Lewisham Cancels School Streets with No Schools Idea
Lewisham Council has been introducing “School Streets” recently, i.e. timed closures around schools. This was apparently to overcome the objections to the road closures such as in the Lee Green LTN which has been causing much worse traffic congestion. As there seemed to be some public support for School Streets, the Council then decided to introduce “School Streets” into roads where there were no schools. This was probably aimed at reducing through traffic.
But they have now reconsidered. They now say: “After careful consideration, and having listened to the feedback we received, we will not go ahead with the proposals. The feedback was mixed, with some strongly in favour and some strongly opposed to the approach”.
Comment: It is good that they have back-tracked on this which was an unethical way of sneaking in road closures.
They are also promising a public consultation shortly, which they say will be widely publicised, in the Lewisham and Lee Green Low Traffic LTN. But why is it taking so long? And it’s never a very good idea to do public consultations in the middle of summer for obvious reasons.
See https://lewishamcovidresidentialstreets.commonplace.is/news/ltn-consultation-june-2021 for more details.
Walking the Streets to Oppose Road Closures
Photograph below is of Christine, one of our Committee Members, promoting the cause with a sandwich board. It got a lot of attention.
Survey Results
We did a survey of Lewisham residents prior to November 2020 covering their views on the road closures and we have recently done another one to see if their views have changed since changes were made to the closures.
This a brief summary of the results from 860 respondents (most of whom are residents of the Lewisham SE post codes and particularly the Lee Green area):
1. 93% of respondents did not support the road closures and other measures introduced by the Council. This is only slightly lower than on our first survey.
2. There were high numbers of objections (between 96% and 83%) based on increased journey times and traffic congestion, increased air pollution, delays to emergency service vehicles, difficulties faced by carers, delivery drivers and local service providers and difficulties faced by the elderly and disabled.
3. 90% of people said their views on the closures had not changed since last November, i.e. the changes to remove some closures, to use camera enforcement and put in timed closures (school streets) were not supported.
4. 94% still thought the changes were unjustified by the Covid epidemic and the same percentage were unhappy with the lack of public consultation.
5. We asked an additional question this time which was about the level of support for expansion of the ULEZ to the North/South Circular. Some 76% did not welcome it.
6. Note that 93% of respondents own a vehicle who obviously had a high interest in the subject of the survey which possibly accounts for the overall answers. With a few exceptions, one might say that anyone who owns a vehicle is unhappy with what the Council has done and the changes since last November have not pacified them (a high percentage of households in areas such as Lee Green do own a vehicle of some kind).
7. We got a very large number of individual comments, some ruder than others about the Council’s actions, which are too numerous to cover here. But if anyone wants more details or if you have particular questions, please let me know. We plan to provide more details of the survey results to the council (excluding personal information of course).
Roger Lawson
Tel: 020-8295-0378