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Speeding traffic is the real problem
• LIKE thousands of others, I have been given a glossy, six-page leaflet labelled “Swiss Cottage Street Improvements, Public Consultation”.
This was prepared for Transport for London and distributed by street delivery and by hand, courtesy of TfL consultants Colin Buchanan and Partners, at a cost undoubtedly running into thousands of pounds.
Accordingly, I expected some major improvements were being proposed, not the pathetic collection of “ideas” it contained.
And the main one – filling in the bus lay-bys in front of the 100 Avenue Road building and Swiss Cottage Library – is stupid beyond belief.
It says this is because buses can find it difficult to get back into traffic from the lay-bys, but fails to recognise that it will still leave buses battling to get into the traffic.
It will also block the nearside lane and so create even more congestion.
Most buses, apart from the C11 and 31, now have to cross five lanes of traffic here. If the lay-by is abolished, they will still have four lanes to cross, now filled with drivers of cars, vans (and other buses), furious because of the extra congestion they have just battled through.
The other proposals are trivial and hardly needed any consultation. They include suggestions to extend one bit of bus lane by about 20 feet, and fiddling with traffic signals to make the junction of Adelaide Road and St John’s Wood Park safer, which do not need public input.
If they wanted to improve things at Swiss Cottage, why did they not look at the real problem in the area: the high speed of traffic through the junctions, and the utterly inadequate pedestrian crossings from the west side to the east at the Tube station?
This is where the bulk of the pedestrian traffic occurs, and has three sets of crossings, all controlled by lights (or rather across roads which are controlled by lights, since the pedestrian buttons do nothing).
These controls make the process slow at best. It also makes the junctions dangerous, as people get fed up waiting for the lights to change and so try to cross between gaps in the traffic which is mostly going far in excess of 30mph, much too fast for an area with such a high level of pedestrian traffic.
These crossings have refuges which are too small for more than three or four people, and are utterly inadequate for giant buggies, again making a hazard as mothers struggle to get onto the refuges.
I hate our money being wasted on such useless consultation exercises, especially when there are many useful road-related problems which need improving at Swiss Cottage.
DAVID REED
Eton Avenue, NW3
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