Impression of the current road layout under trial in Tavistock Place

• IT’S been hot – and a lot of hot air seems to have found its way into your Letters pages.

“Messianic thinking” screeches one commentator, (Closing Judd Street is a blow to local people and democracy is dead, July).

“Social cleansing” brays another, adding that Sadiq Khan is trying to “turn London into a cycling superhighway”, (Is the switch to cycle superhighways really social cleansing? July 5).

Well chance would be a fine thing for even if this were remotely close to the truth, it could hardly be worse than London’s present traffic-infested state.

Virtually a whole page of letters then, all claiming horrendous consequences for implementing a simple scheme that would increase the benefits already widely felt around Tavistock Place.

All the evidence shows that where traffic is diverted onto a major road that was designed to carry it, a process of evaporation occurs and a the major route pretty much returns to normal.

Drivers, having become used to being granted a short-cut through an area, find that by being denied the option of rat-running and obliged to use the main road as opposed to a residential environment, will hardly find it worth starting the car.

The howls of anguish from those whose life would be turned upside down by having to drive a couple of minutes extra (or try an alternative mode of getting about) might find their time better spent calling for a wider scheme that keeps through traffic where it should be – on the through routes.

Meanwhile the mayor, Sadiq Khan, was elected on a pledge to triple the number of cycle lanes in London.

But while there has been a little more movement to complete the schemes he inherited from his predecessor (of which the Judd Street measure forms an important and strategic part, connecting to the north south Kentish Town to Elephant & Castle route) little in the way of new, and increasingly essential, routes have been proposed.

And one important, and staggeringly simple measure has, to date, still failed to materialise and that is the closing of some of the Regent’s Park gates for just some of the time.

Did the protest from the “NW3 crowd”, who took it upon themselves to dress up schoolchildren in pollution masks, in order to draw attention… not to excessive road traffic… nor to rat-running vehicles on local side streets… not to enable people to get to school and work with a bit of respite from all the air-borne filth and intimidating 4x4s… no… this protest was against the above measure for closing the gates of a park to through-traffic!

The CS11 scheme having been severely reduced from a once fantastic route that would have enabled cyclists in Brent to travel to the West End in relative safety, has now been reduced even further to a few metres.

No longer a cycle scheme, the remaining work means the hellish multi-lane carriageway at Swiss Cottage will be made pedestrian and bus friendly – oh and will, of course, assist people cycling for a stretch of road a bit longer than the length of the Odeon cinema.

And even this has been criticised, not just in Letters but Westminster Council in all their motorcentric, gas-guzzler-promoting glory, have threatened legal action.

But now The Outer Circle is to be closed for 10 days. What…as a trial? To see how preventing rat-running works in practice? To allow people to be able to walk to the zoo?

No. Donald Trump is coming for dinner. A ring of steel, with enough police drafted in to deal with the capital were it to be ablaze. I wonder at the cost of this “ring of steel” compared with what it would cost to implement the park gates bit of CS11.

But to return to Judd Street. Council leader Georgia Gould is to be commended and deserves a massive thank-you from those of us who face the daily realities of crossing the Euston Road and also understand the vast benefits to be reaped by people living, working, shopping and travelling through the Bloomsbury area.

Your pages could be filled several times over with the ever-expanding list of negative externalities (from health to economy to climate change) caused by uncurtailed motor traffic; it is important to remind ourselves of what is at stake.

The massively successful example of “Mini Holland” traffic measures in Waltham Forest, has demonstrated how, once the initial resistance to change and the unfamiliar subsides, people are surprisingly enamoured to their new-found tranquillity and vitality of their neighbourhood.

Communities engage, children get to play outside, and people throw off the burden of motor-induced state of tension that they may not even have been aware of.

Surely this has to be a good thing? I know it to be so and demand that such schemes are rolled out across Camden, the entire capital and beyond.

STEVEN EDWARDS,
NW5