Harrow Council's LTN Deception

As those of you who take an interest in liberating London's streets from the dominance of the car and support Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and cycle lanes in particular will notice, there  has been a concerted campaign to resist change. A campaign led by some motorists and disgruntled taxi drivers but given air-time and publicity by elements in the popular media such as the Daily Mail and Talk Radio hosts on LBC - Nick Ferrari and David Pearce come to mind. This has come to a head since Covid-19 restrictions have come into force. Councils introduced measures to ensure social distancing on the streets by reducing the road space available to the car and promote active travel, while at the same time many people who used to use public transport are resorting to the car. 

And the backlash from these groups has been swift. They have chalked a number of successes in getting the Tory run Wandsworth Council to scrap their LTNs and the notoriously cycle phobic Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to scrap a popular cycle highway on Kensington High Street, thanks to an astroturfing campaign led buy some local businesses.

But these successes have not been limited just to Tory run councils. In April Harrow Council, to much gloating from the shock-jocks of LBC, announced it would be getting rid of its LTN schemes -  more on this later.

Now it's certainly true that criticisms can be made of the way some of the LTN plans have been implemented, even though the end objective is one we could all support: reducing air pollution, reducing carbon emissions from road transport and making our streets greener and safer. Even if LTNs are popular with the general public. 

But in a democracy it is often the case that a vociferous minority can prevail over a passive majority. London's local elections prove this where single issue Anti-LTN candidates have fared badly in places like Islington and Hackney. And yet the campaign against LTNs by these groups if far from over with a plethora of legal challenges on the way

Of the many false claims made by the driver lobby against LTN's is that they do not reduce air pollution but merely displace it onto adjacent streets. And they would seem to have backing in this respect from the report Harrow Council used to justify its decision to scrap a number of LTN schemes in the borough back in April. I quote from one of the claims made in the report submitted to Harrow Council's Traffic and Advisory Panel of 22nd April, 

"...surrounding roads have experienced an increase in levels of traffic, longer journey times and waiting times at junctions, and increased vehicle emissions thereby reducing air quality.

Now these claims are without merit. In order to conduct a proper trial to evaluate the effectiveness of LTNs would require twenty four months of data and air quality monitoring stations placed on the adjacent roads: twelve months of baseline data prior to the commencement of road traffic measures and twelve months of road traffic data following its implementation.

I asked David Eaglesham, head of Traffic, Highways & Asset Management at Harrow Council who commissioned the report about the air quality data used to make the assertion in the report. He admitted to me there was no data from the air quality monitoring stations to back up this claim. This is more like the truth as there are only two scientifically accurate air quality monitoring stations operating in the borough. These are the stations operated by King's College London

In effect his team at Harrow Council made up this report so that their LTN scheme could be axed. 

Notes: 

Harrow Council's LTN report

You can contact David Eaglesham by email David.Eaglesham@harrow.gov.uk

You can find the number and location of air quality monitoring stations in Harrow from https://www.londonair.org.uk/