Residents say Yes to Low Traffic!

Residents of the Fox Lane area gather at the Amberley Road play street to show their support for removing through traffic

As people living in and around Fox Lane await a revised low-traffic neighbourhood proposal from Enfield Council, support for a scheme which would completely rid their streets of the plague of rat-running is growing. At last week's meeting of Fox Lane & District Residents' Association (FLDRA) it was confirmed that the "Red Poster" group, originally sceptical about excluding through traffic, are now in favour. And on Sunday residents used the opportunity provided by the monthly play street in Amberley Road to gather in the road and say "Yes to Low Traffic".

"FLATWG very much support the the Green scheme"

At the "open general meeting" in Burford Hall which followed last Thursday's FLDRA AGM spokespeople from the two groups that had been looking at ways of reducing traffic through the area distributed printed maps showing their proposals and made brief statements. The two maps, produced by the Fox Lane LTN Group (the "Green Poster") and the Fox Lane Area Working Group (FLATWG) were the same as those included the report I published last week and are very similar - in fact, the spokesperson for the "Red" group actually said that "FLATWG very much support the the Green scheme", though she did add that they "very much support Automatic Number Plate Recognition" rather than the physical barriers preferred by the LTN Group.

Meaning that the views of two groups of residents - initially at loggerheads with one another - have now converged around a scheme which would provide many more entry/exit points for cars than the council's November 2019 scheme, but would still make it impossible to cut through the area.

Whether or not the revised scheme that the council is working on is similar is still unknown - but we shouldn't have to wait much longer to find out. At last Thursday's meeting it was revealed that councillors representing areas affected by the proposals will be briefed about the council's plans on Friday (28th February). One of the reasons why the council has been taking so long is the need to analyse the huge amount of feedback from residents about the November plans and draft a report, which will be discussed with councillors before being published.

"Politically castrated"

In fact, it was the question of consultation with local councillors, and consultation procedures more generally, which dominated last Thursday's Burford Hall meeting, to the extent that very little time was left to discuss the principle of excluding through traffic and the specifics of how to do it, which is presumably what the 70 or so attendees were most interested in.

The five councillors present were clearly very angry about what they considered to be very inadequate initial consultation arrangements - Cllr Derek Levy said he felt "politically castrated".

The councillor behind the low-traffic neighbourhood proposals, deputy council leader Ian Barnes, was unfortunately not present at the meeting, despite representing one of the affected wards. In a post on Facebook after the meeting he denied that local councillors had been kept out of the loop ahead of the "Starbucks" meeting in November:

Councillors were informed of the draft plan on 28th October. On 7th November they were notified that plan would proceed. And the public event was on 12th November. Feedback could, and was given (by some Councillors) anytime between 28th October and 12th November.

It appears now that more time is needed in future for Councillors to digest, and that's certainly a valuable lesson for the next phase of the LTNs, but to say that they weren't kept informed about the plans before the public event is disingenuous.

I've been very clear from the start that this is a learning process and each new LTN will provide lessons for the next throughout the entire rollout.

We've had a huge amount of feedback that will inform the next design so I'm hoping that everyone can now join together and push forward to a consensus.&

(This comment was a response to a paragraph in my report published last week which included the sentence "The update acknowledges implicitly that the original consultation arrangements for residents were inadequate and that local councillors should have been consulted and been kept informed about the plans before the November meeting in the former Starbucks cafe". I subsequently removed this sentence from the article. However, it is clear from the anger and upset expressed by councillors at last week's meeting that they do feel that they were not properly consulted.)

"The traffic is beyond ridiculous"

The demonstration on Sunday in Amberley Road was organised by the Fox Lane Low Traffic Neighbourhood Group, which has members throughout the area designated by the council as a "quieter neighbourhood". It has been campaigning for a "low-traffic neighbourhood", a concept originated by Living Streets, a national charity which has been promoting the interests of pedestrians since the 1929 and played an important part in the introduction of speed limits, zebra crossings and driving tests.

While Enfield Council's Quieter Neighbourhoods (QN) programme has been running for several years, it has had limited success in reducing traffic through residential areas. However, last autumn the council's deputy leader, Ian Barnes, took the decision to switch to the low-traffic neighbourhood model for future QNs.

However, it would be a mistake to think that low-traffic neighbourhoods are just the bee-in-the-bonnet of a single councillor in a single borough. Waltham Forest now has several similar schemes completed and a number of other London councils are implementing LTN schemes across their boroughs, usually with funding from the Mayor of London, and recently Islington took the decision to go ahead using its own money.

Photos: Phil Rogers