Detail from a council appeal for views on the creation of ‘people-friendly streets’

• AS an Islington resident of over 30 years I share the dismay and anger of many over the virtually totalitarian method and general incompetence of local Low Traffic Neighbourhood implementation.

I am thankful I no longer have school-age children, do not need a vehicle for work, and am not yet needing regular transport to get medical attention.

Whole sections of our neighbourhood have been sectioned off, as though by a Berlin wall; and any traffic needing to traverse from west to east now has to negotiate the bottleneck that is the ill-conceived new Highbury Corner.

The council have been scurrying around trying to mitigate the effects of poor signage and inadequate warnings, with one hand, even as they collect revenue from unfortunate drivers falling foul of the new system with the other.

There has been no meaningful consultation with the people they purport to represent so, unsurprisingly, there are many distraught accounts from those, some in very difficult circumstances whose roads and neighbourhoods have been arbitrarily chopped up, causing much anger and distress.

As well as dividing the borough it has also divided the community. The council survey is disingenuously loaded, suggesting if you do not agree with the LTN as it stands you are pro pollution.

The two sides can be characterised as:

a) sanctimonious proponents and supporters (you might even call them nimbies); and b) selfish car users who care little for the environment.

This is an absurd over-simplification of a much more nuanced debate, and it doesn’t need to be this way.

Virtually every resident would support the aim of reducing pollution, yet the council have alienated a considerable section of the community by refusing to engage with them in how to improve quality of life and health while at the same time realistically addressing the needs of people who need to move freely within the borough, and indeed the wider city of which it is part.

I need hardly add, yet I feel I must, that any statistics derived from this hasty and ill-conceived project are likely to be flawed due to the fact of its imposition during an unprecedented lockdown.

JOHN KEANE
Highbury Hill