• THE council is currently consulting local residents on a proposed “liveable neighbourhood” (LN) across south Islington’s Barnsbury and Laycock wards.

The area is a large one as an online map shows. See: https://www.islington.gov.uk/roads/people-friendly-streets/liveable-neighbourhoods/barnsbury-laycock?ref=low-traffic-barnsbury-st-marys

There have been several letters in the Tribune and elsewhere regarding limiting traffic-flow along Liverpool Road, misleadingly referred to as “like a motorway, 24/7” in a recent LN Zoom meeting, but nothing about reducing vehicular movements along the LN’s four main boundary roads, Caledonian Road, Pentonville Road, Upper Street and Holloway Road. This is odd, as these are the principal entry points for most of the traffic coming into the area.

As they are Transport for London-controlled red routes, liaison with City Hall will be necessary. But it would be strange if the capital’s transport authority refused to consider such proposals, bus-travel being one of the immediate beneficiaries: less congestion, better timetable-keeping and, not least, less stress on drivers who face an awful job during peak commuting and school-run hours, often receiving abuse from frustrated passengers.

Islington’s executive member for transport and environment, Councillor Rowena Champion, has an engineering background and surely understands that restricting boundary-road traffic to public transport and other active-travel modes is essential to halt long-term rat-running through the proposed LN area.

She will also know that the boundary roads are the area’s principal shopping thoroughfares, where families often shop with young children, the demographic most susceptible to pollution.

And, lest we forget, some of our neighbours live along these heavily-polluted routes, a fact often obscured by the use of “residential” roads to refer to non-TfL routes.

As the council repeatedly states, it wants “a greener, healthier borough”.

This can’t be restricted to the largely better-off fortunate enough to live in quieter, local, streets if Islington is to live up to its declared intent of being a “fairness” borough.

Inevitably there will be naysayers opposed to such restrictions along “main roads” but the challenge must be met if London is not to grind to a halt.

We must ditch the thinking which says we can’t do anything about it, that traffic needs to get into and across central London…

There are ways of achieving this end.

As Benjamin Franklin – scientist as well as politician – once said: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail” (with thanks @PeterFrankopan, author of The Earth Transformed; An Untold History).

Failure to limit traffic-flow along the TfL routes is to fail to address the sources of unnecessary traffic through Barnsbury/ Laycock, the very point of the LN idea.

MEG HOWARTH
Ellington Street, N7