PETITION TO CAMDEN COUNCIL - PLEASE THINK AGAIN ON FITZJOHN'S AVENUE

Addressed to Councillor James Slater, Cabinet Member for Planning and a Sustainable Camden

We, the undersigned residents, parents, and users of the Fitzjohn’s Avenue area, call on Camden Council to pause and urgently reconsider the current Fitzjohn’s Avenue Area Safe and Healthy Streets scheme.

Our neighbourhood urgently needs better air quality and streets that are safer to walk and cycle along.  The busy junction with Arkwright Road is unsafe improvements are vital.  But the current scheme instead seeks to push through a cycle lane onto Fitzjohn’s Avenue in a way that does not put pedestrians, children, older people and access to vital public transport first.

Specifically, we object to the way the Council has chosen to:

• Further narrow the already narrow pavements outside St. Anthony’s and Fitzjohn’s Primary Schools, making them even more congested for hundreds of children and parents at the start and end of the school day and less safe for those walking, using buggies or wheelchairs.
• Remove the Southbound bus stop near St Mary’s School, which hinders essential public transport access for schoolchildren, the elderly, and less mobile residents on one of our steepest hills.
• Redesignate numerous pavements along Fitzjohn’s Avenue as “Shared” enabling cyclists to ride at will alongside pedestrians, disabled people and children.
• Narrow Fitzjohn’s Avenue at various places, creating a new bottleneck for buses and service vehicles.
• Ignore the dangerous section between Arkwright Road and Prince Arthur Road, where traffic is at its highest and pavements are overloaded during school term, despite the pleas of our local councillors.
• Introduce controversial “floating” bus stop islands, opposed by disability groups,  that bring bus passengers out towards the traffic, force them to step over a cycle track to reach the pavement, and will not work in congested locations, such as outside St. Mary’s school.

We are particularly concerned that additional delays on Fitzjohn’s Avenue resulting from the Council’s design that have not been planned for, leading to the uncontrolled and chaotic displacement of vehicles onto surrounding residential streets.

By failing to consider the effect of these proposals on pedestrians, children, local schools and surrounding streets, the scheme violates basic safety principles for heavily used roads.   

We strongly oppose the way that these changes were planned for years without dialogue with local schools or residents and are now being pushed through in spite of serious concerns raised by our local ward councillors.

The scheme is permanent, so mistakes made now will cost residents and schools dearly for many years to come.

We ask the Council to pause, re-think the scheme and to modify it to ensure that:

• pavement space is preserved at all locations and kept for pedestrians
• bus stops are retained
• controversial “floating” bus top islands are removed
• traffic does not create chaos on surrounding streets
• the traffic black spot between Arkwright Road and Prince Arthur Road is put at the centre of any scheme
• local schools, parents, residents, bus users and disabled people and our elected representatives are properly consulted.
• the £2.4 million cost is fully justified.

A genuinely healthy street must work safely and fairly for everyone.

A leaflet with more information can be found at  www.Fitzjohns.org

Thank you.  Fitzjohn’s Neighbourhood Action Group of local residents