‘Any filtering or road closures increase journey times for anyone who relies on cars and vans’

• THE letter from John Hartley referring to Islington Council’s Barnsbury and Laycock liveable neighbourhood interactive map consultation is a typical example of how the council and its pro-LTN, low traffic neighbourhood, allies continue to mislead residents (Poll shows LTNs have the public’s support in capital, August 11), as another of your readers has already pointed out (Can we rely on the survey results? Tribune, August 18).

Keep Islington Moving carried out our own detailed analysis of the interactive map comments and you can read our findings at: https://keepislingtonmoving.com/data#mapcomments

Our overarching conclusion was that any quantitative analysis of the comments is meaningless since the mapping consultation was deeply flawed.

As John Hartley admits, very many comments were cut-and-paste duplicates (we estimate that only 200 to 300 out of a total of 2,328 were unique).

Moreover it is obvious that if people are invited to make comments tied to their particular street many will claim opportunistically that it has too much traffic and should be closed down or “filtered”.

Unfortunately this has proved to result in the traffic and its pollution simply being diverted onto neighbouring streets or already congested main roads where less advantaged residents live and small businesses try to make a living. Offord Road is a classic example of this.

Many comments called for this to be filtered, ignoring the fact that it has been an important east-west thoroughfare for at least the past century; and residents knew this when they bought a house there, presumably at a knock-down price.

But an equal number of comments pointed out the hypocrisy of this and called for Offord Road to remain open at all costs.

Here’s an example: “It is simply untrue to state this street [Offord Road] is the most congested – that unfortunate prize goes to the Liverpool Road. Offord is a vital east-west road which should remain open to prevent further increase on the chaos that is the Liverpool Road.

“Efforts by a privileged few to collude with the council to place even more pressure on vulnerable residents on offset streets are recklessly dangerous. New efforts to claim this street is too narrow are demonstrably untrue. We all have a responsibility to share the burdens of traffic and placing them onto one artery is cruel and callous.”

Careful, qualitative, analysis of the map comments yields many such insights, documented in our report, and we hope the council will take note.

The fact is that LTNs just don’t work. Any filtering or road closures increase journey times for anyone who relies on cars and vans, which is particularly bad for the old, the infirm, most traders and small businesses, and their customers.

And filtering causes congestion and pollution on those main roads which are vital to a neighbourhood’s thriving local economy.

To end on a more encouraging note, the recently published LN, liveable neighbourhood, proposals for the Cally were surprisingly sensible and involved just one instance of filtering of a relatively minor road.

We remain hopeful that Islington Council will analyse the Barnsbury interactive map comments in a careful, unbiased, and open manner and that their LN proposals for Barnsbury & Laycock, expected soon, will be similarly free of LTN measures.

NICK COLLIN, N1
www.keepislingtonmoving.com
www.keepbarnsburymoving.com