‘We need urgent measures for main roads’

• TRANSPORT for London is directly responsible for the redesigned Highbury Corner, not Islington Council, and it would be TfL who would adjust the layout, (Secondary main routes must reopen to tackle the gridlock, December 10).

I, too, am tired of sitting in jams on buses on St Paul’s Road, surrounded by drivers, often one to a car or van, who are adding significantly to the traffic jams, while 50 of us on the 19 are held up.

Highbury Corner’s new layout has caused traffic tailbacks in all directions and these often get blamed, wrongly, on the people-friendly streets trials.

Drivers using minor roads did not begin with the recent changes to Highbury Corner or with the introduction of the road trials. However millions more miles were driven through Islington in 2019 than in 2013.

Drivers have been driving down my cut-through road with growing frequency, until we reached the stage where our street was often gridlocked, generally busy for 18 hours a day, and hang the consequences for we residents and children in terms of pollution, noise, even fights between frustrated drivers, and road danger.

Your correspondent claims it will be clever to open up these roads taken out of the drivers’ equations by the trials. Around 90 per cent of residents live on the borough’s minor residential roads. They have suffered enough.

Researchers from King’s College London and Imperial College (Thousands of COPD & asthma hospitalisations due to London’s poor air) found that between 2014 and 2016, more than 4,000 Londoners were hospitalised because air pollution worsened their asthma or lung conditions.

As Andrew Willett implies (Change driving habits, December 10), the selfishness is staggering. In the face of damaged health and deaths from pollution, and an existential climate crisis threat, the clamour is for unfettered rights to keep polluting. Shameful.

“Secondary main routes”? I despair. We second-class citizens, second to the car or van driver, on the buses in the traffic jams, or in the council houses or private homes on your correspondent Alison’s proposed “secondary main routes”, are sick of being “secondary”.

Suggesting we go backwards is profoundly anti-people, anti-the environment, anti-children, anti-all we living on Islington’s minor roads. We need urgent measures for main roads.

Finally, on the revamp of Highbury Corner, TfL’s starting aim to improve one of London’s most dangerous junctions, and make walking and cycling easier around it, was a noble aim, and has been partly achieved.

Let’s call for major tweaks to prevent cars being stuck part-way across junctions and to solve the other real issues there for pedestrians too.

D BYRNE, N5