that’s ridiculous if it’s a through route people will drive through it
Brixton Liveable Neighbourhood and LTN schemes - improvements for pedestrians and cyclists
- Thread starter teuchter
- Start date
that’s ridiculous if it’s a through route people will drive through it
happyshopper
Well-Known Member
Overstating a case doesn't help. A sense a community doesn't depend on the ability to drive a car down a particular road.
Gramsci
Well-Known Member
i know their is a discussion to be had. Its that on the grapevine Ive heard plans for Atantic road have been scaled back.
Im surprised that this stretch of Atlantic road has not be tested during the pandemic.
This is the photo of how Atlantic road would look like:
This is the original ideas:
About Brixton Liveable Neighbourhood
- Removing general traffic from Atlantic Road while maintaining local access
- Priority access for cycles, buses and emergency services
- More space for walking with widened pavements, safer crossing points and junctions
First stage of consultation has taken place for Loughborough, Railton and Ferndale. I cant see any updates on the Town Centre area.
Its partly me thinking Brixton BID is going to get the say on Town Centre. Without a lot of consultation with residents.
Initially the Atlantic road section of the Brixton Liveable Neighbourhood was the cornerstone of the project.
My interest is also that the consultation on the Good Growth Fund for Brixton Station road and Rec is sort of being done now. And that one aspect of the Town Centre bit of the Brixton Liveable Neighbourhood was that there should be some joined up thinking on these separately funded projects.
Winot
I wholeheartedley agree with your viewpoint
Well they are turning it into a no-through route. Once the cameras are working drivers will be fined.
sleaterkinney
Well-Known Member
On Atlantic rd there was massive kickback about reducing car parking so taking the car out of it altogether will not go down well.
Gramsci
Well-Known Member
I heard something like that on the grapevine.
I can't find anything about scaling it down or any info on what consultation has been done on that section of the scheme on the commonplace website. After all it was going to be the centre piece of the overall scheme. It was a reason the Council BID to TFL was successful.
So my concern is that unofficially Brixton BID and Council have decided this.
If it is the case the Council should be be straignt up with people and say if it has been scaled down.
Its my problem with Council schemes. There is consultation and unofficial consultation/ decision making. This was supposed to be transparent consultation process with everything on the common place website.
The Council may surprise me and Im wrong. Its that past experience gives me a bad feeling about this.
Gramsci
Well-Known Member
Interesting comment on Brixton Liveable Neighbourhood
Street. This is an awful stretch of road. The priority seems to be to get cars from A to B as fast as possible. The pavements are too narrow with shoppers, traders, commuters etc jostling for space and having to step into oncoming traffic. The underpass towards the rec is dark, smelly and...
brixtonlnmap.commonplace.is
I went back to the original commonplace consultation and found a load of comments on the stretch of Atlantic road in the market area.
Nearly all say pavements to narrow, the bus is held up in the traffic, lot want it to be car free. With space for bus, pedestrians and cyclists.
A lot of comments on the poor interchange between the overground and underground at peak times.
This chimes with what I think of that stretch of road.
These were comments by people who use the street.
Gramsci
Well-Known Member
Something similar was done at Stockwell by the Tube entrance. Drivers get the message after a while and stop entering it.
Rushy
basically a scrotum
Interesting comment on Brixton Liveable Neighbourhood
Street. This is an awful stretch of road. The priority seems to be to get cars from A to B as fast as possible. The pavements are too narrow with shoppers, traders, commuters etc jostling for space and having to step into oncoming traffic. The underpass towards the rec is dark, smelly and...
I went back to the original commonplace consultation and found a load of comments on the stretch of Atlantic road in the market area.
Nearly all say pavements to narrow, the bus is held up in the traffic, lot want it to be car free. With space for bus, pedestrians and cyclists.
A lot of comments on the poor interchange between the overground and underground at peak times.
This chimes with what I think of that stretch of road.
These were comments by people who use the street.
It's strange what they have chosen to use their emergency powers to push through. Surely Atlantic would have been an obvious choice with real and immediate benefits compared to St Matthews.
sleaterkinney
Well-Known Member
It's actually dangerous, that stretch of road, but if you want arguments about edgyness and gentrification etc then changing that road would do it x 10.Interesting comment on Brixton Liveable Neighbourhood
Street. This is an awful stretch of road. The priority seems to be to get cars from A to B as fast as possible. The pavements are too narrow with shoppers, traders, commuters etc jostling for space and having to step into oncoming traffic. The underpass towards the rec is dark, smelly and...
I went back to the original commonplace consultation and found a load of comments on the stretch of Atlantic road in the market area.
Nearly all say pavements to narrow, the bus is held up in the traffic, lot want it to be car free. With space for bus, pedestrians and cyclists.
A lot of comments on the poor interchange between the overground and underground at peak times.
This chimes with what I think of that stretch of road.
These were comments by people who use the street.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
I'd like to come back to newbie's post here from a week or so back, because I didn't have the time then to respond to it properly. And I'm going to try and do this without quoting bits of it and getting bogged down in specific points too much.
Perhaps we can start out on what we agree - that pollution, noise, congestion and danger are problems that need to be solved, and they need to be dealt with quite urgently. And I think we both think this should be done through methods that try to address inequality rather than make it worse.
newbie's view seems to be that the livable neighbourhood concept exacerbates structural inequality by creating a preferable environment for those living inside one of those zones compared to those outside of it.
A point about terminology - I am not going to go along with calling them "impermeable" neighbourhoods because that's not what they are. They have reduced permeability for motor traffic but increased permeability for pedestrians and cycles. The correct technical term, I think, is "filtered permeability". But I am going to go with "livable neighbourhood" for the purposes of this post. And what that means is: no part of the neighbourhood becomes inaccessible by car, but the routes through it are restricted, and the aim is to reduce the amount of traffic using streets within the zone to get between places outside of the zone.
So, back to the inequality issues. One is that traffic is displaced to main roads, and that the people who live on those roads are likely to the less well off. My answer to that doesn't just rely on the "traffic evaporation" theory, it is that by progressively adding more and more livable neighbourhoods, the overall amount of motor traffic in the city drops, and in the longer term that means improvements for everyone including those who live on the main roads.
Another is the idea that making somewhere a livable neighbourhood improves living conditions within that neighbourhood, at the expense of other neighbourhoods. Well, the point is to make living conditions better in that neighbourhood. If people see that people living inside one of these zones have things better, then surely the right response is to ask that their neighbourhood can have the same - not reject the concept. Of course there would be a problem if these schemes were only being applied to well-to-do neighborhoods, but I don't think that's the case. The "Railton" neighbourhood, for example, is not the only neighbourhood that is included in this batch of Brixton-based ones.
Then there is what I find the most hand-wavy of newbie's objections, which is to do with what seems to be a notion that the traffic controls disproportionately affect the least economically privileged. This is something to do with frustrating the desire of working class people to be able to drive around their local area freely. I find it hard to reconcile this with what statistics we have, which shows that car ownership in London is pretty strongly correlated with wealth. Basically I don't really accept it.
But anyway, I can attempt to understand newbie's proposed alternative approach in that context. That alternative approach involves things like extending the CC and low emission zones, road rationing, restrictions on engine size, a different way of allocating parking. In fact I'd agree with nearly all of these things - but I am not sure they would work on their own. I think the basic idea here is that you apply a strategy to London overall, one that is focused on somehow reducing car usage overall, but one that doesn't do the thing which the livable neighbourhoods do, which is dis-incentivising those short-medium range journeys between adjacent or nearly-adjacent neighbourhoods.
Because the strategy has to reduce overall traffic levels, in order to achieve the outcomes that we can both agree on, it must have to rely on massively reducing some other kind of journeys instead. What are they? Are they people commuting from outer London into the centre or near-centre? There's some level of that goes on, after all the livable neighbourhoods try and stop those kind of journeys using residential streets by removing those tempting cut throughs that avoid main roads and traffic lights and so on. But what proportion of the traffic is this, actually? (that statistic might be out there sonewhere, I'm not sure)
My basic question is, if certain types of journeys must not be "frustrated" for fear that they disproportionately disadvantage London's working class population, then what are the journeys that do need to be targetted instead and how do the alternative proposals achieve that? How, for example does extending the CC zone target these journeys without putting restrictions on the ones that must not be "frustrated"? Is the idea that if you're inside the CC zone, you can do what you want, and the restrictions are heavily weighted onto people who want to drive into that zone from outside? How do we know this would have any significant effect? Is there data that shows most of the traffic going up and down Brixton Hill is in fact people who have driven in from outside London, rather than people making internal journeys? That's not my understanding of London's traffic patterns - my understanding is that a substantial chunk of traffic is made up of people making relatively local journeys and journeys which would be perfectly feasible by other means.
It seems like wanting to have your cake and eat it - you want to reduce traffic and pollution and danger but without putting any restriction on the kind of journeys that make up that traffic.
It just simply does not work, to try and reduce traffic levels without restricting people in what journeys they can make.
The only alternative is to change the infrastructure so that everyone can have a car and use it as they wish - you can make sure that everyone, of every economic class has somewhere affordable to park that car and use it freely, and you can attempt to make sure that they can use it without causing too much local pollution. So you have low density housing, you have sprawling residential areas and then you have some main roads which you try and shield from the housing areas, you make them dual carriageways to make sure there's plenty of capacity and maybe have wide areas of land each side of them as buffer zones for noise and pollution. This is a kind of town planning we've already tried of course - it's called suburbia. This is why it's bizarre to describe these livable neighbourhoods as suburbanisation.
It just doesn't work somewhere like Brixton - it's literally impossible to let everyone have freedom to drive as they wish, unfrustrated by restrictions (unless you knock down a load of housing, which is what would have happened had the inner ring road gone ahead some decades ago).
As far as I can see, it's inevitable that you have to target local and semi-local car journeys if you want to reduce traffic levels.
The livable neighbourhood idea can achieve that. It has in its favour that (a) it is politically on the table at the moment and (b) you can implement it incrementally. Those two things make it pragmatically viable right now. That's why I support the concept in principle.
I don't see any alternatives on offer just now, and I also don't really see any theoretical alternatives that on their own would (a) reduce traffic sufficiently and (b) not involve "frustrating" local or semi-local car journeys.
For example, I quite like a lot of aspects of the "road rationing" concept. You decide the amount of overall traffic you want on the roads and then you divide that up between everyone equally. And then people who decide not to use their allowance can sell it to others. However people end up distributing it amongst themselves, in theory at least you know there's a maximum level of traffic that will result. But looking at this from a structural equality point of view, how does it produce a better outcome than what we have at the moment or what might be produced by a widespread livable neighbourhoods implementation? I don't see how it would be much different - the bulk of the allowance would end up in the hands of the better off, because they could afford to buy it up. Maybe you could make it non-tradeable - you get your allowance and you either use it or you don't. But then you are giving away something that only certain people can benefit from - the people who can afford to own a car, and the people who are able to drive in the first place. You are giving away a public good (street space or air quality for example) but you are not sharing it out equally - only the people that can use a car benefit from them. Which is much what we have at the moment - the people that mostly benefit from them are both a minority of the resident population and a portion of it heavily skewed to the most wealthy.
Perhaps we can start out on what we agree - that pollution, noise, congestion and danger are problems that need to be solved, and they need to be dealt with quite urgently. And I think we both think this should be done through methods that try to address inequality rather than make it worse.
newbie's view seems to be that the livable neighbourhood concept exacerbates structural inequality by creating a preferable environment for those living inside one of those zones compared to those outside of it.
A point about terminology - I am not going to go along with calling them "impermeable" neighbourhoods because that's not what they are. They have reduced permeability for motor traffic but increased permeability for pedestrians and cycles. The correct technical term, I think, is "filtered permeability". But I am going to go with "livable neighbourhood" for the purposes of this post. And what that means is: no part of the neighbourhood becomes inaccessible by car, but the routes through it are restricted, and the aim is to reduce the amount of traffic using streets within the zone to get between places outside of the zone.
So, back to the inequality issues. One is that traffic is displaced to main roads, and that the people who live on those roads are likely to the less well off. My answer to that doesn't just rely on the "traffic evaporation" theory, it is that by progressively adding more and more livable neighbourhoods, the overall amount of motor traffic in the city drops, and in the longer term that means improvements for everyone including those who live on the main roads.
Another is the idea that making somewhere a livable neighbourhood improves living conditions within that neighbourhood, at the expense of other neighbourhoods. Well, the point is to make living conditions better in that neighbourhood. If people see that people living inside one of these zones have things better, then surely the right response is to ask that their neighbourhood can have the same - not reject the concept. Of course there would be a problem if these schemes were only being applied to well-to-do neighborhoods, but I don't think that's the case. The "Railton" neighbourhood, for example, is not the only neighbourhood that is included in this batch of Brixton-based ones.
Then there is what I find the most hand-wavy of newbie's objections, which is to do with what seems to be a notion that the traffic controls disproportionately affect the least economically privileged. This is something to do with frustrating the desire of working class people to be able to drive around their local area freely. I find it hard to reconcile this with what statistics we have, which shows that car ownership in London is pretty strongly correlated with wealth. Basically I don't really accept it.
But anyway, I can attempt to understand newbie's proposed alternative approach in that context. That alternative approach involves things like extending the CC and low emission zones, road rationing, restrictions on engine size, a different way of allocating parking. In fact I'd agree with nearly all of these things - but I am not sure they would work on their own. I think the basic idea here is that you apply a strategy to London overall, one that is focused on somehow reducing car usage overall, but one that doesn't do the thing which the livable neighbourhoods do, which is dis-incentivising those short-medium range journeys between adjacent or nearly-adjacent neighbourhoods.
Because the strategy has to reduce overall traffic levels, in order to achieve the outcomes that we can both agree on, it must have to rely on massively reducing some other kind of journeys instead. What are they? Are they people commuting from outer London into the centre or near-centre? There's some level of that goes on, after all the livable neighbourhoods try and stop those kind of journeys using residential streets by removing those tempting cut throughs that avoid main roads and traffic lights and so on. But what proportion of the traffic is this, actually? (that statistic might be out there sonewhere, I'm not sure)
My basic question is, if certain types of journeys must not be "frustrated" for fear that they disproportionately disadvantage London's working class population, then what are the journeys that do need to be targetted instead and how do the alternative proposals achieve that? How, for example does extending the CC zone target these journeys without putting restrictions on the ones that must not be "frustrated"? Is the idea that if you're inside the CC zone, you can do what you want, and the restrictions are heavily weighted onto people who want to drive into that zone from outside? How do we know this would have any significant effect? Is there data that shows most of the traffic going up and down Brixton Hill is in fact people who have driven in from outside London, rather than people making internal journeys? That's not my understanding of London's traffic patterns - my understanding is that a substantial chunk of traffic is made up of people making relatively local journeys and journeys which would be perfectly feasible by other means.
It seems like wanting to have your cake and eat it - you want to reduce traffic and pollution and danger but without putting any restriction on the kind of journeys that make up that traffic.
It just simply does not work, to try and reduce traffic levels without restricting people in what journeys they can make.
The only alternative is to change the infrastructure so that everyone can have a car and use it as they wish - you can make sure that everyone, of every economic class has somewhere affordable to park that car and use it freely, and you can attempt to make sure that they can use it without causing too much local pollution. So you have low density housing, you have sprawling residential areas and then you have some main roads which you try and shield from the housing areas, you make them dual carriageways to make sure there's plenty of capacity and maybe have wide areas of land each side of them as buffer zones for noise and pollution. This is a kind of town planning we've already tried of course - it's called suburbia. This is why it's bizarre to describe these livable neighbourhoods as suburbanisation.
It just doesn't work somewhere like Brixton - it's literally impossible to let everyone have freedom to drive as they wish, unfrustrated by restrictions (unless you knock down a load of housing, which is what would have happened had the inner ring road gone ahead some decades ago).
As far as I can see, it's inevitable that you have to target local and semi-local car journeys if you want to reduce traffic levels.
The livable neighbourhood idea can achieve that. It has in its favour that (a) it is politically on the table at the moment and (b) you can implement it incrementally. Those two things make it pragmatically viable right now. That's why I support the concept in principle.
I don't see any alternatives on offer just now, and I also don't really see any theoretical alternatives that on their own would (a) reduce traffic sufficiently and (b) not involve "frustrating" local or semi-local car journeys.
For example, I quite like a lot of aspects of the "road rationing" concept. You decide the amount of overall traffic you want on the roads and then you divide that up between everyone equally. And then people who decide not to use their allowance can sell it to others. However people end up distributing it amongst themselves, in theory at least you know there's a maximum level of traffic that will result. But looking at this from a structural equality point of view, how does it produce a better outcome than what we have at the moment or what might be produced by a widespread livable neighbourhoods implementation? I don't see how it would be much different - the bulk of the allowance would end up in the hands of the better off, because they could afford to buy it up. Maybe you could make it non-tradeable - you get your allowance and you either use it or you don't. But then you are giving away something that only certain people can benefit from - the people who can afford to own a car, and the people who are able to drive in the first place. You are giving away a public good (street space or air quality for example) but you are not sharing it out equally - only the people that can use a car benefit from them. Which is much what we have at the moment - the people that mostly benefit from them are both a minority of the resident population and a portion of it heavily skewed to the most wealthy.
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Gramsci
Well-Known Member
Why would I want arguments about edginess and gentrification?
Winot
I wholeheartedley agree with your viewpoint
You've touched on this in your final paragraph, but just to underline that well-off drivers can buy their way out of all of the things listed below as part of the alternative approach:
by paying the congestion charge, paying for a new low emission car (e.g. an EV), buying a second smaller car for urban driving and paying high parking charges.
The beauty of schemes which restrict access is that the rich cannot just pay extra to avoid them. They are far more progressive than the other approaches listed.
by paying the congestion charge, paying for a new low emission car (e.g. an EV), buying a second smaller car for urban driving and paying high parking charges.
The beauty of schemes which restrict access is that the rich cannot just pay extra to avoid them. They are far more progressive than the other approaches listed.
Gramsci
Well-Known Member
So what happens when a local community decides it does not want to be part of a "liveable neighborhood".
Or it wants parts of it and not others? As is looking likely in Railton?
What you haven't dealt with is how its decided.
If this is to be done incrementally through the Liveable neighbourhood concept using consultation its imo likely that some but not all road "filtering" will be accepted.
Getting community engagement and agreement is big part of how Council/ TFL say they want to do this.
sleaterkinney
Well-Known Member
I was speaking generally.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
It'll get implemented in a patchy and messy way, like the way most things happen in practice. That in my view will still be better than basically nothing of substance changing in the near future, which is the realistic alternative.
There may be some places where there is sufficient opposition and/or sufficient council incompetence that it fails, like what happened in LJ. There will be some places that it succeeds. In many ways I think the best way to persuade people that it's a good idea is to let them see what other neighbourhoods, the early adopters if you like, are actually like post implementation. I think that is one way to reduce fears about what will actually happen as a result.
The 20mph limit got implemented throughout London in a haphazard way - it certainly wasn't ideal at all, but eventually we have got to a point where it'll be London-wide. Getting there that way was better than never getting there at all.
thebackrow
Considerably more Brixton.
Indeed. One approach would be to see who shouts the loudest (while I'm not denying there are definitely some very unhappy people on Shakespeare Road north of the Railway Bridge, none of us have any real way of knowing if there is unanimity of all the residents in opposition or if it's just a small, but very vocal, minority).*
Another would be for an 'expert' to look at the borough as a whole and determine what the function of each road should be so as to provide safely for all traffic types and create a network that works best for the borough as a whole. That seems to be the intention of Lambeth's Low Traffic Neighbourhood Plan (Looks like a final version but who knows given can't find the outbound link) - https://s3-eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/commonplace-customer-assets/streathamhilllowtrafficneighbourhoodproposals/TSIP Appendix B Low Traffic Neighbourhoods Plan.pdf where theres a grid of different street types.
That seems to tie up with them defining 'Healthy Routes' where walking and cycling are prioritised. If you're going to say that Shakespeare Road IS NOT going to be the healthy route between Herne Hill and Loughborough Junction, and the residents there have overwhelmingly decided that they instead they want to live on the 'main' route for motor traffic, then I suppose Lambeth could look at swapping some of the functions.
There seemed to be some of that sort of choice offered to Loughborough Junction in the Brixton Liveable Neighbourhood pages. eg along the lines of "We need to make it safe for walking and cycling through the Loughbourough Estate. You could have a low traffic neighbourhood with lots of improvements across the area OR we could put protected cycle tracks on Barrington Road (which would eat up all the budget so there wouldn't be an improvements made more widely)".
COVID has detroyed TFLs finances so who knows if any of the fancy schemes will ever be funded now. At the moment 'quick and cheap' is all thats on offer.
* general rule seems to be that for most things the majority pretty much shrug their shoulders and are fairly 'whatever' and then a minority strongly in favour and another strongly opposed. Council elections typically have a turnout of less than 30%. Make of that what you will
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Quick & cheap is better than endless consultations followed by no action
Gramsci
Well-Known Member
This does comes across as saying society would be better if it was run by experts. A Technocracy. Not corrupt but a civil service educated to run and plan society. Most people would shrug their shoulders and accept it. People don't vote and aren't that interested as long as things tick along.
Rushy
basically a scrotum
I don't disagree with this. All the more reason to make sure the early schemes are models of cooperation and consent, reflecting local needs and ambitions rather than something dreamed up in an office as being good for the ungrateful and unsophisticated residents.
Rushy
basically a scrotum
Interestingly, St Matthews is pretty self sufficient parking-wise. The estates as well as a number of the privates homes have a lot of off street parking. It could cope with far less on road parking space if it were not for becoming the car park for Your New Car Free Town Hall. Apart from ending the use of the residential street as a car park for Your New Car Free Town Hall (and others), I would actually welcome a scheme which genuinely improved livability. I'd be happy for cars to be deprioritised and slowed and separated from pedestrians and other pedestrian uses (such as playing). What has been proposed does not do that at all. Even a one way single lane street with small areas of perpendicular parking (for example). Actually I think something like the dead space between the gates could be a positive feature outside the residents hall, if properly thought through. Given that some residents no longer have any option but to use a sometimes dangerous junction onto a red route, I'd improve that junction. Or close that junction instead of the middle of the road. All illustrations to answer your question, rather than concrete ideas.
More than aggrieved, I am fed up. Having been a real enthusiast for working with the council when I first moved here, I am utterly jaded. Does it show?
teuchter
je suis teuchter
I'm all ears for the things we can do that will result in Lambeth engaging in a meaningful process of consultation that takes proper account of local needs and ambitions. Me I've attended and tried to contribute to various consultation evenings the results of which never appear. I've voted for councillors who aren't part of the sitting administration. I try and post up info about any of these schemes on here so that as many people as possible get to see them and express their toughts, which is why I started this thread. I've no idea really what can be done to change what seems to be an embedded organisational culture of incompetence and inaccountability. I do have some faith that somewhere in the system there are people who have done their homework and have genuine intentions to improve stuff, transport wise, for all sections of the population. I don't assume they hold residents' opinions as unsophisticated or irrelevant. I imagine they are trying to do stuff in spite of Lambeth's clunking processes, not exploiting those processes to push ill considered agendas. Maybe that's just because I'm naively biased in my judgements as a result of the general driving principle being one that I think is the right one.
I don't have any doubt that the St Matthews one could be much better implemented - I've not made any comment on the specific design of it. It's a bit of an oddball one as you point out, and in terms of the details of what would work best, your opinion will be much better informed than mine.
As for the dead spaces between the gates there and anywhere else... An obvious use that ocurred to me would be to stick in a bunch of those cycle hangars which provide very affordable storage space and are completely oversubscribed with waiting lists of hundreds or thousands of local residents. But also, as this is supposedly at a trial stage I can see why you might want to put anything too fixed yet.
newbie
undisambiguated
Thanks for an interesting post. I can't quote it in full, too many characters, even so I'm not sure I've done it justice. There are points of agreement, there are points of terminology, and there are points where we diverge.
It is indeed the only plan on the table, and that matters. In a different context the Hostile Environment is the only... Point being about input assumptions and outcome objectives, whose interests are served, who gets to choose and who has that choice inflicted on them. Implementing a poor plan, with neither proper consideration nor adequate scrutiny, and without properly consulting those at the sharp end isn't a great idea, whether it's the only plan on offer or not. I'm not going to labour the point, today is Windrush Day I hope a simple but imprecise analogy isn't going to cause a huge side track..
I'm sure "livable neighbourhood" is a preferred term, from the perspective of the inside resident as well as campaigners and consultants, ; it's only those seeking motorised mobility who'll see the area as impermeable. 'Livable' is necessarily viewed from the resident perspective... somewhere upthread Blenheim Gardens estate was offered as an example of livable, car free conditions. It occurred to me afterwards that of course some years after it was built up popped these signs.
So 'livable' is defined by and for those on the inside, and can change over time. For motorised outsiders "the right response is to ask that their neighbourhood can have the same", rather than notice that planters or No Through Road signs plonked on the streets make them impermeable. Or perhaps unwelcoming. The genteel postcode gang analogy isn't that far off. Terminology matters.
It's perfectly good to describe the suburbs in terms of dual carriageways, buffer zones and sprawling low density housing, until you start to wonder if those are the aspects of suburban living that some access restrictions might introduce into the innercity. Was that really what you think I meant in contrasting the vibrant innercity with suburbia? Bizarre indeed. Another perception of the suburbs might be of peaceful, quiet dormitory streets more or less unused except during the daily migrations, interspersed with bustling arteries that all traffic inevitably oozes onto. 'Peace and quiet' is the predominant sentiment from the Victorian streets, as expressed on the pins- the complaints are about speed, noise, danger, the proposed solution less traffic. The clear vision is 'peace and quiet', buffered from the vibrant bustle. If 'suburban' isn't an adequate description, You could suggest something better.
I can't prove it but I have a notion the same charge, attempted suburbanisation, was made in one of the church bell/noisy pub disputes where strident incomers tried to change old local habits. In cases like that most people laugh at them.
Pollution- the benefit for all most often cited on this thread- is certainly mentioned on the pins, but it's almost as background as climate change in the hierarchy of resident complaints. I'm hesitant to suggest that pollution is being used as cover, but in the campaigning it's a far more prominent argument than on the pins. Interestingly this is happening just as electric cars are coming of age and diesel is much less of a factor. In a few years time the pollution argument will have significantly less force.
Car ownership keeps being mentioned. Am I the only one who notes that outside the rush hour the clear majority of cars moving around the backstreets have cab stickers in the window? I guess most car owners have moral highground, non car owning mates who twitch if their cab takes more than 3 minutes to arrive. The whole point of me repeatedly mentioning Uber and Zip is that ownership isn't particularly meaningful any more. Peer to peer carhire is growing too, they don't have stickers I don't think.
The short journey chunk: sure y'all want to stop them, yet my repeated questions about who defines which journeys don't 'need' to be made remains unanswered. You just restate that they're all 'perfectly feasible by other means'.
Is taking kids out acceptable, even if taking them to/from school isn't? Or the elderly? Going to and from work? Dropping off stuff? Visiting someone? Running someone home or to the tube? Carrying tools, equipment, materials for work? Travelling laterally across South London? What about supermarket shopping, you want to frustrate people from using their own car, so should they use a cab or or book a delivery truck slot instead, or is everyone supposed to walk or cycle? Everyone, undifferentiated by age, ability, confidence? Who decides this stuff? You, apparently, by blanket increase in frustration. Because you don't approve and you know that the journey would be perfectly feasible by other means.
Yet despite my prompting you don't mention enormous SUVs with huge engines, and only in passing note those who choose to work tens of miles from where they live, taking advantage of both higher London wages and cheaper country/suburban living and who drive through where we live twice a day. Commuters are a 'chunk' of London traffic for wehich, IMHO, there is little excuse. You also don't mention all the vans delivering online purchases either, Amazon, Waitrose, vegbox, ebay or Tesco they're such an obvious 'chunk' that's relatively recent and keeps increasing year on year.
I'm not sure which 'you' that is, but it's not me. The whole point about backstreets like St Matthews Rd is that, parking aside, they're of no use or interest to the vast majority of commuters, they're used by and for locals as thoroughfares, to get about when the arteries are in use by heavier and/or longer distance users and buses.
So no, the scheme doesn't 'have' to target locals.
You're fairly honest that your fundamentalist objective is to ban cars, that personal mobility isn't something you personally value and you don't think others should either (despite clear evidence that they do). That your personal age, health and interests can be accommodated without a car so everyone else's should too. I get that, it's a reasonable if extreme position, but I'm not clear why it's just the local 'chunk' of the overall traffic you want to target.
Of course there would. We are agreed.
Oh! There are BLN neighbourhoods that aren't well to do? Where are they?
That's the closest you get to mentioning gentrification. It's like when thebackrow accused me of 'generic smears' for daring to mention that this might reward current genteel owner occupiers and give landlords an opportunity to put rents up. It's like you want to pretend it's possible to discuss any aspect of social policy in Brixton over the last couple of decades without referencing gentrification and social cleansing.
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newbie
undisambiguated
I'm shocked and surprised. I've known plenty of people dip their toes into local politics and/or try to influence the council, and they've all been entirely unscathed by the experience. Entirely.More than aggrieved, I am fed up. Having been a real enthusiast for working with the council when I first moved here, I am utterly jaded. Does it show?
Rushy
basically a scrotum
teuchter
je suis teuchter
I've had to split this over three posts:
Put bluntly, I just don't have the energy to write out why I think it's an invalid analogy.
- Nowhere will you find me saying that there are no problems with bicycle/pedestrian interaction. Anyone designing something like Blenheim Gardens (where motor vehicles and pedestrians are completely segregated) needs to think about providing routes for cyclists so that they do not have an excuse for using routes that are intended for pedestrians. But a zone of Victorian streets converted to a "livable neighbourhood" is completely different - you already have a segregation between road and pavement. Why do many cyclists go on the pavement? Because they don't feel safe on the road. Remove the busy motor traffic from the roadway and they no longer have an excuse nor motivation to go on the pavement.
- You misquote me. I said: If people see that people living inside one of these zones have things better, then surely the right response is to ask that their neighbourhood can have the same - not reject the concept. There is a crucial "if" at the start of the sentence. Nor do I say anything about "motorised outsiders". I am talking about people living in other areas, whether they are car users or not, who think that a livable neighbourhood scheme seems to have improved things for people inside it. If they think that planters or no through signs look "unwelcoming", then that's what they think. I don't think most people have that reaction. Maybe I am wrong, and a lot of people find some plants, and a street without loads of speeding cars on it threatening and unwelcoming.
I don't think that this will create "dormitory streets more or less unused except during the daily migrations". Yes, that may be what you see in suburbia, where people's routines are much more likely to be car centric, and much more likely to separate where they come home largely to sleep, and where they go for work, entertainment or socialising. Somewhere like Brixton is not like that at all - people are much more likely to be walking to the shop or the bus stop or the tube or the pub or the cinema. Reducing motor traffic does not stop people doing this - if anything it encourages them to do this. Honestly, I don't see how anyone who knows Brixton can believe it's likely that somewhere like Railton Road is going to become some kind of dead zone as a result of a reduction in traffic. I've said it elsewhere, but one of the really visible things during "peak lockdown" was that more people were doing things like sitting out on their doorsteps. In my immediate locality there are people that I now recognise because I've nodded hello to them in passing them sitting in their front garden. Now the traffic is back, a lot of this has stopped again.
Put bluntly, I just don't have the energy to write out why I think it's an invalid analogy.
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- Nowhere will you find me saying that there are no problems with bicycle/pedestrian interaction. Anyone designing something like Blenheim Gardens (where motor vehicles and pedestrians are completely segregated) needs to think about providing routes for cyclists so that they do not have an excuse for using routes that are intended for pedestrians. But a zone of Victorian streets converted to a "livable neighbourhood" is completely different - you already have a segregation between road and pavement. Why do many cyclists go on the pavement? Because they don't feel safe on the road. Remove the busy motor traffic from the roadway and they no longer have an excuse nor motivation to go on the pavement.
- You misquote me. I said: If people see that people living inside one of these zones have things better, then surely the right response is to ask that their neighbourhood can have the same - not reject the concept. There is a crucial "if" at the start of the sentence. Nor do I say anything about "motorised outsiders". I am talking about people living in other areas, whether they are car users or not, who think that a livable neighbourhood scheme seems to have improved things for people inside it. If they think that planters or no through signs look "unwelcoming", then that's what they think. I don't think most people have that reaction. Maybe I am wrong, and a lot of people find some plants, and a street without loads of speeding cars on it threatening and unwelcoming.
I don't think that this will create "dormitory streets more or less unused except during the daily migrations". Yes, that may be what you see in suburbia, where people's routines are much more likely to be car centric, and much more likely to separate where they come home largely to sleep, and where they go for work, entertainment or socialising. Somewhere like Brixton is not like that at all - people are much more likely to be walking to the shop or the bus stop or the tube or the pub or the cinema. Reducing motor traffic does not stop people doing this - if anything it encourages them to do this. Honestly, I don't see how anyone who knows Brixton can believe it's likely that somewhere like Railton Road is going to become some kind of dead zone as a result of a reduction in traffic. I've said it elsewhere, but one of the really visible things during "peak lockdown" was that more people were doing things like sitting out on their doorsteps. In my immediate locality there are people that I now recognise because I've nodded hello to them in passing them sitting in their front garden. Now the traffic is back, a lot of this has stopped again.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
Whatever - I don't think it's analogous.
It gets a focus in campaigning because it's one of the things that you can get almost anyone to agree is a problem. For me it's important but not the only reason to reduce motor dominance. If people are mentioning other things, like social effects and misallocation of space, then that's good news, because these other more insidious effects are the ones that can be harder to persuade people are things that can be improved. EVs and reduction of diesel vehicles will help to reduce pollution, yes. They won't solve it, because internal combustion engines aren't the only source of pollution - it's been argued that they aren't even the main cause. And a reduction in pollution doesn't invalidate any of the other arguments for reducing car use.
Not something I especially notice about the cars round me. If I'm a moral highground person, well, I'd like to see more regulation of Uber et al, because excessive use can undermine public transport, especially when it is priced below cost because it's being subsidised by venture capital in a long-game effort to do exactly that - undermine public transport. I refuse to have the Uber app on my phone. Ubers etc are known to cause a congestion problem in central London in particular.
That's not really true - if you own a car, you make very different journey choices compared to someone who doesn't own a car but has access to something like Zip. That's why I think Zip in principle is a good thing - it encourages people to not own a car.
No, everyone is not supposed to walk or cycle. Haven't we gone through all this before? By changing the relative convenience of modes, you shift the proportion of journeys made on them - you do not make anything impossible. All of the journey types you mention, can still be done by car, by those who have that option. Yes, they will be deliberately "frustrated" in doing so. Someone who wants to drive to the supermarket will have the frustration that they have to spend 5 more minutes in their warm car listening to the radio. In return, the person who has to walk to the local shop because they don't have a car, gets a little less frustrated by the time they have to spend standing in the rain waiting to cross multiple busy roads to get there and back.
You ask me what all these people are supposed to do. The answer is dead simple - what they want.
My question is about all the people who don't and can't have a car. What are they supposed to do, in the world where we must not dare "frustrate" those using cars? Stand meekly waiting for the green man at the traffic lights? Tramp across the car park that's in front of the supermarket, which they must cross to get from the shop door to the bus stop?
teuchter
je suis teuchter
What do you want me to say about SUVs? I'd be rid of them yesterday if I could. Like you, I would like to frustrate their owners.
Right then, I'll get out the statistics, to the extent that I can find relevant ones. Here.
A selection:
- About 83% of car trips in London are made by people who live in London.
- 66% of trips made by Londoners are under 5km in length.
So, yes, there is a chunk of traffic caused by people who don't live in London. I would like to remove that chunk too. I would like to understand (a) what proportion of traffic somewhere like Brixton comes from these people and (b) what proportion can be persuaded to stop doing so by pricing them out. Any more info on this would be very welcome. My feeling is that the profile of traffic coming through Brixton will see rather less than 17% of journeys being made by people driving in from outside town, because my understanding of what people who do that do, is they drive into outer London to somewhere they can park near a station (which is generaly further out than here), and do the remainder by public transport. I would like to understand this better. Maybe digging into the source info for that technical paper would produce some answers. But it would seem like maybe a 10% reduction might be a realistic best case scenario. Is that enough? I don't think so.
I don't think you can ignore that huge chunk - 66% of London resident journeys - which are less than 5km.
Yes, they need to be dealt with sensibly. I don't think they should be totally discouraged, because they do provide a useful service for those who can't do their shopping on foot or by public transport, and don't have access to a car or someone who can drive them around. The fewer unnecessary journeys there are, the more space there is for necessary ones and I think there is a good argument that delivery services should be counted in the latter category. Some cities have a strategy of allocating specific delivery spots on all streets - which can be done by re-allocating space given over to parking of private vehicles. This helps reduce double-parking of delivery vehicles which can cause various problems. I am certainly interested in any schemes which consolidate deliveries into a minimal number of vehicles, and which provide local hubs which people can collect parcels etc from on foot.
I think it does. I think the statistics show that it does, if you want to achieve a substantial change. I dunno about the specific example of St Matthews Rd, as I said above, it's a bit of an oddball one.
No, that's all complete nonsense, and rubbish like this makes me feel it's a waste of time typing out patient replies. I don't see how you can write this if you have made a genuine attempt to understand my position, and aren't trying to deliberately misrepresent me in a dishonest manner.
Personal mobility is something that I absolutely value - that's the whole reason I care about this. My view is that car dependence reduces personal mobility, and it disproportionately reduces mobility for the less privileged. You might disagree about that, but that doesn't mean you can decide that I therefore do not value personal mobility. Nothing I have written on this supports that. I also have never said that just because my interests can be accommodated without a car, everyone else's should be too. I have repeatedly explained how - in my opinion - people who do not have my privileges of health and age are disadvantaged by car dominance. I have also never said it's "just the local chunk of overall traffic" I want to target.
So would you like to apologise for what you have said?
I don't think of what has been designated as the "Loughborough Neighbourhood" as particularly well to do. Do you?
This is after all the neighbourhood where the previous attempts at road changes were criticised as beeing imposed on a working class area by gentrifying outsiders.
No, I don't think it's possible to ignore the phenomenon of gentrification in Brixton, and I don't ignore it.
thebackrow
Considerably more Brixton.
Interesting. Both the BID and the Market Traders appear to be pushing for a large part of central Brixton to be pedestrianised. So they don't seem to think that the "vibrancy" that attracts people to the area comes from the presence of lots of motor vehicles
www.brixtonbuzz.com
Theres a lot of micro level analysis going on in this thread. Is 'north Shakespeare Road" poorer than south Shakespeare? Ward by ward analysis suggests the assumptions about well-to-do areas are kind of splitting hairs. North Shakespeare may be marginally less well off than Herne Hill but it's only in the next band here and that's likely mostly influenced by it being grouped with the Southwyck estate (which is no different to Tulse Hill, Brixton Hill at a ward level).
Source - which might also give some context. These first changes are not happening in isolation. They're not the only LTNs that are coming.
The revolution will be pedestrianised – the commercial argument for closing roads in Brixton
July the 4th is the date when those of us in hospitality are told that with proper safety procedures in place we can throw the doors open. For Brixton, this is immense with the wealth of pubs, bars…
www.brixtonbuzz.com
Theres a lot of micro level analysis going on in this thread. Is 'north Shakespeare Road" poorer than south Shakespeare? Ward by ward analysis suggests the assumptions about well-to-do areas are kind of splitting hairs. North Shakespeare may be marginally less well off than Herne Hill but it's only in the next band here and that's likely mostly influenced by it being grouped with the Southwyck estate (which is no different to Tulse Hill, Brixton Hill at a ward level).
Source - which might also give some context. These first changes are not happening in isolation. They're not the only LTNs that are coming.
snowy_again
Slush
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