London is one of the busiest cities in the world for road traffic, over 1 million vehicles enter the city every day and the city itself contains 2.6 million vehicles* (* source TfL) .
It relies on a road system that has not changed since medieval times, but this year something has changed leading to what many describe as the “worst traffic jams in London’s history”.
The source of this gridlock is due to the London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan rolling out a new scheme in July at a cost of £250,000, where Transport for London (TfL) imposed new cycle lanes across the city, reducing many roads to a single lane each way for cars, creating massive tailbacks spewing pollution on pedestrians and cyclists.
All of this is part of a £250 million Government initiative to encourage people to travel on bicycles and minimise the use of public transport when the Covid-19 threat was at its most dangerous.
They call it the ‘Emergency Active Travel scheme’, and it was rushed through past Parliament, often without any consultation with local residents or businesses.
Many local authorities have used the funds without any foresight to rapidly increase the number of cycle lanes and impose ‘LTNs — Low Traffic Neighbourhoods — on residential areas, even if not required. This includes bollards and road closures on high traffic roads.
But now it seems that many councils will need to U turn on their active measures and even rip up the cycle lanes and bollards they’ve put down. Even Sadiq Khan has been forced to backtrack on some of London’s schemes. Next month, selected cycle lanes and bollards will be ripped up to the delight of residents and struggling local businesses.
It is a highly embarrassing reversal for the Mayor and TfL, which has admitted that the cost of returning roads to former states is unknown.
Residents fight back across UK
In other parts of Britain, we are seeing councils forced to U-turn due to rising resident pressure.
Councils are desperately trying to work out how quickly they can get rid of their schemes and appease furious residents, some of which are taking to the streets in protest.
All over the country, expensive, traffic calming schemes are being abandoned, months after being built, at a huge cost to the taxpayer.
In many cities and towns, without any consultation, council contractors moved in over the summer to block roads with bollards and planters, turning many residential areas into no-go zones.
In the months since, councils have become alarmed by the groundswell of opposition to their schemes, which in most areas crosses party lines.
In some parts of the country, local businesses are reporting customer losses of up to 80 per cent since the restrictions came into force.
It gets worse, the councils are also being slammed by clean air campaigners, horrified by the ensuing gridlock across towns and cities.
Source: Morningstaronline.com 2020
Department of Transport Defends Schemes
The Department of Transport continues to defend the schemes, but even the Transport Minister is unable to escape the pressure.
Grant Shapps, MP for Welwyn Hatfield, was informed that his local council was presented with a 1,200-signature petition complaining about the new traffic scheme killing the high street. He ended up writing to the council, challenging the policy his own department had put in place.
Shapps also wrote to other local authorities, warning that he might withdraw funding if they continued to abuse the Government scheme.
This week, when interviewed by The Daily Mail he said ‘Clearly there have been individual instances where schemes have fallen well below par. Some emergency measures have been hurried through by councils, with little to no consultation of residents, meaning they have failed to deliver for locals or offer genuine improvements.
‘I’m determined to make sure the schemes rolled out as a result of the next round of funding work from the get-go for the whole community. We’ve been consistently clear that councils must engage with local communities — and have publicly reminded all authorities that plans have to work for everyone.’
The truth is that, at the moment, they’re hardly working for anyone. In a recent survey by Transport Focus, a research agency funded by central Government, cycle use has remained static throughout the pandemic at about seven per cent of traffic.
At a time when local businesses are in dire need of support, the last thing your councils should do is prevent customers from reaching your shops and prevent local residents from coping with the challenges of the pandemic crisis.
What do you think about residents and businesses fighting back against these measures? What are these active measures going to do to towns and cities in the future? Let us know in the comments.
Councils have to carefully consider where they place traffic calming measures. It’s one thing to slow down a frequent rat run that is causing a nuisance, but making it difficult to navigate the high street will only drive people to out of town shopping centres and decimate our town centre businesses!
The car is not going away we have to learn to accept that!
Even more disastrous, and dangerous, are so called ‘smart’ motorways that should be immediately returned to regular motorways with a hard shoulder for emergencies and emergency services’ access past holdups to accident sites.
Since the piper alpha disaster where many people died health and safety has become paramount.
With every design and build health and safety is built into every stage of the design.
Our motorways had the hard shoulder which is a major and extremely necessary safety feature which enabled not only broken down vehicle’s to escape danger but for access for emergency vehicle’s.
We have had electronic signs above the motorway for many years alerting us to potential hazards.
This should never of been allowed to happen, it’s new and people have already lost there lives and many more will do so, scrap it now before more needlessly die.
It’s only there for taxing the motorist.
These restrictions are costing a fortune in fuel apart from frustration by having to sit behind very slow drivers when you are trying to get to your destination at a legal speed. Leave the road system alone and fix the pot holes to make safe and stop damaging our vehicles instead of wasting money on these awful schemes.
Labour council Leaders .”morons” have blindly fallen victim to this and have implemented the schemes without foresight or thought.. they will fall on their axe in Ealing when the election happens next time around absolute shambles! Is the only way to describe. A tfl survey of 1000 Londoners out of a city of 12 million people! Where were these people from ? Mars? Was a equality assesment done?
That is a very strange headline. Residents are generally in favour of traffic calming measures because they want the street they live in to be safer.
I think the point is that councils introduced rushed calming measures without consulting residents or local businesses, which has caused a lot of anger and lost trade.
That’s absolutely not true, but it is entirely typical of the kind of people who think this idiocy to be a good plan. “Just keep lying and everything will be fine.”
Watch and learn as all these schemes become toast, and after that, people won’t go anywhere near anything similar for years. In promoting these ineptly conceived schemes with lies, you’re hobbling your own agenda.
If they didn’t block up the main roads, there would be no need to have any “rat” runs blocked – I’m NOT a rat, I just look for the most direct road to go anywhere, i.e. less carbon footprint. If fact the so called “improvements” they make to main roads, it’s virtually impossible to get anywhere using them without constant queueing on every road beItween A and B – is there any wonder that people choose to use side roads to get about? If cars could use main roads properly, it would leave side roads for the bikes and pedestrians and local cars. One day – some “brain-box” in charge of traffic would come up with the idea of opening up all the roads, then traffic would flow easily an
There is a crazy scheme in Manchester’s inner ring road whereby the inner lane of Quay St has been blocked off for bikes and social distancing, denying the use of a filter lane to turn left which causes a polluting trail of cars back up into the city centre but what is even worse is that the extension of this scheme into the ring road itself does not even allow cyclists to enter forcing them to mix it with traffic in a narrow outer lane that is a complete pinch point causing mayhem on the inner ring road clockwise.
These measures are causing havoc in Manchester in the Openshaw district where “walls” have been installed on either side of the road to widen the pavements but reduce the traffic lanes from two to one which means rhat when a bus is stopped at the bus stop at the centre of this “wall” to take on large numbers of passengers, traffic can collect up to 400+ yards causing frustration and pollution. This is the only place along the whole of Ashton Old Road where this system has been implemented.
Just need to try and use some of the routes laid out if they are practical for your journey. Depending on where you have driven from, it may be that some form of ‘park and change’ facility could exist to allow drivers to park and swap to a bike, then make use of the cycle lanes. Possibly some routes needed more thought, but something needs to change drastically to make people realise that we can’t just carry on as we were; we all need to consider whether we can reduce reliance on cars for some of our journeys, not necessarily all of them. Some local rat run routes have been closed in my local city of Exeter, which does make traffic flow more slowly, but then when I use my bike on these blocked off routes, it is much safer and quicker for me to get around.
Typical cyclist saving the planet but destroying our cities.
They go to work there but don’t add anything to the economy.
They don’t shop !
They eat and drink !
They don’t pay road tax !
They don’t have insurance !
What happens if they hit your car no insurance !!
What happens if they seriously hurt a pedestrian no insurance !!
There are few, to little of them in the summer, what about the winter snow and heavy rain when you can’t see the pot holes ! Most probably just get into your car that you have on your drive.
What about service and delivery vehicles they have to go in and out, traffic jams cost company’s money !
What about the disabled, what about people with joint and back problems, arthritis is massive but hey ho you just think about yourself.
What all the people employed in motor vehicle industry ! We cannot live without the car.
As for electric vehicles well electricity is worst fuel nuclear.
Have we forgotten that we cannot safely get rid of it ?
London is crammed because of these measures that add pollution due to traffic jams.
There are many bus lanes which are short and buses are held up by the traffic jam. They would get through quicker in many cases if traffic used the bus lane and moved faster..
ps Congestion charge is about raising money – not about reducing congestion.
I pointed out to my council at the time that these cycle lanes were a knee jerk reaction and this has proved correct, the sooner Boris gets rid of the buffoons in his cabinet the better it will be for the country and his career, as, since this cabinet took over the running it has been a case of lurching from one crisis to another with no positive action or solutions coming out of number 10.
I live in North Wales where the Councils spent a lot of money creating/adopting cycle lanes. Unfortunately they prefer to use either the ‘normal’ pavements or the road!
I wouldn’t be surprised to find that most councils took the money to top up their budgets which were cut by the Tory government previously. Their thinking will have been that there would less traffic since more people are supposed to be working from home.
Camden is at a standstill..
The LTN’s are ridiculous where I live in Ealing they are causing huge traffic jams on main roads as everyone is forced to to go that way causing big hold ups and more pollution
As a cyclist myself I half expected a knee-jerk reaction against cyclists, but the tone of these comments has been very tolerant towards us. Thank you Petrol Prices people.
We all share the roads together vantheman, but giving preference to a specific mode of transport at the expense of local businesses and other transport methods is crazy.
This is another conservative B/up and waste more money like Boris Johnson with his bridge over the thames and lost over over £1 million pounds.
Trouble is – give these little Hitlers like Khan and his ilk some power and, before you know where you are, some stupid idea has been implemented with no consultation or consideration.
very interesting to hear that councils are imposing these traffic calming /road closures on the population without any consultation….the morons at birmingham council are doing exactly the same to residents!!! Take ,for instance the A38 between selly oak and Northfield. they have taken a perfectly good dual carriage way and sliced 1.5 metres off the road for cyclists(of which not many use it) and then halved the remainder between a bus lane and ordinary traffic, essentially making a main arterial road out of the city to the south a less than single track road. Even worse, when the A38 reaches the orthopaedic hospital, both cycle lane and bus lane disappears….wheres the safety aspect in that? Please birmingham council, use a bit of common sense….you tried teied it on another arterial road (Tyburn road) and had to admit defeat and turn it back into a dual carriageway. Road engineers….you must be joking!!
My road was closed and then it resulted in an ambulance not being able to get quickly into the sheltered accommodation housing estate near my home. I watched them struggle to pull the bollard down as the lock had an issue, the police came to assist sadly to no avail, so in the end up the crew left the ambulance and went on foot to the call out😡 I watched this all playing out as I was out walking my dog as the ambulance drew up at that time and I am glad I did, as it just proves how these measure haven’t been clearly thought out!! All I know is god forbid you have a heart attack or need a real quick response with these ill thought out measure you be dead before you get seen due to these restrictions!! 🤬
Andy Burnham and Manchester City Council are trying to do the very same!!!
They tried a while back to get a congestion charge but were refused, and since then they have done nothing but harass the motorist diverting traffic and changing traffic lights to cause road blocks an congestion.
They have caused the excessive pollution.
Air quality tests were taken during the first major lockdown, the council were expecting and hoping that they would be low to non existent ! Whoops they weren’t, they were still to high, and there were little to no vehicle’s there!
High rise buildings and poor sanitation that’s a big problem not being addressed.
These council’s cannot survive without the revenue from the car, parking charges and of course parking fines.
Forget about the COVID-related circumstances, many roads across the UK have been running (or not, as the case might be) at far above design capacity, and often for the use of single users of cars for years. The pollution that this has engendered has put peole of all ages at high risk of damaging toxins and of coming down with respiratory and other pollution-related illnesses. As someone who uses shanks pony, cycl3es and cars to get around as appropriate, we need to deal with the excessive and often unnecessary use of combustion engines within our transport system. One of the most enjoyable things about bthe original ntional lockdown was the ability to walk and/or cycle almost anywhere without fear of being engulfed in pollution or knocked off one’s bike. Yes, there are irresponsible cyclis and pedestrains, in the same way that there are irresponsible car drivers – but we need to relaise that roads aren’t the preserve of the car and their owners.
I live in a main road , the road has become a virtual gas chamber due to these I’ll thought out scheme. I wonder what the council thinks that our lives are worth lesser than those living in those cordoned off? Complete shambles!
Totally right Jay, its almost as if they want to pollute people to death and get people off the roads by creating gridlock.