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

• SO Lucy Facer suggests “…by implementing people-friendly streets we are encouraged to swap short car journeys with active travel…”, (People-friendly streets will be of real benefit, August 28).

An excellent initiative, but unfortunately one which is undermined by the council’s “roamer parking” scheme.

Introduced to encourage permit-holding residents to drive and park anywhere in the borough, seven days a week, between 11am and 3pm – hard to believe, but enabling visits to the Upper Street’s cafés was the example given by the then-leader of the council – it’s time for this absurd car-centric policy to go.

Not only for public-health reasons – cleaner air, active travel – but in order to ensure that emergency-service response times, highlighted by your correspondent, are protected to the maximum under the people-friendly streets, aka LTNs (Low-Traffic Neighbourhoods).

Driving around the borough to avoid parking charges must become a practice from the past. Free parking for electric vehicles should also be consigned to the borough’s transport-policy waste-bin.

People-friendly streets means fewer, not newer parked-up cars. Nor is there any place in a progressive borough for subsidising the better-off among the less than 30 per cent of Islington households that owns or has access to a private vehicle.

MEG HOWARTH
Ellington Street, N7