• WE would like to thank Islington Council for all they are doing to keep essential services running under the current difficult circumstances.

While acknowledging this, council planning also now needs to be directed to adjusting our streets.

During the lockdown, pedestrians are having to walk in the road to maintain the two-metre distancing rule. As the lockdown eases, the volume of people needing space for walking and cycling will rise.

While the vast majority of people are trying their best to distance themselves physically in many areas this is already impossible. No one wants their child to be walking on a crowded pavement or cycling on a dangerous road.

Our streets are currently markedly quieter and freer from pollution, but speeding motor traffic has doubled and vehicles are forcing the most vulnerable off the carriageway and onto pavements.

The demand for space for people, not cars, has never been greater and now is the time to reverse the prioritisation of vehicles in our public realm.

Less than 26 per cent of Islington residents have access to a vehicle, yet road space is disproportionately allocated to parked and moving cars.

With so many residents without a garden, outdoor space must be shared more fairly – the value of nature, as mentioned in the council’s own biodiversity action plan, cannot be underestimated.

The council have promised liveable neighbourhoods (Low Traffic Neighbourhoods – LTNs) in all wards by 2025. An effective and easily implemented way of creating an LTN is to put planters at key junctions (ref trial at Highbury Fields).

Introducing filtering on some of our roads now would provide much required breathing space for people in this time of crisis. It would also give residents a taste of what life could be like in a liveable neighbourhood post-virus.

These schemes will obviously have to be done in consultation with the emergency vehicles to ensure they have access, but this should not be an insuperable obstacle, as existing LTNs in Hackney and Waltham Forest show.

Hackney has announced that it will be introducing temporary schemes which could be made permanent later. So Islington please follow their example.

CYCLE ISLINGTON
FOSSIL FREE ISLINGTON,
ISLINGTON CLEAN AIR PARENTS
& ISLINGTON LIVING STREETS