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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.  

About

KeepIslingtonMoving

We are a network of individuals and organisations united by our love of Islington as a place to live and work and our mission to persuade the Council to halt and reverse its ill-advised Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTN) programme.

Resources

Here you can find articles, data and media coverage supporting our mission to keep Islington moving.

Get Involved

Please contact us if you would like to be part of our network or just to make comments and engage in the discussion.

Projects

Anti-LTN organisations or activities within the umbrella Keep Islington Moving (KIM) network.  For more information hover over the main menu item "Projects" and click on the relevant sub-menu item.  Currently the two most active and longstanding projects are Keep Highbury Moving (KHM) and Keep Barnsbury Moving (KBM).  Others include Canonbury, Liverpool Road, Charlton Place, Annette Road and Dartmouth Park.

KHM Logo.png

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.

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The Council have started the "Engagement and Design" process for an LTN.  We have launched a Keep Barnsbury Moving website in response.

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"

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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"

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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

Anti-LTN protesters Town Hall 6.12.22 PXL_20221208_185825252.NIGHT_-1536x1152.jpg

 

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

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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"

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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

DAVE HILL

"Farts in the Wind" - LTNs are irrelevant to global climate change

Heather Louise

Upper Street

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=

(edited)

 
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

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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

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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.  

https://youtu.be/zljHMpbG6-I

Needless to say their objections were ignored by the Council!

Islington Executive Council meeting 12.1.23 to ratify LTN programme 

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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!

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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!

DfT_Review

Government does U-Turn on LTNs and Orders Review by DfT

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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.

Islington LTN policy discriminates against disabled people and its Blue Badge exemption policy doesn't work

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July 2024.  Islington Council's LTN programme is bad for disabled people and its policy of exemption for Blue Badge holders is a sham which simply doesn't work. That's the gist of a highly articulate and compelling indictment by veteran disabled persons' campaigner Andrew Martin at the most recent Council Executive meeting. You can view Andrew's contribution on the attached webcast (Item 8: "Adopting the People-Friendly Streets individual exemption policy"; 2 mins 48secs in) - well worth watching in full both as further evidence that LTN policy is simply wrong and that the Council's continued implementation of this policy in Islington is iniquitous. See  https://islington.public-i.tv/core/portal/webcast_interactive/891807

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