A controversial low traffic neighbourhood (LTN) scheme in south London is to be scrapped after turning a three-mile bus journey into a two-hour slog.
The scheme at Streatham Wells has been suspended by Labour-run Lambeth council after it caused huge traffic congestion in the suburb.
The authority, which announced the U-turn on Thursday, admitted thatthe scheme had caused an eight per cent increase in traffic on boundary roads.
One bus reportedly took 121 minutes to travel just 2.9 miles after the A23 arterial road, which runs along one side of the LTN, became heavily congested with traffic trying to avoid the scheme.
Typical of planners, eh? Not noting even the existence of second order effects…..
Rezina Chowdhury, the council’s deputy leader, said: “We’ve listened to the concerns raised by local people and recognise the major disruption coming as part of transport improvements on the main road running through Streatham.”
To the council it was still an improvement, though. No doubt the planner will be commended for their work.
This isn’t an unintended third-order effect.
It’s an intended zeroth-order effect.
We’d be lucky if the politiscum and bureaucunts ever noted the existence of first order effects.
It was designed so that when the local scrotes mug you, they can get away on their bikes without getting run over.
The death knell for Streatham was sounded when the John Lewis store there closed in 1990.
Chesterton’s Road? – Close it and wait for the man on the clapham omnibus to kick off.
Imagine if every time they built a new road to reduce congestion, and it didn’t due to the second order effect of more people getting in their cars, like wot happens all the time everywhere forever, the planners said ‘yeah, that didn’t work’ and shut the new road.
Sometimes the way to find out what the effects of doing something really are is to do the thing. Good on them for stopping doing the thing when it turned out the effects were not what had been predicted.
If you look at it through a lens that isn’t ’cars good, councils bad’ it all seems quite reasonable.
“Imagine if every time they built a new road to reduce congestion, and it didn’t due to the second order effect of more people getting in their cars…”
How does that work exactly? I don’t actually need to go anywhere but a new road has just been built so I need to go out and drive on it? What normally happens is that the new road does become very busy but the old roads that people used to take become much quieter.
Why are these things always called “controversial “? Nobody wants them except a few loonies and the retards on the council.
Stonyground
“Billy Fish” is just reciting the tired old argument that LibDems and Greens have been pushing for years against every new road scheme.
They seem to think that people just drive for fun and not that an unmet need is finally being met.
Billy Fish has never been to Sheffield. Still less tried to drive there one week, then the week after. Then the week after that, etc etc.
Well road planners these days are supposed to have miodelling software to predict flow from closed roads.
This being Lambeth, they probably have some Matchbox or HotWheels cars and Streatham High Road drawn in crayon on a canteen table.
ps In answer to BillyFish’s point it is just “Councils bad.” They probably only had to U Turn because one of the councillors lives in the area and suddenly realised that they couldn’t get to Brixton Town Hall in their Bentley.
Bloke: bollox to even driving in Sheffield. I’ve just got back from trying to get around Sheffield BY BUS and it was a 30 minute walk from the closest bus stop IN THE CITY CENTRE to my destination. Everywhere is inaccessible other than on foot with all the old bus routes being dug up and turned into gardens.
The council in Cambridge has been quite subtle. First they started blocking off what they called “rat runs” i.e. peripheral routes, to force more traffic to drive into town on a radial route and out again on another.
Then they blocked off some routes in the city centre altogether (especially easy when there are a finite number of river crossings). Then they widened cycle routes so as to reduce the number of lanes of motor traffic.
Then they point at the congestion and propose a congestion charge.
Then when the public bats that back they return to blocking peripheral routes before they try again.
Come the Revolution, brothers, let’s hang ’em.
And we will not go full Singapore charging for car permits and roads as that means poor people can’t get around…. So we just make them sit in traffic instead. Now what?
In the same way they’ve introduced a vape tax to replace lost tobacco taxes if we don’t get the planned increase in EVs (I don’t see it) we’ll see an increase in road/milage charges.
I like one way residential streets – it means the spend on the infrastructure of that road can still be useful, but traffic flow is more predictable, it’s wide enough for e-scooters, e-cyclists and pedal cyclists (are there any left) to coexist with cars, and emergency services can still come in from the wrong direction if they absolutely have to.
The cul-de-sac variant of LTNs is an utter disaster.
Imv, of course.
It’s called the People’s Democratc Republic of South Yorkshire for a reason.
One of the arguments against the M4 relief road around Newport has always been more people will use the roads, far better to have static traffic it seems. When I worked near there a serious holdup on the motorway could lead to a drop in air quality that set off sensors in our building