Basil Clarke criticises Tory leader Alessandro Georgiou's failure to set out a proper argument for "ripping out" the Fox Lane low traffic neighbourhood.
As Karl Brown notes, the statement in the Enfield Dispatch by the Conservative leader in Enfield - "I detest Labour's LTNs" - comes over more as an "outburst" than the kind of calm and considered policy-making that is needed to run a large London borough. And the video clip above does nothing to reassure the watcher that Alessandro Georgiou bases his policies on rational consideration of pros and cons rather than prejudice and anger. Yet he is seeking to become the leader of a large and complex borough, where the interests of different groups of people need to be handled with delicacy and wisdom, not by gut feeling.
In fact, neither in this video nor in any of his other recent statements is there any sign that Cllr Georgiou has weighed up the arguments for and against, or has considered any factors apart from his instinctive feeling that drivers' "rights" rule. What about the rights of other road users?
And earlier in his video (not included in this extract), Cllr Georgiou spreads blatant untruths about the reason this and the Bowes LTN were created: as a cash cow, he says. Anyone who remembers the years of campaigning by residents that preceded the establishment of the LTN, and the absolutely ineffective early attempts by the council to reduce traffic cutting through by using planters to narrow the ends of roads, will know that the council had to be dragged kicking and screaming into setting up the LTN
Returning to Cllr Georgiou's video, turning off the cameras on "Day On" without running a proper consultation first may or may not be illegal, but it is almost certainly dangerous, since people, and especially local children, will have become used to walking, wheeling and cycling in the Fox Lane LTN and may not be prepared for the shock of returning to the horror story that was Fox Lane before the LTN. Remember the safety barriers by the bridge twisted and crushed by a driver cutting through the area? The Keep Left signs knocked over by dangerous drivers? The car wrecks? The irresponsible people driving through what should be quiet residential streets at speeds of up to 83mph, all recorded during pre-LTN monitoring? What about the many people who you now see walking along Fox Lane who will revert to driving everywhere since walking the area's pavements will again become unpleasant and stressful?
And it's simply untrue that residents of the LTN are unfairly privileged. As Karl's map shows, a pretty large proportion of Enfield's streets are effectively "low traffic neighbourhoods", of no use to drivers trying to cut through. In fact, all new developments since the war, and probably some before, have been designed to prevent cutting through. When older estates were built, for example in Edwardian times, like the Lakes Estate, planners could have had no inkling of the number of vehicles that would one day be filling Englands' roads and overflowing into residential side streets. If they had, they would have designed estates so that they were impermeable to through traffic.
In any case, LTN residents are not the only people who benefit from the Fox Lane LTN. I don't live in it, but I walk through it several times a week to various destinations in Palmers Green and Southgate, and see people who I know don't live in the LTN walking through it too.
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