Shape Better Streets Upper Norwood

Auckland Road in Utopia

It looks like Auckland Road will become the backbone of an experimental ANPR controlled Healthy Streets scheme. But instead of a watered-down 2^nd generation Low Traffic Neighbourhood, how would we design it if we genuinely wanted to demonstrate what a people friendly neighbourhood could really look like?

Croydon Council has talented highway engineers who must be praying to do more than just put in ANPRs. What would they deliver if they worked in the Netherlands, Denmark, or Germany?

LTNs and Equalities

Opponents of LTNs, in this area and elsewhere, frequently assert that they have adverse impacts on the groups in our society who are legally protected under equalities legislation. This blog takes a dispassionate look at the evidence and finds these claims at best unsubstantiated, and in some cases completely unsupported, on the balance of evidence.

Want your own LTN?

Fed up with rat-run traffic making your neighbourhood unsafe? Here’s a few ideas about how to petition the council to install a Low Traffic Neighbourhood or other filtering options.

Bla bla bla climate change

It is yet to be seen whether climate change will become a deciding factor in the future of Crystal Palace LTN.

As Greta Thunberg recently pointed out:

Telraam traffic counters coming to Crystal Palace

A local initiative is taking off to inform the debate around traffic management and policy in Crystal Palace. Volunteers are installing a number of stand-alone traffic counters using Raspberry Pi devices running Telraam software. This is an open source traffic-counting system that has been developed by a team in Belgium specifically to promote citizen science-led traffic policy.

Open letter to Councillor Muhammad Ali

1 February 2021

Dear Muhammad

CRYSTAL PALACE AND SOUTH NORWOOD LTN

Residents and supporters of our campaign were dismayed to read your announcement that the current LTN measures will be taken out before the implementation of the planned new experimental layout, and, indeed, before there is any clarity about the timetable on which it will be implemented. I am sure you realise, but I must put on record, that a return to being a high traffic neighbourhood will have a devastating impact on well-being and quality of life for residents, particularly many with protected characteristics, and reverse the enormous progress which has been made in encouraging active travel.

Theory of relativity

For centuries, we were quite happy to think that time was constant until Einstein spoilt everything by advancing his theory that time was relative. But it has taken the advent of our local LTN for oppositionists to posit that a road that takes 5 minutes 10 seconds to cycle is causing 40 minute delays to car journeys.

So we thought we should provide some context. Here you can see how people are adapting to the new safe environment that is Auckland Road (and Lancaster Road):

The case for/against the LTN

Issues that have been raised by the consultation on the LTN and proposals that have been made to address them.

Congestion in the Fresh Air Suburb

Congestion = Pollution. Supporters & opponents of the LTN agree.

Planters into chicanes

Whatever might be in store for the LTN, one thing for sure is that the planters will become redundant. Here’s a proposal to make use of them that requires the least effort or transport costs. Some members of our community clearly like their planters, so this proposal offers continuity for them to care for and decorate ‘their’ planters.

It wasn’t a vote

Some of our local representatives seem to have been caught up in the meme that the opponents of the LTN ‘won the vote’. If they had been paying attention, rather than getting caught up in OOR hysteria, they should have spotted that it was a consultation. So looking beyond the simplicity of the numbers let’s see what this consultation actually revealed.

The most striking feature was that 75% of residents were so unconcerned about the LTN that they did not think it was worth responding.

Why restrictions need to be kept at the bus gate

Supporters of the LTN broadly support the proposals in the officers’ report to the Traffic Management Advisory Committee, though some would prefer that the LTN was preserved in its current format with planters.

However, almost unanimously, we believe that permitting local residents to drive through the bus gate undermines some of the objectives of the LTN.

Claims made by the Open Our Roads campaign – Myth & Reality

The Open Our Roads campaign can only support its ludicrous demands to open roads which are, in fact, already open, by resorting to claims for which they can produce no evidence. Here we take a look at a few of them.

Letter to TMAC councillors

Traffic Management Advisory Committee 12 January 2021

Dear Committee Members

This email is on behalf of Shape Better Streets, a resident campaign for traffic reduction and active travel in the LTN area you will be discussing next week. We broadly support the proposals in the officer paper.

Evaporating traffic

The phenomenon of evaporating traffic is so interesting that we devote a sub-section to it on our Resources page. Opponents of LTNs all over the world like to claim that restricting traffic in one area just displaces it to another. This may well happen over a short period, but quite quickly, enough people change their mode of travel so that overall traffic reduces and in some cases it even happens on the boundary roads.

But now for something completely different.

This post is going to look for a more mysterious form of disappearing traffic, as it has apparently occurred without intervention, nobody has spotted it nor divined where it might have gone.

Protected: Devastating debunking of LTN raison d’être

New TfL data shows significant increase in walking and cycling since the pandemic started

Evidence that the Streetspace programme is working is confirmed by today’s release of traffic data by TfL.

LTN: proof it’s needed; proof it’s working

Shape Better Streets has delivered a 37 page submission to Croydon Council’s Consultation on the Crystal Palace and South Norwood Low Traffic Neighbourhood Scheme.

Active Travel Briefing for LB Bromley Council meeting, 7 December 2020

We write on behalf of ‘Bromley Living Streets’ and ‘Bromley Cyclists’, which are respectively local groups of the national walking charity ‘Living Streets’ and the ‘London Cycling Campaign’.

Cypress School Pupil Survey

Pupils from Cypress School recently took part in a survey on how they got to school. This took place after the Walk to Schools week and no doubt the safer streets within the LTN must have had an impact. An amazing 272 pupils took part; a large and significant survey.

Active travel in the LTN – July & November 2020

This brings together resident data about active travel at two locations in the LTN:

on Sylvan Hill, where there is data for both July and November
at the Sylvan Hill/Auckland Road crossroads, where there is data only for November.

Submission by Bromley Cyclists (London Cycling Campaign)

To: Croydon Council’s Consultation on the Crystal Palace and South Norwood
Low Traffic Neighbourhood Scheme

When we learned of the furore over this scheme on the Croydon/Bromley border, we sought to get to the bottom of it. We talked to a range of players, opened a social media channel for discussion, studied the situation on the ground, and explored cycling links northward through Crystal Palace Park and southwards to Croydon.

How the traffic came and took over our neighbourhood

Rise in traffic in London and Croydon

It looks like a fairly modest increase in traffic over the last 27 years in London. Less than 1% per year. But still an additional 3.5 billion miles.

LTN causes traffic chaos

It’s become quite fashionable to post images of congestion caused, not by too many cars, but by the LTN. This page will present date/time stamped photos of local streets at times when one might expect greatest congestion to occur: commuting, school runs, Saturday shopping. Now this isn’t to say that there is no congestion, just that it is nowhere near as bad as some suggest, AND hasn’t there always been jams around the triangle?

First of all, we must confess that it is not all good news. This next photo shows how the LTN has caused eeeeeeeeeeeenormous tail backs all the way to Cape Town:

Motorists pay for roads. Cyclists don’t.

We often hear this refrain from the ‘road lobby’ – people who think they are entitled to drive on all roads, come what may. So before considering what is behind this meme, let’s check its accuracy.

Shape Better Streets

This is YOUR chance to share YOUR views on what should happen next.

By local residents who support a low-traffic scheme to benefit the local community

CP-LTN – Come On You Spurs!

By Angus Hewlett

The removal of the scaffolding at the Church Road / Westow Street corner – and with it the long tailbacks on Church Road – contains within it both good and bad news for the future of active travel in and around the Crystal Palace area.

The good news is, of course, that the LTN interventions were not the primary driver of the long traffic delays that the area was experiencing. This further shows that additional LTN interventions are likely to be OK from a network-level perspective in those streets where people are calling for them.

A vision for LTNs

Lets’ see what life offers when we get out of our metal boxes. What can we in Croydon learn from the Walworth & Dulwich experience? Yes, this was imposed on them too!

Photographs thanks to Crispin Hughes (his website is well worth a visit!)

Transition to what?

One of the concerns at the heart of the transition movement is climate destruction, so we should expect that our over dependency on fossil fuels to be a key subject for debate. There are many issues that need to be tackled on a global scale, such as flying or energy production. But since Transition is “a movement of communities coming together to reimagine and rebuild our world” lets reimagine one major factor that can be tackled locally – car usage.

But now for something completely different.

Rise in traffic in London and Croydon

By Angus Hewlett

So how are we ‘transitioning’ in Crystal Palace?