KEEP ISLINGTON MOVING
Say No to Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs)
Breaking News
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Some important documents relating to the DfT review of LTNs. Well worth reading in full.
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In a highly encouraging development for the Anti-LTN cause, the Conservative government has withdrawn its funding for new LTNs and the Transport Minister, Mark Harper, has ordered a review by the DfT. See here for details.
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Excellent article by Andrew Ellson in the Times on how bus journey times are often dramatically increased as a result of LTNs combined with TfL's policy of replacing bus lanes with dedicated cycling lanes.
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We've circulated almost 10,000 Say No to Barnsbury & Laycock LTN leaflets to most households and shops in the area. There's still quite a lot of people who remain unaware of the Council proposals, but of those who are aware, close to 100% are strongly anti-LTN.
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Finally, the Council have announced their proposal for a Barnsbury.Laycock LTN and it's a shocker with no less than 15 "filters" aka road closures! We'll be reporting a lot more on this development but for the time being we suggest you all visit https://www.islington.gov.uk/roads/people-friendly-streets/liveable-neighbourhoods/barnsbury-laycock , study the proposals closely, then provide appropriate feedback via the various channels on offer, including a survey, a council email address (barnsbury.laycock.LN@islington.gov.uk), an online meeting next week and various workshops. Make sure your voice is heard - and tell all your friends. It's serious this time and we need to get the sensible silent majority on board.
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Following a recent Freedom of Information (FOI) request we can reveal that Islington is still earning more from LTN-related Penalty Charge Notices (PCNs) than any other borough in the country. Yearly LTN- and School-related revenues are steady at about £5.5M pa and when Parking charges are added the total is well over £13M pa. Could this be a factor behind the Council's fondness for LTNs? Click here to judge for yourselves!
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The latest Islington LTN to be made permanent is St Mary's. This is surprising since according to the Council's own data the scheme has failed to meet any of its objectives and was opposed by a majority of residents. Click here for our analysis.
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Islington's LTNs have had no discernable effect on air quality. Click here to see our detailed analysis of the Council's own figures.
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Through Keep Highbury Moving, small businesses in Highbury provided the Council with overwhelming evidence that the LTN there was bad for business. You can read about this and watch a video by clicking here. The Council published a report describing the businesses' objections in detail, but then apparently ignored the evidence and went ahead with the LTN anyway.
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Two more excellent anti-LTN articles from the Times and Spectator respectively - click here to view.
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Two really encouraging news items (click here for details):
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The government will no longer fund LTN schemes
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Dulwich Council have scrapped an LTN in response to resident pressure.
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We have long suspected that the Council's plan to replace parking space in Barnsbury with "parklets", "rain gardens", "cycle hangars" and so on is mainly just another facet of the War on Cars by making parking as difficult as possible for residents and their visitors. In any case, parking is increasingly unaffordable in Islington. It has emerged that the borough not only has the highest prices for residents' parking permits in the UK but also earns the most from parking violations. Read about it here.
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We have carried out a detailed analysis of the comments on the Council's Interactive Map for a Barnsbury-Laycock LTN - click here to view. Overall, there is no evidence that the majority of those who live or work in Barnsbury want or need an LTN.
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The latest Council LTN initiative is a bizarre "wavy line" redevelopment in Charlton Place. Residents are appalled and an astonishing 98% of traders in adjoining Camden Passage have objected in a petition. We've created a new page in the website to track this development.
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Following a detailed analysis of the Council's own data, it turns out that residents' feedback on the results of the first 7 Islington LTN trials was overwhelmingly negative, in sharp contrast to the Council's misleading positive spin on the results. Follow this link to find out more.
Quick Links
Click on the links to jump to relevant part of the website
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We regularly add quite detailed analyses of LTN issues in our Resources>Data Section. For example our analysis of the Council's report on St Mary's ward is a good example of all the things which are wrong about LTNs.
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Read about the case against LTNs in Islington in general, and Barnsbury in particular
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This leaflet was delivered to about 5,000 households in Barnsbury (February 2023, Phase 1)
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And this leaflet was delivered to about 10,000 households and shops (October 2023, Phase 2)
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See what happened at the first abortive "Liveable Barnsbury" consultation meeting in October 2022; shocking video evidence!
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And here's our detailed analysis of the Council's presentation at that meeting; their statistics are mostly inaccurate, misleading or just plain wrong!
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Keep Barnsbury Moving (KBM) was set up in late February 2023 as a sister group to KIM. Read about what they're doing and follow the links to the KBM website here
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Latest News: find out how to engage with the Barnsbury.Laycock consultation process
Say NO to LTNs in Islington
Save the Islington you love. Fight the Council's LTN programme. Keep Islington Moving!
For centuries, Islington has been a busy transport hub defined by the free movement within, into and out of the borough of every form of conveyance imaginable - pedestrians, livestock, horses, carriages, bicycles, trams, buses, trains, tube lines, canal boats - and yes, even the odd car! Let's keep it that way.
Projects
Anti-LTN organisations or activities within the umbrella Keep Islington Moving (KIM) network
The Highbury LTNs have been in force for some time now and this group is fighting for a better solution. Check out their excellent website here.
Liverpool Road
Residents of Liverpool Road were horrfied to find out that this appalling scheme has now been made permanent. They are organising to fight this decision.
The Council have started the "Engagement and Design" process for an LTN. We have launched a Keep Barnsbury Moving website in response.
Canonbury
A small but committed group of Canonbury residents has formed a group to fight the existing LTN there. They send out a newsletter to supporters and you can see the most recent one (8.1.23) here. To be added to the mailing list please email CanonWest at canwestobjects@gmail.com.
Gallery
News
News items in reverse order (latest items at bottom of page)
"Liveable Barnsbury" meeting, 15.11.22
The recent "consultation" meeting about "Liveable Barnsbury" at Bridgeman Road was a shambles. Islington Free News Media were there to record what happened and this video faithfully records the extraordinary events as they unfolded.
"Big Brother is Watching You"
A Freedom of Information (FOI) request has recently revealed that Islington Council has collected no less than £11 million in fines from CCTV cameras used for "traffic filtering" - see here.
Update: and the argument this outrageous mugging of Islington motorists is hotting up - see this rather good article in the Islington Tribune.
"Big Brother in Oxford"
Oxford City Council's plan to divide the city into LTN zones and use sophisticated CCTV "filtering" to only allow residents to drive out of their zones for a limited number of times a year is causing quite a stir (see here for example). It's the sort of thing which is already happening in totalitarian states such as China and if more of us don't wake up to the the threat it could happen here in Islington too. This GB News interview presents a very reasoned argument why we all need to fight it.
Anti-LTN protest at Islington Town Hall
This stalwart group of anti-LTN protestors gathered outside the Town Hall on 6.12.22 and later mounted a spirited attack on the Council for pushing its LTN programme whilst neglecting to improve pavements for pedestrians. You can read about it in this EC1 Echo article entitled "Islington LTN Anger Two Years On"
Freedom For Drivers Foundation
This newsletter from Freedom for Drivers Foundation is packed with useful information about LTNs and the War on Cars generally. Most of it is depressing but at least someone's fighting back.
"LTN Narrative Unravelling"
Here's a really good summary of how the pro-LTN narrative is being challenged and found wanting across London. As reported elsewhere on this website, there is an increasing realisation that the data on which LTNs were proposed in the first place was wrong and the statistics used to justify them was misleading or downright false. Check out the rest of John Stewart's blog for other excellent insights into why the case for Low Traffic Neighbourhoods is unravelling.
You can learn more about misleading pro-LTN statistics in the Data section of this website, here.
OnLondon Article
Review of London 2022: Street transport’s year of road rage and regression
29th December 2022
Rancour has dominated much of the debate about the best use of streets and limited road space, with buses and pedestrians too often losing out
"Farts in the Wind" - LTNs are irrelevant to global climate change
I just wanted to add, for anyone who is pushing the green agenda in terms of getting cars off our roads in the name of climate change. There are over 10,000 cities in the world. London is the 12th most populated city on earth. Yet we are the 3,739th most polluted city in the world. Roughly translated, we could get every car off the road in London and it would merely be a fart in the wind on a global scale. Please see below link for reference. Also, if all these world governments wanted to tackle climate change, they would start in the 2,500 (25%) most polluted cities in the world (that exceed WEF standards by upto 10 times) which are, India, Pakistan, China and the USA. If they did this we would see dramatic change on a global scale. However, they seem to not be focusing on these dire polluted cities, instead, we (England, that creates minimal negative impact on our planet as a whole) get to have 15 minute neighbourhoods, so we can have all our amenities within a 15 minute walk, but, we already have this? No? Everything I need is within 15 minutes, this is a city, so why introduce something we already have? https://www.iqair.com/world-most-polluted-cities?sort=-rank&page=13&perPage=50&cities=
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There's been an interesting exchange on Nextdoor Barnsbury recently which includes this perceptive message from Heather Louise of Upper St. As she points out so eloquently, the impact of Islington Council's LTN programme in terms of "climate change" amounts to no more than a "fart in the wind" in the big context of global climate change, and amounts to a dishonest attempt to impose an ideological "war on cars" traffic system on a community which doesn't need it or want it. The same goes for the "15 Minute Neighbourhoods" nonsense being peddled in Oxford and other cities across the UK.
Haringey fights back - another anti-LTN protest
Check out this YouTube video of an inspirational speech by Alan Miller of #Together at an anti-LTN demo in Haringey, just North of Islington, last Saturday 7.1.23:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZmdKqRnaXo
Resistance to councils imposing LTNs on those who live and work in their boroughs seems to be growing across London!
Why Highbury businesses hate LTNs
Another great video made by Keep Highbury Moving many months ago during the "consultation" period, which demonstrates the very reasonable objections by an overwhelming majority of local Highbury businesses to LTNs.
Needless to say their objections were ignored by the Council!
Islington Executive Council meeting 12.1.23 to ratify LTN programme
At the Islington Council meeting on 12.1.23, several members of the public voiced their objections to the LTN programme, including Rebekah Kelly who berated the Council for professing to promote Social Justice when LTNs have the opposite effect, pitting "haves vs have nots, rich vs poor, fit vs disabled and internal roads vs boundary roads". She also pointed out that the Council's monitoring data was inaccurate and untrustworthy and rubbished the recent pro-LTN Imperial College research report. You can see her tweet together with a video here.
https://twitter.com/BekahBexi/status/1615802599382388761
The Council ignored all questions and voted unanimously to press ahead with their LTN programme!
"Liveable Barnsbury" Consultations - Act Now!
STOP PRESS 8.2.23: Islington Council have just announced the next meetings in their "Liveable Barnsbury" consultation, here: https://islington.gov.uk/roads/people-friendly-streets/liveable-neighbourhoods/barnsbury-laycock I urge everyone who likes Barnsbury the way it is and doesn't want the Council to try and turn it into another Islington Low Traffic Neighbourhood (LTN) with road closures to engage with this process and make your views known.
According to the website there are four ways for Barnsbury residents to engage:
1. Online consultation on Feb 22
2. "Workshop" at Islington Town Hall on Mar 7
3. "Interactive Online Map"
4. Email Council.
If you like Barnsbury the way it is and don't like LTNs then please act!
Government does U-Turn on LTNs and Orders Review by DfT
January 2024. In arguably the most significant development over LTNs since their introduction, the Conservative government has signaled clearly that it wants the "War on Motorists" to end and has ordered a review by the Department of Transport (DfT). Transport Minister Mark Harper (pictured) has published a highly encouraging "Plan for Drivers" which you can access here and is well worth reading in full. The DfT review is underway and there are grounds for hoping it will result in local authorities putting plans for new LTNs on hold or even reversing existing schemes.
Several KIM supporters have written to the Transport Minister and to the DfT providing evidence that Islington Council's LTN programme is ill advised and badly implemented with particular emphasis on the draconian plan for multiple road closures in Barnsbury.Laycock. We have had several replies, all of them quite encouraging, and following a standard pattern. This letter is typical. In other replies the DfT has specifically recommended that local authorities pause any post-Covid LTN plans to which they are not already financially committed until the review is complete. We have established that the Barnsbury.Laycock plans fall under this guidance. The results of the review are expected soon, perhaps as early as February.