Hi Neighbours,

I hope you and your families are weathering the latest lockdown as best as you can. 

Hopefully you will have all seen the Harrow Council leaflet ‘Have your say on the future of the Headstone South Low Traffic Neighbourhood’ come through your doors a couple of weeks ago. 

This is a reminder to please respond to the Headstone South consultation by the 21st March 2021, which is this coming Sunday. 

You may also be interested in responding to the Vaughan Road consultation, which is accessed via the same page.

Hopefully you also saw the Healthy Streets for Harrow leaflet that followed a few days later.  This was a great collaboration effort, so huge thanks to the neighbours who helped organise this, and even donated cute photos to the cause! 

In the leaflet we urged LTN supporters to ‘agree’ to the proposed Automatic Numberplate Recognition (ANPR) scheme.  This is because we believe that an ANPR scheme will fundamentally still achieve most of the aims of the original LTN.  The risk of ‘disagreeing’ with the ANPR scheme is that everything is taken out and we end up back where we started, with thousands of cars driving through the neighbourhood unnecessarily.  The most important thing to remember is that even an ANPR scheme will be a vast improvement on nothing at all. 

I know for some of you that ANPR will be disappointing.  I have to say that I do share your disappointment, and ANPR does have drawbacks on a more basic ‘planter’ style LTN scheme in terms of overall benefits to residents (road safety, improved health and wellbeing etc).  However, ANPR is still a step in the right direction.  It will eliminate rat running while being easier for many residents to accept, as it means no impact to their daily lives as drivers.  While I expect there is an operational cost associated with ANPR, the council have emphasised the point that permits will be free for residents and businesses within the LTN, which is great.  One day when my friends and family can visit again I’ll warn them in advance to avoid the ANPR locations if they insist on driving – same as I used to warn them about the static LTN bollards in my old neighbourhood. 

My suggestion if you would have preferred to keep the original schemes as installed is to also make a statement along those lines in the ‘any other suggestions for improvements’ part of the consultation form.  I also added a request for the 20mph zone to be extended to include the boundary roads, for more pedestrian crossings to be added to boundary roads along strategic desire lines, properly maintained pavements, and more street tree planting.  Well…they did ask…!

I can’t predict how the consultation will turn out.   I expect as they usually do the consultation will return a range of opinions, and we will just have to wait and see what they are, and how the council will decide to proceed.

Obviously I hope that we get enough positive responses that we get to keep an LTN of some form, so as usual thank you in advance for spreading the word, and reminding your family members and neighbours to respond positively to the consultation by the 21st March.

If you are on Facebook, please join the new private Healthy Streets for Harrow group for more regular updates at the link below.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/4296947603655064/about

If this is the last few weeks before the LTN is removed, I hope you all get the chance to get out and enjoy it while it lasts – I know I mean to!

Thank you once again for all the help and support!

Stay safe,

Emma