason that "we remain committed to trialling other ideas if the data we gather suggests the planter approach is not having the desired effect".

Should this prove to be the case - and feedback from residents (so far only anecdotal) suggests that the planters have had little or no effect on either speed or volume of traffic - the campaigning group Better Streets for Enfield will be pressing the council to trial a more radical solution using the Low Traffic Neighbourhood principles.