Blanket LTNs are just a hammer to crack a nut

There is no doubt that there is a need for change in the way we live our lives, the way we do business, the way we move around and forward to preserve the future of this planet, but the ubiquitous blanket LTN is a hammer to crack a nut.

Roads are for using and the clever answer is about how you use them to their best advantage within each area through traffic management and interventions.

During the design consultation process for the Streatham Wells LTN, the majority of respondents voiced serious concerns and offered many sensible alternative solutions in an attempt to achieve a more realistic, cost effective goal.

After all, these are peoples’ lives and livelihoods Lambeth are dealing with, not just areas on a map.

I feel this has now divided the community into the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’.

Those that live on the boundary roads have the displaced traffic and increased congestion, pollution and noise and those that have little traffic, reduced pollution, peace and quiet.

The LTN is an untimely, insensitive and an unnecessary imposition upon residents at a time of greatest economic pressure.

London generates a great deal of the wealth for the country and for this, they need easy and efficient access to their homes and places of work to do business.

It is obvious all the existing roads play an enormous part in all of this and this should be embraced and not denied.

London is not a utopia, but is meant to be a democracy. It can be improved to benefit all, not just a few, with positive and creative thinking.

I fear though, LTNs are dead-end thinking on a road to nowhere.

But, as we all know, the ‘temporary’ becomes permanent and I am afraid it wreaks of a purely money-making, greenwash tick-box exercise.

Keith Smith
Streatham Hill

Picture: Pixabay/shilin wang