Thorpewood Ave School Street mEnd it or End it

It seems that the council have been secretly planning a school street for the top half of Thorpewood Avenue and have now come clean to surrounding residents.

The plan is to close the top half (Radlet to Kirkdale) to vehicle traffic during school hours. They will also reduce the direction of traffic on the top to Eastbound only. It is not clear whether this is permanent or just for the closure hours.

Lewisham have a policy of not having different traffic measures on the same road. It seems strange they have broken this.

The usual reasons are given including COVID social distancing. I am sure many will ask if this is another scheme for the rich and Labour members using a crisis to get something and not spreading the benefit evenly.

The main question I would ask though is why is Holy Trinity excluded?
Holy Trinity is a primary school at the bottom of Thorpewood which takes the less well off in our area (30% compared to 10% on free school meals at Eliot Bank) with a high proportion of BAME students. Do these kids not matter/deserve better air quality? Eliot Bank is currently able to social distance their kids with two large entrances and a large site while Holy Trinity is more constrained by their cramped site which although taking less kids is proportionately a lot smaller.

I think surrounding residents need to be consulted not just asked to comment. Putting a border on the avenue will just shift the problem. Radlet, Featherstone and Derby Hill Crescent are likely to suffer most. The bottom half of Thorpewood is busy already.

I am totally in favour of school streets with better air quality for children and residents but this should not be just for the upper half while making it worse for others, it should be for all.

Well I’m a neighbour who will be directly affected by this and I havent been consulted, so how have they “come clean” to surrounding residents? @cllrLeoGibbons formed a working group with Thorpewood Avenue residents from the FH Assembly coordinating group a couple of years ago. I only found out about it once it was ongoing. I’m not aware that any consensus was reached and Leo promised that there would be a full consultation with neighbours before any decision was taken.

I’ve repeatedly warned that closing Thorpewood will be really dangerous for Kirkdale’s Kelvin Grove and Dartmouth Road’s Holy Trinity schools and for anyone (children and adults alike) crossing upper Kirkdale - that includes children attending Eliot Bank. But of course not from the posh side.

Why are Lewisham and a handful of residents allowed to put other people’s children in harm’s way like this?

Holy Trinity is on Dartmouth Road, which is a A road. They can’t close off A and B roads in this way.

Upper Kirkdale is a C road from its junction with Dartmouth Road all the way up the hill (the section that was called Sydenham Hill Road till the LCC started playing sillies, in much the same was as LBL is now). So they can close upper Kirkdale. Not that I want them to any more than I wanted them to close Thorpewood. It’s bonkers, dangerous and divisive.

Holy Trinity has a postal address of Dartmouth Road. The main entrance is on Thorpewood Avenue.

The section of Thorpewood Avenue outside Holy Trinity has school markings for about 50 metres. A danger kids crossing followed by yellow Zig Zags for no parking followed by yellow lines for school Coach parking. There are other temporary markings on the pavement of 1 metre apart yellow lines.

Up until recently the Thorpewood entrance was the only one used (from what I saw) but since COVID the back gate from the playground on to Dartmouth has been used for social distancing. Most of the drop offs, cars idling happens on Thorpewood and all visitors arrive via Thorpewood. If COVID ever ends, I would expect most kids to go back to entering via the main gate.

I would expect Lewisham considers Holy Trinity being on both but primarily Thorpewood Avenue. I don’t think Thorpewood has got a letter so it could be closed for the benefit of the students. I woudn’t be surprised if Lewisham and our councillors don’t know that the main entrance is on Thorpewood. There were some posters on the railings outside the main entrance for some clean air group but it doesn’t sound like they are fighting their corner.

So where do you draw the boundary line for streets deemed worthy of being closed to traffic?

Some people would be happy if their street or part of the street were closed, knowing full well it’s going to make life more difficult for others but as long as their child and their street is protected “I’m all right Jack”. Please don’t misunderstand me, of course I’m not saying you feel that way, but sadly a vocal and influential few clearly do or they wouldn’t be content with increasing danger to children on Kirkdale. My point is there are very few places where there is a clear line that can be drawn and Thorpewood Avenue is not one of them.

Schools need to set up marshalling and drop off points in the same way that they do in the USA.

I read it as meaning just for the closure hours. I think that’s pretty clear from the context, although I agree it’s not 100% unambiguous.

Where are you seeing all this? Have you all been sent a document? If it’s online, please can you post a link? Does it say when they’re proposing to start? As I say, I’m a close neighbour and will be directly affected and I’ve not been sent anything.

I think it is a difficult question and not easy to answer. Thorpewood has been chosen and so for now to keep on topic I will stick with that issue. It has two schools with equal traffic problems.

I find it strange that one set of school children are being favoured over another set of school children. You can say the same about the residents of the upper half compared to the lower half but probably the primary aim here should be to treat the children equally and fairly with better air quality for all not making it better for one half at the expense of the other half.

I don’t see how the pupils at Holy Trinity would be any less better off than those at Eliot Bank on account of being on Dartmouth road, a much busier road and bus route that’s traffic generates more pollution due to its nature/purpose.

I guess one of the reasons for this is that there has been an outcry about double parking, obstruction, congestion and anti-social behaviour by parents dropping children off at and picking them up from Eliot Bank. I think I remember being told that there weren’t the same problems at Holy Trinity.

Mary, we had a council letter through our door about this. Happy to scan it and send it to you if you PM me your email address.

I’ve sent you a PM. Thanks so much Robin. Very kind of you.

Evening all,

1. Secret planning? A potential School Street has been openly discussed for Eliot Bank for about two years.

2. Why no consultation? Well. Covid-19 happened and central government changed the law allowing 18-month emergency transport orders to cover interventions like school streets, LTNs, model filters, pavement widening etc etc. We’ve been round this before.

3. Why is Holy Trinity ‘excluded’? My ideal would have been for the ANPR cameras to be placed at the junction of Dartmouth Rd and Thorpewood Avenue, but this would have meant another set of cameras needing to be placed on Derby Hill to prevent parents just simply driving around the cameras (via Derby Hill) and parking outside both schools. It was deemed more viable to turn upper Thorpewood Avenue into a School Street - after all, ANPR cameras are not cheap, and the overwhelming majority of complaints we have received have been regarding congestion outside Eliot Bank school.

I do not think a School Street on Thorpewood Avenue will be a danger to any pedestrians on Kirkdale and nor do our officers.

Leo

As you know, I am in the Coordinators Group for the FH Assembly. I missed a meeting, because my mother was ill. At the next meeting your Thorpewood Ave working group was mentioned. You promised faithfully that nothing would happen without a full consultation in the neighbourhood- including Kirkdale. I was told also that there was no consensus in the working group as to what was wanted - some wanted residents only parking, some a school street, there was no agreement on the sort of hours when a CPZ would operate.

What studies/evidence have you collated? Who were the officers who reached this conclusion and who in the neighbourhood did they consult?

Have you personally been to Kirkdale during a normal morning school run? Have you personally seen the cross traffic between the flow to Eliot Bank in one direction and Kelvin Grove in the other?

I hope so Leo and I really hope no child is hurt on your watch as a result of this ill conceived decision.

Leo, in response to your points

1. I think there is a difference between discussion and being given a plan created in secret to comment on. No consultation, just we are putting this in in 5 weeks.

I would agree with Mary that all discussions in the past were about the whole of Thorpewood Avenue becoming a school street/CPZ/something else which ended without consensus.

2. I think you seem to have answered my comment from earlier with this response

3. It seems that you can spend loads of money to get air quality for some but not the less well off but then I read it further.

This seems to say you are doing this because the residents have complained about congestion.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with that but be honest when you contact the other affected residents and don’t say " The primary objective of this programmed is therefore to help pupils and parents to socially distance at the school gates and to create a safer environment for travel to school on foot and by bicycle, be implementing a short closure at school drop off and pick up times.

I think if your primary objective is social distancing then Holy Trinity has a greater need but if your main objective is to keep the people who have complained happy then the upper half project makes more sense but be honest.

Are you going to allow any limited consultation on this with other residents who are directly affected?
You are dividing a road, do the residents of the lower half of Thorpewood get any say?
Do residents of Radlet and Featherstone where a lot of drop offs will now occur get any say?
Do the children and parents of Holy Trinity get a proper explanation rather than we have spent all the money on Eliot Bank kids?

There are many inaccuracies in the the previous posts about the past history of Thorpewood Ave parking issues. I have been involved from the beginning with the consultation on a possible CPZ. The results of this consultation was that the bottom of Thorpewood Ave voted for the CPZ but the top of the road voted for no restrictions. In the Consultation report it was noted that there was a significant problem with all day & Forest Hill Pools parking that should be further investigated. Leo Gibbons knocked on a few doors when he was elected as a councillor asking for any issues he could help with & parking was the main concern of residents at the bottom end of Thorpewood. It then was discussed at the Forest Hill Assemblies. A working group was formed which was chaired by Leo Gibbins & at that time was mostly attended by members of households from the lower part of Thorpewood Ave. The residents from the upper part joined at later meetings. The parking issues at the bottom are as bad & certainly more complicated as they is are all day parkers, residences cars from other roads, Holy Trinity school car parkers (teachers & parents) & Forest Hill leisure centre parking who often block driveways. The congestion at Holy Trinity school is as bad & dangerous as at the top at Eliot Bank school. I have seen double & even triple parking by parents collecting children. Do Lewisham really think that Eliot Bank parents will not use cars to drop their children off all that will happen is that this will happen on Kirkdale or at the bottom of Thorpewood Ave & surrounding roads. Children walking to both Eliot Bank & Holy Trinity Schools will encounter more pollution from cars, how does this improve things for children or residents. I invested a lot of time & effort to help improve safety for all using Thorpewood Ave & especially school children & residents & feel Leo Gibbon & others in the council have just look after the needs of a few who have shouted the loudest. Holy Trinity school children are as entitled to protection from pollution & safety as Eliot Bank children & all residents on Thorpewood Ave should have been consulted about something that will have a major impact on their everyday life. Members of Lewisham Council always told the working group that any changes would have to take account of views of residents of surrounding roads Covid or no Covid.

Holy Trinity is a single form entry school while Eliot Bank is far larger as a three form entry school. That means far more children try and squeeze through the gates each day and far more vehicles arrive outside its gates every day.

To portray this as Holy Trinity School vs Eliot Bank School is a bad faith reading of the proposals and our motivations for the them, in particular as I’ve explained why we believed cameras on Dartmouth/Thorpewood were not suitable.

…

The goal of School Streets is to improve air quality around schools and other problems caused by congestion AND to encourage active travel and help social distancing.

Not to be pithy but better air quality for some is better than no better air quality for anyone. The accusation that healthy neighbourhood interventions are solely for the benefit of the well off is misplaced in general, but in this circumstance it certainly is. I’ve outlined above why the cameras are being placed where they are.

…

I will try and respond in full to points that people post on here later on. But in the mean time, think of this implementation period as a trial (as that’s what it is) with a consultation ongoing during the trial period.

Despite this being a trial which will assess feedback from residents, we have the same complaints I often hear again and again on this forum. There seems to be an attitude on here that we operate in some sort of direct democracy, in which the council makes all its decision by consultation (decisions to be made by and for the certain demographics that respond to LA consultations in the most part).

But we vote for elected representatives via the Mayor and councillors, who act on their manifesto commitments and judgement. We judge this approach to implanting School Streets as the correct way forward.

I do share some worries that parents at Eliot Bank will simply drive up to Radlet Avenue and congest the lower part of Thorpewood Avenue. I expressed this to officers but they said funds could not stretched for the 3 or 4 sets of cameras to lock off Derby Hill and the whole of Thorpewood Avenue.

I will go back to our Sustainable Transport lead and mention that residents have expressed concerns that the intervention might just knock the congestion further down the hill. But what I would also say is give it time, and see how it goes. If things aren’t working we can always try and amend the scheme.

I will also be speaking to the leadership of both schools to ask them what they’re doing to encourage their parents to walk and cycle their kids to school during Covid-19.

Personally I don’t think this sort of comment is particularly appropriate to direct at a single councillor. As Leo said:

Does anyone question why so many people need to drive their kids to school? How big are the catchment areas for these schools? Surely they can’t be more than a mile radius? And yes I appreciate that not everyone can walk but it does sound bad if people are triple parking.

Our local Councillors do have to be held account for their decisions. Leo took the lead on this. It was Leo’s working group. Leo promised - I emphasise promised face to face - that nothing would happen without the neighbourhood being consulted. Then, as there was no consensus, the whole thing seemed to have fizzled out.

Our Councillors may have been elected, but there is no viable opposition in Lewisham at the moment. They have no mandate to do this. But then around the same time, so were told at a Coordinators’ meeting that the Council’s so called Local Democracy Review was reporting to the Labour Group.

No one in this area needs to drive their children to school, unless that child has mobility issues or there are other extraordinary circumstances. The school must have a school travel plan. I’ll ask them for a copy. I would hope it has some requirement that they have some sanctions on parents that do make unnecessary motorised journeys to school. Shifting the parking chaos onto Kirkdale and other neighbouring streets doesn’t help anyone except those in the closed off streets.

Our Council must have real problems if they have to set about dividing communities in this way.

Hi @KimD and welcome. Was a report actually published? Where can we see it? I only know the name of one person who was a member of Leo’s working group and he is also a FH Assembly Coordinator. Obviously I’m not putting his name on here as he’s not an elected and therefore public figure. The report should be in the public domain though.

I think you have disappointed a lot of young parents with this inaccuracy. Eliot Bank is a two form entry not three as you have stated. HT has a capacity of 210 with EB having 420. EB’s site is probably 4 times the size of HT set back from the road and is an outstanding school with a feeling of space and a great reputation.

Eliot Bank has now divided the entry of children between the front entrance on Thorpewood Avenue and the back entrance on Eliot Bank. These entrances are a few hundred metres apart so the top of Thorpewood have probably half the traffic they had in the past.
Holy Trinity has two entrances about 50m apart, most drivers will still arrive via Thorpewood as it is most convenient for both. I don’t think you can say far more at present during Covid, pre-Covid it would have been more accurate but this measure is Covid related.

I think an easy way to test the theory of whether the cars will just move to the lower part of Thorpewood is just to ask the residents who live by the back entrance of EB. I think the most recent newsletter is asking them to stop parking in residents car parks.

I don’t think people see this as an EB vs HT or upper vs lower Thorpewood. I think all have equal entitlement to clean air and all should be treated equally. I don’t think it is right that you are seeking to displace pollution from one place that has high levels of traffic for 2 hours a day to another place that has high levels of traffic all day. I understand the cost argument but it shouldn’t be about making it a lot worse for some people.

You seem to be advocating benevolent dictatorship by local councillors who know best and should follow their approach as it is the correct way forward. I don’t think we residents elected you tell us the correct way without listening to us. I am grateful that in your second reply you have listened to our concerns.

Elliot Bank was 717.86m last year. Adamsrill was 7142.25m (source).

While I don’t doubt there are needless journeys, I wouldn’t like to make assumptions about parent’s individual circumstances and situations. Having more than one child in different schools (e.g. one in primary and one in secondary), or having moved for schools or work, or just needing to drop the kids and get to work are all reasons why people may end up driving.

Primary schools are a particular problem as the children are generally too young to make their own way to school on public transport or whatever.

But clearly they do.

It would indeed be interesting to see the ‘school travel plan’. If only ‘please consider not driving your kids to school if not absolutely necessary’ worked then school streets wouldn’t be implemented in the first place.

These are all good points, and to be clear I’m not suggesting everyone walks to school, it’s exactly the needless journeys that I’m talking about. Even small changes in behaviour can reduce congestion and pollution and risk of accidents around schools.

Well I did say no one needs to drive their children to school “unless that child has mobility issues or there are other extraordinary circumstances”.

@robin.orton has kindly sent me a copy of Lewisham’s letter. I shall ask Lewisham to circulate the letter to the neighbours who will inevitably be affected. It’s extraordinary to me that residents in that part of the street can still come and go as and when they choose - presumably so can their employees, which makes for an interesting time should any of the planning applications for that part of Thorpewood be approved.

Thanks too to @EmmaJ for the info on Eliot Bank School. From the school’s website I also learn that they now stagger the entry/exit times for different year groups.

I wonder if part of the reason for favouring Eliot Bank children (at least in the immediate vicinity of the school) over others is because it’s part of a Federation? Does that maybe give them more political clout?

Hi @marymck
I was in both the co-ordinating group and the Thorpewood Avenue working group.

Firstly, I couldn’t find a link to the 2015 CPZ consultation report. I can pm it to you but I had a look for the relevant details. There is a lot in there but the upshot was the council (this was before Leo’s time) through their measurement of traffic pressure on the road and local pressure concluded that the greater pressure was on the lower half but felt they couldn’t just have part of the road/area as a CPZ. They acknowledged though there was a need to do something.

This rumbled on for a while and at the assembly where we had the Meet the Mayor and question him session. I asked him what he was going to do to fulfil the council’s commitment. He asked that the Thorpewood Avenue Working Group be setup to look into it. Leo was appointed to head this up.

The working group wasn’t particularly well publicised and attendance was probably down to locals getting their neighbours to attend. It was open to all but the majority were Thorpewood Avenue residents with a representative of the local schools. I think the great thing was that it united the road and made people think about the road as being one with similar problems.

School Streets (School Pedestrian Zone SPZ) were seen as an option but only for the whole road. There was never any discussion of a school street for the bottom or the top. Unsurprisingly it would not have been acceptable in a group that was looking at Thorpewood as one road. People discussed the option and saw the complexity of the issues and the number of cameras. Many residents felt that a school street should only be brought in with a CPZ. We were told repeatedly by Leo that any proposal which we agreed on whether a CPZ or SPZ would need to get approval from the local area including Radlet, Derby Hill Crescent etc. I don’t think he mentioned Kirkdale but it sounds like you mentioned it to him.

There was a lot of concern about child safety and pollution but it was about the whole road and not just the top part. The same goes for schools, there was discussion about both schools but never singling out Eliot Bank for special treatment or feeling that because Holy Trinity was smaller, it deserved less attention.

I have had some contact from people from the working group, the people from the bottom are feeling betrayed and feel Leo is making a bad situation a lot worse.
The people from the top accept they got lucky and say they would be furious if it had gone the other way but say that Leo seems to have destroyed the consensus and offended a lot of people.
There is fear that the desire for a CPZ which has receded because of Covid might end up now happening because of the extra pollution and congestion which will now be concentrated below the Radlet Camera.

The Forest Hill CPZ Consultation Study 2016 & can be view if you google this & click on Forest Hill. The report is available in full. Sorry as I am new to this site I’m not sure how to show the link here.

On the number of cars dropping children & the catchment areas, families often move once there children have started at Eliot Bank to areas miles away but continue to have there children at Eliot Bank so travelling by cars are their only option. Eliot Bank is an outstanding school so competition for places is high. This point was brought up in the Thorpewood Ave Parking Working Group but never answered by Eliot Bank.

The encouragement for children to walk to school has been in operation at both schools for a few years now but had made little difference to the number of cars dropping & collecting children. I am not confident that journeys will reduce with this traffic system just move the drop off & collections to Kirkdale & Thorpewood Ave at Radlett Ave causing traffic chaos in the surrounding areas.

I’m not sure about the relevance of the discussion on the different in & outs schools are taking due to the Covid these will presumably revert back to one entrance once Covid restrictions are reduced. As I understand this road closure at school times is probably a long time change.

Thanks @BorderPaul for that really helpful and thorough summary.

The Meet the Mayor Assembly must have been the one I missed. It was probably at the next Coordinators meeting that the Thorpewood Ave working group was mentioned. If memory serves there was mention of another working group too for a different area. I think @cllrSophieDavis might have been leading that one, but I might be wrong.

The thing is a community is about more than just one street. I’ve expressed my concerns for upper Kirkdale and Kelvin Grove since I first heard mention of school streets or a CPZ. It’s chaos at the junction of Thorpewood and Kirkdale in the mornings when the school run coincides with the morning rush. During the day, upper Kirkdale remains a quiet road but it is the thoroughfare for the many schools in our area. Far more so than Thorpewood, as we have Kelvin Grove too.

Leo is aware of this.

Our Council seems determined to set street against street, when really we should be standing up to them and seeing they fulfil their duty of care to all.

Hi Emma, yes I apologise I got that wrong. Eliot Bank is a two form entry school and I am happy to be corrected.

I will try and respond to this thread later with other matters people have raised.

It is not a benevolent dictatorship when we have elections every four years.

Our manifesto clearly stated: Work with parents and schools to protect our children from toxic air. All Lewisham children will be encouraged to walk, cycle and scoot to school away from main roads. We will provide interventions to protect our most polluted playgrounds and build on our anti-idling schools programme to reduce emissions in the vicinity of our schools.

The executive has embraced School Street as an intervention, after some lobbying from me. Under new laws, we are able to put these interventions in place to support active travel for 18 months. These 18 months, or less, will act as a trial and consultation period, which seems absolutely reasonable to me.

In my memory, I had probably two complaints regarding parking/congestion issues near Holy Trinity, and these involved cars parking on the pavement on Dartmouth Rd. Eliot Bank, on the other hand, I received countless as the school is larger and congestion is greater. It is understandable (to me) why the intervention was focused here.

Today, I emailed our road safety and sustainable transport manager expressing anxieties about the proposed placement of the ANPR cameras and offering a potential remedy if the same level of congestion remains but below Radlett Avenue. My suggestion was that we could move the lower ANPR camera to the junction of Thorpewood Avenue & Dartmouth Road, while a rail-gate be placed at the junction of Derby Hill & Derby Hill Crescent. This isn’t without its issues, as one of the schools would need to agree to operate the gate and I am unsure how easy it is to move the cameras around.

Finally, noting some of the comments here… I don’t seem to understand the attitude that if a street gets nice things (model filter/CPZ/school street/public realm improvements) = “they get it but we don’t, therefore you’ve set street against street”. I have no idea where this attitude has been fostered and I sincerely hope it is not representative.

I just don’t get why you can’t see this is divisive. You are creating more problems for nearby schools and streets to favour one small area and one small school.

Indeed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more divisive policy by the council. It’s given rise to all kinds of nastiness, both between residents of streets that “win” and “lose”, and more generally amongst those who have ideologically pursued LTNs vs those affected by them.

Resident-on-resident warfare is really sad to witness. And all avoidable, if the council were to choose positive policy making as opposed to zero-sum.

Being objective I would raise the following points:

Polluted Playgrounds

Eliot Bank is in set in the middle of a tree lined avenue with the classrooms setback from the road. There are 2 playgrounds a front one which could not be described as the most polluted under any measure. There is a very large playground at the back which is about 50 metres from the road and could probably be described as one of the largest and least polluted playgrounds in Forest Hill if not Lewisham. It is absolutely brilliant that we have this resource for our kids.
I am not sure if many people such as the mayor would say

Holy Trinity is on a cramped corner with a B road and the classrooms are not setback from the road, the playground is small and could be described as polluted.

Parking/Congestion

It would be good if somebody could do an FOI regarding congestion on this but over the last ten years or longer the issue at Eliot Bank has been the parents parking over residents driveways and subjecting residents to abuse when challenged. A small but significant number of residents have been affected very badly. The council and the school have been unable to resolve this. Those residents are the ones who will benefit from gating that section of the road with two cameras.

Lewisham Transport surveys and the last CPZ consultation found that most parking pressure in this area was not the top of Thorpewood Avenue but the lower section with some very high levels of short term parking more normally seen in car parks. This is probably not just an issue for Thorpewood but also Derby Hill Crescent and Featherstone. These residents are the ones who will not benefit from these cameras and probably see it as having a major negative effect.

The worst congestion is the bottleneck section of Thorpewood Avenue between Derby Hill Cresecent and Dartmouth Road. This section takes most traffic in and out of Thorpewood Avenue. This struggles as it is single file when the driveways are parked over and often leads to gridlock both on TA/DHC .and smaller but significant queuing on Dartmouth Road when two cars try to pass at the same time. It is worrying that the original school street plan would have made this significantly worse as it would be a single point of entry and exit to TA at the busiest times. Any School Street that does not take this junction into account could easily lead to a lot more pollution with more engine idling outside Holy Trinity and the surrounding residences.

Leo, I welcome the fact that you are taking into account the concerns of the majority of residents and the children who will be affected. It would be good if you could recirculate the letter with any potential changes so that it becomes a commitment rather than an online chat.

I don’t think anybody feels that the residents outside Eliot Bank shouldn’t get two cameras to protect their driveways and protect them from parental abuse. I am totally in favour but I think this plan can be done in such a way that most residents and children in this area benefit from this change and thank you again for your proposed changes.

Chris how is this tweet relevant - it’s about a cafe in Ealing by an obsessive anti LTN campaigner. We’re talking about local issues to do with School Streets. We can all find thousands of pro and con LTN tweets on Twitter if you want to go read them there but I would encourage people to go read them there and keep it on topic here. We’re lucky enough to have an engaged councillor in the thread and calling policies divisive does not add to the discussion or argument.

I was replying specifically about a point the councillor raised in which he said he didn’t understand how modal filters could be divisive. I provided an example where they had been very divisive.

Personally, I think this response is revealing. Instead of looking at the wider goal of School Streets - ie disincentivising parents from driving to school which will benefit the wider community as much as Eliot Bank’s neighbours - it is viewed as a narrow gain for lucky few. If the trial of the School Street is successful, the problems caused nearby are likely to be minuscule and transient as parents once driving to school begin to change their behaviour as they are no longer conveniently able to.

On a side note, I see similar responses to house building. The focus is always on the narrow, immediate ‘losers’ of a scheme. The magnitude of social and environmental ills caused by homelessness or extortionate rents and prices caused by an inadequate supply of housing in the South East, are overlooked.

It is very rare that the bigger picture is viewed.

I live in Radlet Avenue, so am potentially affected. My instinct is to wait and see, and to make sure that any problems arising are promptly reported (to Leo?). I suggest others do the same.

Emma, if it were possible to move Holy Trinity to a tree lined avenue, I would. If were feasible to close off Dartmouth Road to traffic to protect Holy Trinity, I would push for it.

When I’ve used congestion in these posts, I was talking about a number of things - including: pollution, dangerous manoeuvring of vehicles near a school entrance, and the problem of parents illegally blocking residents’ access to the public highway (by parking over their vehicle crossovers). From my casework, the last two issues are much greater outside Eliot Bank and unfortunately, on the first point, while we can try to disincentivise parents from driving to Eliot Bank (often past Holy Trinity), we can’t block off Dartmouth Rd.

I am aware that parking pressure is greater at the lower section of Thorpewood Avenue but that pressure is caused by commuters and gym/pools users, rather than school drop offs. I’ve been pushing for a CPZ to cover TA/RA/DHC/DH but under our current policies (which I’d like amended) for a CPZ to be placed a consultation and local referendum needs to take place. Atm, it is essentially up to residents to self-organise if they would like CPZ in this area.

As I said, I understand your concerns and have offered a suggested remedy. I would be grateful if you might email your concerns to me at cllr_leo.gibbons@lewisham.gov.uk and I will ensure that the response I receive from our Road Safety team is shared with you.

As a resident of the lower part of TA I’m not seeing this as much of an additional problem. Our parking issues, in normal times, are much more to do with commuter parking, visitors to the library, swimming pools and shops plus dumped vehicles (Leo, there are currently 2, a Transit van that hasn’t moved in over a year and a Ford Sierra on the corner of Featherstone). If EB parents do try to use lower TA as a drop off point the greater concern, in my opinion, is that there will be nowhere for them to legally stop and they may block the road for a short time to residents and emergency vehicles. However, that would be easily remedied if LBC stationed a traffic warden there to hand out tickets for a while as a deterrent.

Yes Leo you and I disagree over the Mais House development. That is not relevant to this debate and people will not understand your distraction techniques or that you are having a dig at me personally or why. I am entitled to my opinion on what is happening at Lammas Green/Mais House just as I am on School Streets and Road Closures and on the flaws with the Local Democracy Review. Setting up a Council Local Democracy Review that reported that reported to the Labour Group did not inspire confidence.

Obviously I get under your skin. Rise above it. You’re the Politician. I’m just a citizen and voter.

I suggest that the Moderators remove the whole of Leo’s post to which I am responding and this one, so that this discussion is kept on track.

@LeoGibbons & @marymck while there are some great views and perspectives here, please lets keep to the discussion at hand and avoid any personal digs and arguments. It would be a shame to have to move anything to #moderator-actions, especially as there are a range of views here, all equally valid and informing.

John, the traffic warden option has failed to work at EB which is why the residents up there are getting 2 cameras to protect their driveways and gate that section. I think we should applaud their success.

Leo, I have not said that I want Holy Trinity moved or that anything should be done to Dartmouth Road.

I pointed out that the most polluting and busiest section of Thorpewood Avenue is beside that school and that a School Street for Thorpewood Avenue should deal with that junction as a primary concern and not add more pollution to Holy Trinity…

I did reference their playground as you have stated that this intervention is to protect our most polluted playgrounds while I think Eliot Bank has probably one of the largest and least polluted playgrounds in Forest Hill if not Lewisham.

As you say the parking pressure is greatest below the proposed cameras and this is likely to make that worse. I think there is a very high level of apathy and disengagement with the council in TA(lower)/DHC/DH so I would say you will probably not receive a single concern/complaint.

Emma, perhaps they should employ a more nimble and zealous traffic warden. I’m sure (s)he could dish out enough tickets to deter the inconsiderate and earn LBC a few quid.

Re your response to Leo it’s not apathy on lower TA, although it could be considered disengagement, but when you’ve been banging your head against a wall for years it’s really nice when you stop.

Actually the assembly meeting agreed that the group would look at traffic flow throughout Forest Hill, but behind the scenes it was changed into a Tewkesbury and Thorpewood group.

Ah that explains it! Thank you. Also I remembered that at the same time I was told there was a Thorpewood working group that there was somewhere else mentioned. Tewkesbury does ring a bell. Did @SophieDavis run that one and anyone know what the outcome was?

I wonder how he selected which doors to knock on?

There is no viable voting system, as the two main parties collude to ensure First Past the Post stops voters truly expressing themselves. A lifetime of having to vote for the least worst option. Stinks!

I did a little comparison of catchment areas for the two schools.
Eliot Bank is the small circle.
Holy Trinity is the large circle.

Although Holy Trinity has half the number of pupils, they come from a far more disperse area. The maximum walk to Eliot Bank from within the catchment area is about 12 minutes - and that’s only because there isn’t a pathway between Taymount Rise and Derby Hill Crescent.

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For Holy Trinity (and Kelvin Grove with three form entry) some pupils have to travel much further. I would suggest that this is a good reason to implement a school street for Eliot Bank first. Whether the exact details of the scheme are right, I don’t know, but I think it is right to test out a school street for a school which has the smallest catchment area rather than the biggest - it is more reasonable to expect Eliot Bank pupils (and parents) to walk the short distance to school - and making this change during a pandemic also makes sense as more parents are working from home.

This is about changing behaviour, and the council is encouraging Eliot Bank school children/parents to be less reliant on their cars. The impact for residents on Thorpewood will be positive, although I do worry about the impact on Derby Hill Crescent and Kirkdale. The council will need to look carefully at the impact, but it is an interesting experiment which can only encourage Eliot Bank parents to be less reliant on motor vehicles.

On the issue of Lower Thorpewood, I have no idea how to solve the issue. A small CPZ for residents on the south side without driveways might help, and a footbridge from the Perry Vale car park to the swimming pool would make a huge difference.

Full disclosure: My daughter goes to Eliot Bank and, because she is in year 6, no longer requires anybody to take her to school (prior to that she may have had a lift to school on around five occasions in the last six years).

Good post @Michael.

Just a minor note (and I’m sure you’re already aware) the catchment area of a school only tells part of the story of where its pupils live. Siblings of pupils, and also those in priority admissions areas may live outside the “as the crow flies” area. And obviously, parents can move house after their children are admitted to a school.

So actually, parents could be travelling further than shown on the map you posted, necessitating car journeys in cases where a) the children are too young to use public transport b) public transport doesn’t serve their journey c) the children have special needs d) the parents have multiple school drop offs etc etc

I can tell you actually. Before I was elected, our Labour Party borough organiser informed us about which roads had the lowest ‘contact rate’ (then had not been canvassed in a while, or have a high-turnover) so we started by canvassing those streets, then nearer to election day we canvassed areas we believed would have a higher number of Labour voters (makes sense in an election!).

Since becoming elected (until Covid-19 hit!), myself, Peter, and Sophie have tried to knock on doors at least once a month in the winter months and twice a month during the summer months. How we’ve chosen locations has been a bit more amateurish - I have a ward map and I highlight areas we’ve visited and I choose them by thinking to myself ‘we haven’t been there for a while’. Not very high-tech I know.

Regarding the working groups. As soon as we were elected we were repeatedly contacted about two major points of contention - parking congestion/school-run congestion on Thorpewood Avenue and rat-running on the roads surrounding Tewkesbury Avenue. Organising working groups, via the Local Assembly, was mine and Sophie’s idea to try and understand the issues better and therefore help tackle them. “Behind the scenes” might mean the Assembly Steering Group, which you’re very welcome to join.

Sophie’s working group (spun from concerns from around Tewkesbury) is now dealing with traffic flow in half of Forest Hill ward (Between London Rd, Honor Oak Park, Wood Vale, Devonshire Road) and she is lobbying for Honor Oak to be prioritised for Healthy Neighbourhood funding. If anyone is interested in learning more about this working group they should email Sophie at cllr_sophie.davis@lewisham.gov.uk.

On a final note, I am not a fan of FPTP either. For Westminster elections I’d a like a hybrid system like AMS or AV+. Local elections, I’d likely prefer PR via STV, which they use in Scotland and N Ireland.

I am trying to be as open and as transparent as I can on here. I want to tackle what I read as cynicism towards the local authority and local ward councillors.

When I went to primary school every child walked to school.
It is not quite so simple these days. I think some parents drive their children to school because it is safer or because they need to go onto work afterwards.

I have visited every school in Lewisham and seen the traffic problems for myself. At one school local residents used to come out of their houses to go to work only to find that they had to wait for parents parked down the middle of the road to come back to their cars!

I suspect that this scheme may move the problem to somewhere else not very far away.

Full Disclosure here before I put in this opinion. I live on the lower part of Thorpewood Avenue and all my kids have attended Eliot Bank. I was on the Thorpewood Avenue Working group (TAWG), took the minutes and helped to keep order (which was challenging ) and in the past was in favour of a CPZ.
I am not so sure now with the current economic climate and job uncertainty that I and many others would want to take on extra expense.

Firstly in reply to Michael. I think it is more correct to say it is positive for the top of Thorpewood and negative for the already very congested bottom of Thorpewood. Many people though feel perhaps we should take one for the team.

Eliot Bank is an outstanding primary school and many people go to extraordinary lengths to get in there all of which I am sure are legal but it does mean where people live and the catchment area may differ over time. It tends to have people with greater income shown by the fact that only 10% of kids have free school meals. These two factors probably contribute to a lot of driving and to these people having difficulty changing their behaviour from using the car to walking especially if they are over 15 minutes walk away.

I would like to see some evidence on the impact of a school street for a small section of it vs the whole street vs no school street. A lot of children and adults travel between Dartmouth Road and Eliot Bank to go to the shops, cafes, pools and library. Are they going to be exposed to be any less pollution? or will it be a case of going from the less polluted area to an area with twice the pollution due to congestion.

Leo, you have said the you want to be open and as transparent as possible and want to tackle cynicism so I am going to put forward an allegation which has been said to me about the TA Working Group and what happened when it finished. I am not saying it is true but I think it is in the public interest to air it so you have the opportunity to respond.

The received opinion/allegation seems to be:

The TAWG met, didn’t achieve any consensus apart from the fact that any scheme should benefit all residents of the avenue and not push the problem from one end to the other. Any scheme proposed you reminded us would need the agreement/consideration of neighbouring streets. You did have our emails so you were able to contact us later if any scheme was discussed or proposed.

The allegation is that subsequent meetings/correspondence took place between a small section of stakeholders which included local labour party members that had two vested interests, protecting the small number of driveways directly in front of Eliot Bank and retaining parking for teachers on part of Thorpewood Avenue. These stakeholders also held the interest which we all believe in that we should reduce pollution for local children. The difficulty was how do you balance both vested interests with the common goal. There is a feeling that the common goal of this scheme has been compromised because of vested interests.

There were rumours coming out of labour party circles a few weeks back that something was going to happen with school streets on Thorpewood. The first the residents and most of the members of the TAWG found out was on Sunday when a letter was posted through our letterbox. Members of the TAWG have asked why couldn’t you have emailed us the details earlier during the discussions. Why was it a closed discussion?

You seem to have annoyed local residents outside the scheme by telling them they should pay £200 to park their cars or else live in a more polluted area while you are going to spend allegedly tens of thousands of pounds to protect a small number of driveways.

Like a lot of other people lower down, I have finally given up after many years of banging my head against a wall in dealing with the council both as an individual, an assembly coordinating group member and the TAWG. I wish this scheme the best if it changes to benefit all the residents and local children but I am out.

Hi Paul,

I accept the criticism that as soon as I heard that a School Street was being considered for Thorpewood Avenue was in August I should have contacted the TAWG, despite Local Assemblies being suspended. At that point, the feasibility and design were being looked at again due to the availability of new central government funds for emergency transport programmes. All I said at this point was that I stressed the need for ANPR cameras, rather than rail-gates as I felt they would not be suitable for TA.

It was only at the end of September that I was told that a scheme was going to go ahead as planned (we could not afford more than two cameras). I knew the plan was to go ahead under new laws and the consultation would take place during its emergency 18-month (or less) implementation. However, I accept that a TAWG meeting probably should have been convened then, via Zoom or Teams, to discuss the plan and I should have seen this coming - that residents would feel like something is being thrust on them without a say. This probably comes from a lack of experience on my part.

I have heard similar rumours as this and I don’t know where they have come from. The scheme is not being done to protect ‘the vested interests of some personal driveways’, instead the scheme is being done primarily to disincentivise parents at Eliot Bank, driving their children to school - therefore - reducing pollution and congestion for all local children and residents along the whole length of Thorpewood Avenue.

As I have already said, if this School Street fails to discincentivise parents from driving to Eliot Bank and instead means they just park below Radlett Avenue, it has not worked, and I will push and push for the scheme to be reassessed.

The idea that I pushed for and supported a School Street - not as a (proven successful) programme to disincentivise car use and therefore reduce pollution and congestion near schools - but to protect the driveways of Labour members is exactly an example of the cynicism and bad-faith readings of our councillors’ actions, that I lamented in an earlier post!

I sigh.

I think unfortunately many people are already calling it the “Cameras for Driveways Scheme” but hopefully over time it will earn the respect of local people.

Thanks for this. It helps me to understand that you had already decided - before collecting any traffic data - which streets you were going to help. This explains how a discussion about the traffic flow in Forest Hill in a local assembly, then changed (without visible process) into focusing on Tewkesbury and Thorpewood. This was pre-determined; you had already decided, and then enlisted support of officers.

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I was in the supposed steering group, but was never contacted; probably not living in the preferred zones for action.

The agendas for the assemblies were never set by the assemblies.

If you want to remedy cynicism, then selecting which roads to close needs to use objectively verifiable data and transparent process. As things stand, it isn’t clear at all. Busy street A is closed to thru traffic because it is a “rat run”. Busy street B is told it has to put up with excessive traffic because it is a “strategic route”.

The perception is that these decisions are political; hence the cynicism that you say you want to do something about.

@leogibbons
3 hopefully simple questions here

Firstly, is it correct to say that any (resident or non-resident) car parked on the top of Thorpewood Avenue is free to exit at any time including the School Street hours although obviously discouraged?

Secondly, traffic is going to be one way Eastbound on the top of Thorpewood Avenue only.
Can you explain the reasoning for this and the times of operation?
Is there any concern that any exiting from the protected area will lead to more congestion in the lower area whereas exiting from the top Kirkdale junction might ease this congestion?

Thirdly, is it correct to say that the only people who qualify as being in the school street are those in the upper half for the purpose of exemption to the regulations, so the lower half are having their right of way through the top part of their road removed?

Hi Leo,

I live on Thorpewood Avenue near Eliot Bank and wanted to voice my preliminary support for the School Street, as proposed.

I appreciate that there is a complex history regarding the many issues affecting Thorpewood Avenue and the surrounding roads. I can also appreciate that the scheme, as proposed, will not solve all of these issues (and may actually exacerbate some); however, as a trial, and bearing in mind the limitations in funding which you have said mean a School Street for the entire street is not currently an option, I think that it is a good first step. It is then incumbent upon us, us a community as a whole and including representatives of both schools, to provide meaningful feedback to the council to ensure that its reassessment in due course is as fair and productive as possible. Do you think that if the scheme is successful in disincentivising parents from driving to Eliot Bank that would help you be able to access more funding in due course to extend the scheme further so that both primaries can benefit more equally from it? If so, then a commitment along those lines may provide comfort to some of those residents who are currently concerned by the limited scope of the trial? I think that it is important to ensure that meaningful data is collected during the trial (e.g. % parents using car as primary means of transport to/from school) so that its success or failure can be objectively assessed. Also, I think that it is important to make Eliot Bank more accountable for the behaviour of its students’ parents, as unless the school works proactively with parents towards achieving the aims of the School Streets scheme, the whole concept could be undermined by parents failing to change their behaviour and simply congesting nearby roads instead. Will the council be able to take more responsibility for liaising with the school to ensure that they take an active role in promoting the success of the scheme? Perhaps I am being overly cynical, but in my opinion a note in a newsletter telling parents to walk instead of drive etc is likely to be ignored by a large majority of parents - something more creative and probably resource intensive is required if you are looking to achieve a genuine shift in parents’ behaviour towards walking/cycling/public transport/carpooling.

I do share the concern of other residents on this thread, however, that the trial will create an even more dangerous situation for pedestrians crossing Kirkdale to enter Thorpewood Avenue. Even with the current levels of street parking on Kirkdale, at school drop off and pick up the visibility at this point of crossing is extremely poor and cars only infrequently stop to allow pedestrians, usually with groups of young children, to cross. The closure of upper Thorpewood Avenue will undoubtedly increase the parking pressure on Kirkdale, only worsening the problem. A temporary solution may be to have a ‘Lollipop Lady’? I think there is already one who assists the Kelvin Grove students lower down on Kirkdale. The present of a council employee may also act as a deterrent to parents parking over double yellow lines etc.

On a personal note, I am uncomfortable that this is being perceived by some as a “cameras for driveways” scheme and wish to make it clear that my support is in no way influenced by a desire for my driveway to be policed. My driveway is blocked in every day and I have not raised any complaints about that as for the time being I feel that it is preferable to parents double parking creating an even more unsafe school drop off environment.

It is good to hear the other side and understand the driveways’ issue. The presence of parking wardens and efforts of Eliot Bank over the last ten years have not made the driveways issue any better. I think under those conditions it is understandable that most people would want their driveways clear. It is good that you are more concerned about safety than your driveway.

It is probably accurate to add the closure of upper Thorpewood will undoubtedly increase the parking pressure on those roads below as well such as the bottom of Thorpewood, Derby Hill Crescent and pollution outside Holy Trinity school.

It is unfortunate that this is now labelled by most residents as the Cameras for Driveways Scheme. Very simply most local residents believe the only certain outcome of this scheme is to protect driveways. It will shift the congestion, parking, pollution, safety issues to neighbouring roads making a bad problem worse. It will do this to benefit about 50 households while shifting the issue to other streets with hundreds of households affected. Most children will still walk through the same amount of pollution, it will just be more concentrated. As I have said before I am in favour of a school street that benefits the many rather than the few.

Residents want to be consulted now rather than in the future. I don’t think anybody believes that if they won’t consult us now, they will consult us in the future.

If what we’re being told is true and some parents of Eliot Bank school children are driving them to school because they have moved away from the catchment area and now live too far to walk - and presumably they wouldn’t want their little darlings to use public transport - then what will they do? All the School Streets in the world won’t change their attitude. They’ll still drive. They’ll just park elsewhere. This won’t change their habits. The school needs to do that. Issue a warning to non Blue Badge holding parents who continue to drive non disabled children to school from out of the catchment area that should they persist they will need to find another school where their child can be transported to school without harm to others.

I don’t hold out much hope the school care enough to do anything as I suspect that some teachers drive to school too. If so, that’s some example to set!

I emailed Eliot Bank School on 19th October, asking for a copy of their School Travel Plan. I’ve had no reply.

That’s absolutely fine, where needed.

The aim is to change the behaviour of people driving shorter distances. The goal is to reduce car use, and thereby congestion and pollution, not eliminate cars.

It’s an unnecessary journey unless there are no schools near where these parents have chosen to live. That cannot possibly be the case in Lewisham. I switched schools when my parents moved from one area to another and my life experience is the richer for it. Schools have catchment areas for a reason.

I think because of congestion and a change in attitude amongst many, most of those who could be encouraged have switched away from driving. I don’t think encouragement comes into it any more. This is about putting up a barrier to stop people from driving through but there is no wall on the other end of the road so people will just drive up that way or park outside the wall/camera.

I don’t think we can blame parents for wanting the best for their children. Eliot Bank is outstanding with great facilities. There are very few Ofsted outstanding schools and most parents aren’t going to switch their children from a great school to a good school if they can still drive. This scheme makes no difference in restricting driving except that they can’t park in a small area protected by 2 cameras where 50 households live.

This will add more pollution to the playgrounds of Kelvin Grove (630 children, 20% free school meals), Holy Trinity (210 children, 30% free school meals) for the benefit of Eliot Bank playground (420 children 10% school meals). This will penalise the majority of the kids probably around 1,000 including those from Eliot Bank who walk to school both in terms of pollution and safety.

So what I’m not getting from this thread is what the proposed solution is… don’t close the road? Close the whole road? Cameras? Traffic wardens? I genuinely am interested to hear as I may be able to help out.

Let’s move forward a few years. 90% of London now drives a Tesla 5 and Nissan leaves are as spread as an Autumn fall. Then what?

Less pollution. Same congestion? That’s why I’m asking what people are actually proposing here instead of the current planned trial. Or is this just a case of ‘there’s no right answer’?

Educate the parents and the teachers. Enforce the catchment areas.

I think you may be misunderstanding how school catchment areas are defined.

The council doesn’t set a radius in which pupils are eligible for a particular school. Instead rules are based on criteria where the distance from school is a deciding factor to rank otherwise equal applicants. The catchment area is just the furthest distance any pupil lives from a school in a given year of intake, and changes each year

The exact criteria are on the council website. Faith schools, free schools and academies are allowed to set their own criteria.

I think the only answer is a controlled parking zone covering the whole area between London Road, Dartmouth Road and upper Kirkdale on the lines proposed and rejected by local referendum some years ago. For this to happen, either the council has just got to go ahead and do it, or people like me have got to be persuaded to vote for something that will cause us inconvenience and cost us money, for the sake of the common good.

Point taken. I see that I had missed where @anon5422159 corrected @Michael on this. But I still think it’s the most relevant aspect, as people further up this thread have pointed out that that is why some parents need to drive their children to school. And presumably to all out of school activities that their school friends enjoy.

MichaelVerified

4d

I did a little comparison of catchment areas for the two schools.
Eliot Bank is the small circle.
Holy Trinity is the large circle.

Although Holy Trinity has half the number of pupils, they come from a far more disperse area. The maximum walk to Eliot Bank from within the catchment area is about 12 minutes - and that’s only because there isn’t a pathway between Taymount Rise and Derby Hill Crescent.

You are right. It is a complex matter and it is likely any solution will upset some but be good for others. The key is to get the balance right so that any money spent can benefit many people. It is hard to critique the current proposal as there hasn’t been a lot of detail. The obvious thing that needs clarification is regarding the imposition of one-way traffic for the top. Is it permanent or just for the 2 hours as @robin.orton and most seem to have assumed? I am going to take it that it is temporary but it is a very critical thing to be ambiguous. These are personal opinions. It is a long read so feel free to skip to the options and table at the end.

Safety, I have children, double parking, driving on the wrong side to pass a double parked car are all major hazards for kids. I think one way traffic is a way to make this easier and more predictable for children. I think the current envisaged plan is counter-productive. A child has to look one way before 9:15 but afterwards must look both ways, many will forget. A child has to look one way on the top of the road but then when they pass an invisible border they must look both ways, many will forget. My simple view here is that you have one rule on which way the traffic flows on one road and not three rules over two parts of the same road.

Congestion/Pollution, the main pollution point in my opinion is the bottleneck between the bottom of Thorpewood Avenue from Derby Hill Crescent exiting to Dartmouth Road. Yes, Eliot Bank has it bad on school days for an hour but this junction has it bad on school days and in the evenings and weekends with Pools traffic, not so much with the Pools closed but it is likely to get worse especially with the Pools reopening and The Bridge being closed. My view here is that making this section one way would reduce congestion. The downside is this might speed up traffic and create longer journeys for residents which would be very unpopular.

Parking, a CPZ is probably the obvious and best answer but it is hard to make the case now in these troubled times. A one-way down street to make it more difficult and time consuming for short term parking with no entrance on Dartmouth Road would probably make the Sainsburys and station back car park more attractive. This would have the benefit that it would add more footfall to London Road and DR shops and cafes. Parking there is free for 2 hours.

Driveway Protection or how do you stop people parking over driveways. A CPZ is the council’s recommendation in this case but this will suffer from the fact the council can’t be bothered to enforce parking. Cameras blocking all traffic on a road between the times of congestion is the most effective solution for this.

Fairness/Equality of opportunity. Any scheme must be seen to be benefitting the many rather than the few. It can’t be seen as shifting the problem down the road. The compromised/half school street is seen as benefiting around 50 households and a few hundred children while making it worse for hundreds of households and up to a thousand children. The original school street for the whole of Thorpewood Avenue which sought to include both schools and all roads below Radlett would be seen as a simple, one road, one rule, benefiting over 600 children and a few hundred households. It would effectively be a neighbourhood scheme rather than a section of a street scheme. There would be overflow onto Kirkdale with the need to probably put a pedestrian crossing there as well as some other measures. I don’t think @marymck would be happy but it would be good to work with these residents/schools as I get the impression they currently feel ignored.

Driving Parents, the encourageable ones have changed, the rest can only be changed if life is made difficult for them except those parents and children with mobility issues who need their access rights maintained. The all street school street or a CPZ are probably the best solutions.

Cost Benefit Analysis. If this was work, my boss would ask me which is the cheapest, which has the highest risk, which is going to reach/benefit the most people at the least cost and the final one which is rarely chosen, the most costly one. I have detailed the options below.

Options:

Cheapest: One way down (eastbound) Thorpewood Avenue. Safety, clear one rule one street permanent not changing twice daily. It should lower congestion but might speed up traffic. Probably the most unpopular with residents. In these times with little money available, it might be the best thing to do.

Highest Cost per person: Small/half school street, will deliver protected driveways but will risk alienating a lot of other residents/children who will experience more pollution and congestion. It is not clear whether it will benefit EB kids walking to school if it just moves pollution. Safety aspects seem confusing.

Lowest Cost per person: An all Thorpewood School street would be seen as a neighbourhood scheme with the lowest cost per person who benefits as it would include both schools, multiple streets and all the people who down TA. It would probably need the introduction of one way traffic to TA permanently. Costs one camera more than the small school street.

Most Expensive: A CPZ would be directly paid for by the residents whereas all the other schemes are free/indirect payment. It would be hard to convince the residents to pay money for the sake of the common good as @robin.orton said but is probably the best option.

I have put in simple table below which I would have preferred to colour in or use traffic lights but you can take it that Good is Green, Good And Bad is amber and Bad is Red. I am happy to let someone colour this in. It is obviously my personal opinion so feel free to disagree but as it is half term you may not get a prompt response. It doesn’t cover all options but perhaps we could get a few more and put them to a vote. Voting won’t change anything as this is Lewisham

Somebody mentioned wanting a Travel Plan for Eliot Bank School. I found one from a planning application in 2011. This is 10 years out of date, but probably hasn’t changed too dramatically.

It includes the following survey of pupils and staff methods of travel.

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Although I’m sure that a few of the pupils travel from far away to attend this wonderful school, I do not think they account for more than 30% of pupils. I conclude that some parents are driving relatively short distances, which should be easier to switch to walking than longer journeys. I was not able to find similar figures for Holy Trinity where the pupils generally travel further to attend school (from a larger catchment area), however, the percentage of free school meals might correlate with lower proportion of car ownership and the school is closer to a bus route.

There is a possibility that some of the 135 car will no longer be able to stop in front of houses on Thorpewood, and will look for alternative parking in Kirkdale, Sydenham Hill, and Radlett Avenue. But when they find that there isn’t ample parking in neighbouring streets, some may switch to walking or public transport. I suspect that the majority of car journeys to the school are for convenience not necessity, so it is possible to change behaviour.

Thanks @Michael
It was me who had asked the school for a copy of their School Travel Plan. I believe that to be considered for a School Street they have to produce one and to show what efforts they are making to change behaviour. It will be interesting indeed to know how teachers are travelling. Presumably, unless they have a disabled child at the school, or are disabled themselves, they will be setting an example using other means of transport.

I’ve been told that many teachers have long journeys to and from work (they can’t afford to live in FH) and, as they have to take a lot of work (marking etc) home with them, travel by public transport would be very inconvenient if not impossible.

Yes, you are correct. Residents have been abused numerous times by parking parents over the years. Also, on one occasion, when a drive was blocked, a resident was unable to attend to their elderly mother who had had a fall, as a result he had to dial 999 to get an ambulance to attend to her. We have approached the school over the years to no avail. We have suggested engaging parents via the PTA and have asked to speak at governors meetings to hopefully discuss with parent governors. However the school seem to not want to engage with their local community. We (the top end if Thorpewood) were pleasantly surprised when we received the letter regarding the school street, as it was something that had been discussed at a number of the parking meetings. Perhaps Leo’s suggestion of cameras at the top and bottom with gates across Derby Hill Crescent and Featherstone will be the ideal solution.
I know that Leo has worked hard on this over the last couple of years and I do feel that the sentiment towards him is undeserved.

Sorry correction: gates at the junction of Derby Hill and Derby Hill Crescent

The one thing that stands out here is the reduction in walking balanced by an increase in cycling. If they’re already walking, why fo they need to cycle? Surely better to get the car numbers down.

Is the issue with teachers cycling more (3/54 is a low target) the fact they have to carry homework and heavy items? Fair enough.

In any case as @marymck said - good to get a more recent update

Just wanted to say thanks for this - excellent job on posting such a fantastic analysis.

Surely it is a police matter. Schools do not have traffic enforcement powers.

Regarding Healthy Neighbourhood Programmes and larger scale LTN interventions. The order in which each neighbourhood was originally prioritised (pre-COVID) was based on a number of criteria. The criteria related to the changes and benefits that could be expected when areas saw reduced traffic and more people feel able to walk or cycle for all or part of their journey.

Lewisham and Lee Green scored highest out of all 18 Healthy Neighbourhood areas. This was primarily due to it having the highest number of personal injury collisions out of all 18 areas. The delivery of a successful low traffic neighbourhood aims to reduce collisions by reducing the number of vehicles using residential streets. In addition, based on TfL’s Strategic Cycling Analysis, this area has a high potential for journeys to be switched to cycling. It also had relatively high levels of feedback from residents who had concerns around road safety and traffic volumes.

I hope this puts to rest some of the ideas circulating that Lewisham & Lee Green area was chosen to benefit Labour members or whatever new arbitrary reason springs to people’s mind from day-to-day.

Similarly, Cllr Best had nothing to do with the location of the Silverdale/Bishopshorpe filter, and her only involvement has been to pass on concerns raised by residents. The rumours chucked around on this forum that the Silverdade filter was chosen to benefit one councillor who lives near the road was, as it would have seemed to most casual observers anyway, completely baseless.

The locations for the temporary modal filters were identified drawing on a number of sources. They are located in areas where through-traffic has previously been identified as an issue, and where it was feared higher volumes of traffic were likely to re-emerge as lockdown restrictions were eased. This assessment was based on a number of factors, including traffic data, resident complaints, and/or officer observations. The footways in the vicinity of these locations are also less than three metres wide, making it more difficult for pedestrians to socially distance. Other strategic factors, such as the proposed cycle network identified in the 2018 Lewisham Cycling Strategy, were also taken into consideration. It should be noted that the initial tranche of ‘filters’ were not intended to stop every rat-run, but focus on some of the key routes.

Bishopsthorpe Road was one of the areas where through-traffic was identified as an issue whilst Silverdale Road is part of the proposed Sydenham to Forest Hill cycleway. A reduction of traffic flows on these streets would improve cyclist safety and encourage more cyclists to use this route.

I have asked officers to supply me with the hard data that can be shared publicly that was used to prioritise the Lewisham & Lee Green LTN and I am sure @DevonishForester you will look forward to crunching the numbers.

Unfortunately, such varied data-driven analysis was not undertaken by myself and Cllr Davis when he formed our working groups through the Local Assembly. As I explained, these were rather more informal groups which we chose to form ourselves to help us tackle casework matters that we saw in the ward. I think most people realise that these groups were set up in good faith to try and solve longstanding traffic-caused casework issues, rather than an attempt at politically motivated electioneering.

I am unsure as to why you were not contacted about the schedule for the Assembly steering meetings. We have a new officer leading the Assembly programme atm. And though Assemblies are paused, if you send me an email I can ask the officer to ensure that if you are a member of the Steering Committee you are kept informed of all future meetings.

I will probably be wrong!.. But I hope this post just lowers the temperature around the LTN and the Silverdale model filter. Like the School Streets, all these are temporary measures (which will be reviewed) and if do want them to be made permanent, they will need to go through a statutory consultation process.

Now… onto the School Streets…

To answer your three questions…

1. Yes they can leave the School Street. If I think cars can leave the School Street as the cameras only enforce unregistered vehicles entering the zone - but in the case of Thorpewood Avenue, cars will only be able exit eastbound anyway and will go through a chicane that is not camera enforced.

Which brings me nicely onto question 2.

2. This will be 24/7 measure. The reasoning is two-fold. Firstly, we only have the funds for 1 set of ANPR cameras - therefore, the scheme could only happen if the School Street was one way, with the other entrance to the zone becoming a straightforward ‘No Entry’ point (with the classic red no entry sign). Secondly, Thorpewood Avenue is a known ‘rat-run’ and it was felt that by making half of the street one way, you effectively half the level of cut-through traffic on it. It is felt that this compromise, while not perfect, could have an overall very beneficial impact on the street.

Finally, for those who will say, what’s changed? 12 months ago Thorpewood Avenue was a ‘strategic route’ but now we can make it one way. I share your frustration. I was frustrated when I first pushed for a School Street on TA and officers were lukewarm to any intervention, claiming this was a strategic route. Personally, I think Covid-19 has changed things. We’ve woken up at need to do more to disincentivise short-distance car journeys. And also, we’ve been provided with funds (from central gov) to actually get some of this work done, and that in itself has changed minds and perspectives on what can be achieved right here and right now.

On knocking the congestion ‘down the road’, yes this is a concern. We hope we will see less congestion as parents start taking the children to Eliot Bank by other means now they cannot get right to the school gate. However, if the scheme fails to achieve this goal and causes big issues for those at the Lower End of TA or on Kirkdale, we are very much open to reviewing.

Unfortunately, my idea for a camera at the bottom of Thorpewood Avenue and one at the top, as well as a gate at Derby Hill, is unlikely to have legs - not only do we not have enough money for two sets of cameras. It is time-consuming and therefore costly in man-hours for officers to administrate exemption lists (ie those registered vehicles that may enter the zone) and the larger the School Street area, the more costly this administration is. It remains an option, but a difficult one to deliver.

3. Yes. So residents at the lower/eastern section of Thorpewood Avenue would not be able to drive through the School Street zone eastbound, for those two hours of the day Mon-Fri.

Shame there is not the money for 3 cameras, as this would have been ideal for both schools and the residents of Thorpewood and Derby Hill Crescent. Just a thought. Wouldn’t it be of benefit to allow cars registered at the bottom end of Thorpewood to drive through the school street zone?

We have never expected the school to enforce the traffic problems. We just thought that if we could engage with the school community there could be some discussion as to what could be done, we’ve even offered to talk to the governors. For example, maybe the parent governors and the PTA could have a team of volunteers at school drop off and pick up time who could remind other parents about safe/legal parking. Pre covid we also suggested that maybe an assembly could focus on walking to school and also have a Dad’s breakfast with a topic of walking to school. For some reason though the school don’t seem to want to engage with their neighbours.

From day one, Eliot Bank’s leadership has been clear that they do not feel that it is their teacher’s duty to patrol the street and act as traffic enforcement. To me, this is perfectly understandable.

I’ve heard multiple stories of abuse and confrontation between residents and parents. Knowing how these situations flare-up, I would not expect parent governors to put themselves in this situation either. Unfortunately, residents near the school have had to live with this. This is, after all, one of the issues we are trying to tackle.

The school are aware that a small number of parents can get aggressive and act inappropriately outside the school gates. However, for lots of reasons, it is difficult for the school to tackle this effectively themselves.

Eliot Bank have engaged very proactively with Lewisham Council and have produced a detailed Travel Plan, showing their attempts to change parent’s travel behaviour.

On the other hand, Holy Trinity have not raised any concerns with Lewisham Council regarding problem congestion near the school (so I am told by officers) nor have they produced the required level of Traffic Plan, to be deemed a priority for a School Street.

This would be a very large expansion of officer’s workload, as they would need to administer a much larger list of exemptions - solely to allow residents to drive from Kirkdale to their homes, for 2 hours a day, 5 days a week (the rest of the time they will be fine to do so). For 2 hours a day Monday to Friday, they will need to enter their street from Dartmouth Rd. In the grand-scheme of things, I do not think it is a large burden.

Thanks Leo.

In short the top of Thorpewood will be one way 24/7.

It seems a very material fact which was questioned 11 days ago on the fourth line in the initial post of this thread. The local residents including @robin.orton interpreted it as being 2 hours 5 days a week. The letter from the council could be said to have omitted this key fact by making it so vague and ambiguous. It would be more honest if you resent the letter including this pertinent fact.

Do you really believe that gating the top of Thorpewood will not make parking and congestion worse for the streets below the barrier mainly Radlet, Featherstone and Derby Hill Crescent? The overflow on the top will now be closed for the benefit of 50 households.

I think this one way scheme is targeted at the wrong place. The most congested bottleneck is the Darmouth Road entrance, people use the top as a way to avoid this bottleneck rather than a rat-run. Now people have to use this bottleneck both entering and exiting. This decision doesn’t seem to be in any way data driven, just in response to who shouts loudest.

50 households are positively affected by this with over 200 or more negatively affected. Over a thousand children will be negatively affected. The excuse you give is you wanted it to be bigger but due to no money, you are making it smaller so it makes it worse for the majority but ticks a box showing you have done something. I think you need to rethink it. As it stands it will give limited benefit but at a cost to many and not represent good value in spending council money.

Do the majority of residents who will be adversely affected by this scheme have any right to object or at least be consulted to make this scheme less bad for them?

Is it just a case that it will be imposed and residents will just have to put up with it?

On a give me a solution note. I think many residents would prefer to see any one way scheme extended to the full road rather than have extra pollution, parking and congestion. It can’t be that expensive and would show that you are considering all the residents not just a few.

I agree that the letter distributed to residents should have been clearer.

Again, I reject the characterisation that this scheme is providing ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. If the trial works, you will see a drop off in the number’s of parents driving to Eliot Bank and therefore benefitting the entire Thorpewood Avenue and the surrounding streets - I’ve repeated this point numerous times.

The one way system does not need to be cover the entire Thorpewood Avenue to prevent westward cut-through traffic. But we are open to amending the scheme, for example, by moving the no entry sign, if we feel things are not working as they should.

You are claiming this and that without giving the scheme any time to bed in. Once you’ve had time to assess the School Street’s actual impact, please email traffic@lewisham.gov.uk with your feedback.

First of all Leo, I think you are doing a great job in championing school streets. This just doesn’t have the balance right and it is not just a school street, it is also putting in a one way system on half the street.

Most (not all) road transport schemes provide winners and losers.
Most will reject your opinion that this scheme will not have winners and losers.

I think most residents just want any scheme to have more winners than losers. The ratio here is wrong.

I half agree with your comment but it is probably more accurate to say “The one way system will prevent westward cut-through traffic on the top section but increase westward traffic on the bottom section”.

In response to the question above, I will take you answer as No. The residents have no right to be consulted. They should put up with it and then complain with the burden of proof on them to have it changed. Most residents will ask themselves a simple question, if you don’t listen to us now, why will you listen to us afterwards?

Unfortunately this thread is descending into opinion rather than fact and I think that is what is sorely missing in this scheme, any data driven analysis of what this scheme will mean for the most congested/polluted/parked on parts of this area.

Hi all,

Sorry for the delay in responding to this thread. I just thought I’d add to what Leo has been saying, and try and address some of the questions addressed to me.

Firstly, on the context - I know people are aware of this but it’s worth re-iterating. One of the main aims of this (other than the safety of children, and social distancing during COVID) is to tackle carbon emissions in our borough. Data we have (https://lewisham.gov.uk/myservices/environment/making-the-borough-carbon-neutral-by-2030-climate-emergency-declaration) indicates that transport related emissions are a large part of the problem; this suggests that we will not be able to significantly reduce emissions without reducing car usage. We know that some people need their cars and that many journeys need to be made by car - the idea isn’t to stop people from using their cars altogether. But we also know that a number of car journeys are short ones that could be walked, or biked instead - and this what the various schemes are trying to encourage.

On this scheme (and school streets generally): locations for the schemes were chosen (by officers) based on a number of criteria, including local data and feedback from schools, practical considerations (e.g. width of pavement; whether the school is on a bus route etc) and how engaged the schools are (because the scheme would be very difficult to implement if the school isn’t bought in). We currently don’t have the funding /resources to implement school streets everywhere at once, so officers have had to prioritise based on the above criteria (resources were already limited after 10 years of cuts, and COVID has made the situation worse).

I appreciate & understand the concerns that this may result in traffic being displaced elsewhere. Two points on this: (1) as mentioned above, part of the idea is to reduce traffic generally (in this case because parents would walk their kids to schools, instead of driving), which would benefit everyone and (2) this is something we will be monitoring (in part via your feedback, as well as school and officer observations); as Leo says, if we do see displacement instead, we will want to review it. But we need to give this time, as these types of behaviours take time to change/ become embedded (people might start by parking in nearby streets, before deciding that it’s not worth it, and walking instead).

I wanted to re-iterate that this is a trial. Officers (with our support) will be monitoring the impact and listening to feedback from parents, the school and local residents. Leo & I are sharing the comments posted here (we had a call with officers earlier this week) & you can also email us & the traffic team for more specific questions/ feedback. We’re keen to get this right and want to work together with the community to do so. These behaviours are really hard to shift (I’m a parent myself and know how busy the day gets!) but I think it’s important that we try.

Finally, on the Tewkesbury traffic working group - yes, I set up a working group with local residents to try and address rat running in and around the Tewkesbury estate/ Honor Oak road/ Devonshire. This was prompted by complaints from local residents, and a continuation of work done by previous councillors. We chose to delineate the area this way as it matches a “cell” for the purposes of the Healthy Neighbourhoods scheme. We had a number of meetings with residents but the work has been slightly paused as a result of COVID and the resulting changes in funding/ priorities. Nonetheless, I’m keen to pick it up so if you’re interested, please email me at cllr_sophie.davis@lewisham.gov.uk

Sophie

Indeed. I think the idea that the schools themselves should enforce the schools streets is dangerous. It potentially pits school staff against both parents and residents. School staff maybe great at many things, but not necessarily acting as traffic enforcement and all that entails - as you say.

My comment may seem redundant in agreeing with you @LeoGibbons, but the council website does not share our opinion, so I thought it maybe worth mentioning.

From https://lewisham.gov.uk/myservices/roads-and-transport/closing-roads-to-traffic-at-school-drop-off-and-pick-up-time-school-streets :

Emphasis mine in the above.

I think a staff member locking a gate 45 minutes before school starts, is far less confrontational/dangerous than teachers patrolling and reprimanding parents at drop-offs, in my opinion…

The same page also says the school will be custodians of the keys should residents need emergency access, and that cars parked in a closed road cannot be moved.

I personally can see a lot of potential for flash-points and confrontation there.

CCTV is a much better solution in that respect.

Thanks Sophie for this comprehensive reply. It would add clarity if we could see the official selection document/meeting notes and to see the relative weighting given to observations by Lewisham’s Traffic department, immediate local residents’ concerns and councillors’ choice.

The council carried out a site visit in summer 2019 to Thorpewood Avenue to investigate School Streets. They did call on a day when year 5 and 6 were absent but at Eliot Bank year 5 and 6 kids can walk to school so it probably wouldn’t have made a lot of difference. I know with my kids and their friends, they all wanted their independence to walk without parents when they got it.

Currently because of COVID, only half the pupils enter via Thorpewood Avenue so it is probably reasonable to say it is not as bad now. This update was sent by Councillor Gibbons to about 30 people so I would regard it as being in the public domain as it is the work of a public figure working with a public department and was sent to a general group. It is a long read but probably the key points are the opinion of the three traffic and highways officers from Lewisham.

I accept that we may have visited on a “good day” but the officers were clear in their assessment. Judging from their direct observations and reflecting on the number of complaints they have received from residents about this issue, Thorpewood Avenue/Eliot Bank does not figure as a particularly bad example of school congestion in the borough.

There were no bottlenecks at the school exit and there was clear space on the pavement for children to roam without being pushed onto the road

I think we understand that the number of complaints have gone up but will traffic have increased significantly since then?

SITE VISIT

Before the summer school break, I visited Thorpewood Avenue with three traffic and highways officers to examine the traffic problems at school collection time. We discussed proposals for enforcement and the arguments for and against the implementation of a School Street/SPZ and/or parking controls.

Pressing the issues raised at Thorpewood Avenue has caused Lewisham Council to now look seriously at the implementation of School Pedestrian Zones/School Streets. However, this would be a new initiative for the Council and one it would want to start with carefully and cautiously. There are a wide range of matters officers need to take account of when considering restricting access to Thorpewood Avenue or any other street. At this stage, there is no guarantee that Thorpewood Avenue would be a priority in a new programme of School Steets, or even be deemed suitable. In the light of the Council’s budget more than halving since 2010, and the pressing demands on the remaining resources, the Council will have to look innovatively at how it might fund SPZs. However, I will continue to raise Thorpewood Avenue, if and when a programme is put in place. I would also suggest that it is a highly positive move that the Council is considering School Streets.

Measures such as ‘School Streets/SPZs’ are being examined as an intervention to protect pedestrians on streets that can get dangerously clogged at school drops offs. In this context, Officers have pressed that School Streets and other traffic calming programmes outside schools will be implemented in areas that are most in need of it to improve safety and where such schemes will have the greatest positive impact.

During our site meeting we witnessed some double parking and two incidents of parking on school zig-zag lines but overall, we witnessed children able to leave the school in a safe and orderly manner. There were no bottlenecks at the school exit and there was clear space on the pavement for children to roam without being pushed onto the road. Many children were able to cross the road with confidence as the traffic was relatively light and at slow and considerate speed.

I later discovered that Years 5 & 6 were off on the day of our observation. Therefore, I have requested that officers return on another morning to reassess the matter now term time has commenced. Officers have agreed to do visit again later this month.

I accept that we may have visited on a “good day” but the officers were clear in their assessment. Judging from their direct observations and reflecting on the number of complaints they have received from residents about this issue, Thorpewood Avenue/Eliot Bank does not figure as a particularly bad example of school congestion in the borough.

It has been noted by me and officers that the complaints we have received about school hour congestion and parental/driver conduct at Eliot Bank have been from a relatively select group of residents. Understandably, the council needs feedback from a breadth of residents to understand the full extent of the issue. Compared to other roads with schools on in the borough, the council has not received a particularly large amount of individual complaint submissions from Thorpewood Avenue residents.

Broadly speaking, across London our roads are heavily congested and too many individuals are making short journeys by car. Car use for short journeys to and from schools is not sustainable, and the issues faced by residents of Thorpewood Avenue effect hundreds of others across the borough. I and Officers will be encouraging schools in Forest Hill to take up the school travel programme and work with us in encouraging their pupils to walk to school.

I urge resident who continue to be concerned for the safety of pedestrians on Thorpewood Avenue to write to Lewisham Council traffic & highways team if they have not done so, as it is crucial that these concerns are expressed and recorded.

Nope, as I’ve said. Covid-19, as a public health emergency, has made creating space outside our schools a much more pressing matter than it was in summer 2019. This is understood by Lewisham Council and Central Gov and as such, the bar for intervention has been set much lower.

Eliot Bank in 2019 did not figure as a particularly congestion school in hitting the bar for intervention when our funds to intervene were extremely limited and only the most congested streets near schools could be prioritised. However, the school does have its problems with congestion, we know that. We are now in a position to act due to new funding.

I have set out over this thread our motivation behind this scheme - why we are now able to act and implement a school street - why the scheme was designed as it was - and why I feel it will benefit the entire Thorpewood Avenue area.

I feel you have already made your mind up about this scheme without waiting to witness the trial and how it plans out. Therefore, I do not feel it is productive to continue this back and forth.

As a resident at the lower end of Thorpewood Ave I witness regular near misses as cars try to go up & down (easterly & westerly) at the same time. The road is narrower at the Dartmouth Road end & with parking, two cars can’t pass each other. At school start & finishing times the sounds of car horns & shouting happens every school day. The reason given by the councillors to make only the top half of Thorpewood Ave easterly only makes no sense if safety is the main concern, then the whole of Thorpewood Ave should one way.
Something that has not been mentioned at all in these posts is the leisure centre parking, which with commuter all day parking is a major problem at the bottom of Thorpewood Ave & why the working group was started over 3years ago. The Eliot Bank school parking problems came in at a later date & has taken over. Forest Hill Pools is due to reopen on 30th November, then the road will be busier & we will be back to more cars trying to park at the Dartmouth Road end over driveways & on double yellow lines. As I understand the plan is to start the road closure & one way system a week later. Thorpewood Ave is used by many not just school traffic, parking & pollution are a problem on the whole road.

I’m getting confused now. Is the whole of TA going to be one way eastbound or just the top half? And from when?

Just the top half, it will be 24/7 from the beginning of December.
You will never be able to drive up Thorpewood Avenue and exit from Kirkdale again.
The only exit will be from the bottom junction with Dartmouth Road.

It is probably time to wrap up this thread as it is obvious this scheme will go ahead in the name of COVID without the need for consultation.

There has been engagement from our councillors on this forum. It has been educational for our Councillors. This is seen as the Eliot Bank School Street but Leo thought EB had three form entry. This thread corrected that important fact as it is two-form entry.

It has been important for residents in getting clarification and transparency. The council sent a letter to residents that was unclear which most residents misinterpreted. Leo admitted the letter should have been clearer. The material fact was that the top of Thorpewood Avenue would be one way with no exit onto Kirkdale which was cleared up after 11 days on this thread. This obviously means twice the amount of traffic 24/7 exiting via Dartmouth Road which is a known bottleneck.

There has been little evidence of working with the community. There was a Thorpewood Avenue Working Group which met and decided two key things: any scheme should benefit the whole street including all residents and both schools and not just push traffic/congestion around. All residents in neighbouring roads should be consulted about any scheme. The community weren’t contacted when the proposal was put forward but it was known in Labour circles. Leo accepted “the criticism that as soon as I heard that a School Street was being considered for Thorpewood Avenue was in August I should have contacted the TAWG”. The community were informed 2 months later and given a plan and told just endure all the extra pollution and congestion when it is shifted down the road to you.

The most damning thing about this scheme is the lack of hard evidence in favour of it. The only hard evidence about congestion and pavements/social distancing was from three officers of Lewisham’s Highway and Traffic Department reported by Leo in 2019 who said it wasn’t particularly bad compared to the rest of the borough and there were wide pavements. Leo has responded to this that the school does have its problem with congestion but with no proof that it really has got any worse especially now EB has halved the number of children who enter via Thorpewood.

I also feel as a labour voter of 30 years that it fails to honour the simple principles of inclusion and equality by not including Holy Trinity School which is on the same street and will now have to take twice as much pollution as it will be situated beside the only car traffic exit on Thorpewood Avenue.

I am going to end with a poll as I agree with Leo that the discussion is probably no longer productive.

These photos just show the front entrance which is now being used by half the pupils going to Eliot Bank.

How do you feel about this use of COVID-19 legislation to push through a school street and one way system without consulting local residents?

Lewisham are proposing to use Emergency Covid Legislation to push through a school street for Eliot Bank on half of Thorpewood Avenue with a permanent one way system without the need for consultation of local residents. There are two sides to the argument.

Proponents would say:
Anything small that makes it difficult to park near a school will discourage parents
The driveways of local residents are constantly parked by parents. Cameras will stop this.
The residents and schools that are likely to be affected by the displacement of congestion and pollution by the permanent one way system should wait to see if the scheme is effective.
Holy Trinity is small, the parents are generally poorer with less car ownership so there is less parent traffic congestion/pollution there and no need for them to be part of this scheme.

Critics would say :
There is conclusive evidence from Lewisham Traffic and Highways Department against this scheme.
The limited nature of the scheme will just push traffic down the road and make the already very congested bottleneck at Dartmouth road worse. Twice the traffic will now go through this pinchpoint which might lead to more congestion/pollution and gridlock. The affected residents have not been consulted or given clear information.
Covid Legislation is about social distancing/safety. Eliot Bank has resolved this itself
Why is Holy Trinity School excluded from this scheme when they actively use Thorpewood Avenue and are situated beside the most congested/polluted junction.

The real solution to the problem of parents driving to schools would be to end the league tables, which encourage parents to apply to schools based on the exam results. Also I think there is a need for parents to be encouraged to move their children to other schools, if they move house. They often move house to get near to the secondary school of their choice.

I feel as if I have been goaded back into this conversation because I cannot let such misrepresentation lie.

Known in Labour circles! By that you mean the Chair of Governors at Eliot Bank? Who would have been working with Lewisham Council discussing these proposals for months? They happen to be a Labour member. Jeez.

‘Holy Trinity is small, the parents are generally poorer with less car ownership so there is less parent traffic congestion/pollution there and no need for them to be part of this scheme’.**This is somewhat of a misrepresentation. Holy Trinity is smaller, about half the size of Eliot Bank so yes, congestion is less of an issue there.**However, local deprivation level is one of our assessment factors and when only a few Schools Streets could be prioritised, we wanted to target interventions in more deprived and polluted area. Fortunately, with new funding, we can prioritise a wider array of schools if deemed feasible.

‘There is conclusive evidence from Lewisham Traffic and Highways Department against this scheme’.This is simply incorrect.

‘The limited nature of the scheme will just push traffic down the road and make the already very congested bottleneck at Dartmouth road worse. Twice the traffic will now go through this pinchpoint which might lead to more congestion/pollution and gridlock’ The level of eastbound through traffic will stay the same. The level of westbound through-traffic will be reduced to zero - Massively freeing up the entrance of Dartmouth Rd. Yes, residents leaving TA will now exit by Dartmouth Road, but overall, the scheme should lead to a lot less traffic running through TA and therefore a lot less congestion at this junction.

‘The affected residents have not been consulted or given clear information.’ You’re literally being consulted on it now during its trial. If it is to become permanent, it will need to go through a statutory consultation process.

‘Covid Legislation is about social distancing/safety.’ A School Street allows schools to manage arrivals far more easily. A freed-up street scene, and children/parents arriving by foot, allows more space for easier staggered entry. It is much harder to manage children being passed out of cars on a congestion street. I think the school would disagree that this issue has been totally resolved.

‘Why is Holy Trinity School excluded from this scheme when they actively use Thorpewood Avenue and are situated beside the most congested/polluted junction.’ **How many times does this need to explained to you? 1. Dartmouth Rd cannot be closed off for obvious reasons. 2. Holy Trinity have not engaged with a forming School Travel Plan to the extent necessary to be prioritised for a School Street, nor has the School’s leadership shown any interest in wanting a School Street. 3. To close off TA at Dartmouth Round would also mean us making the entirety of TA one way, as we did not have funds for two sets of cameras (and a gate at Derby Hill).**And as I have repeatedly explained if the scheme simply knocks-on congestion and congestions remains at the same level as before, then we will look at amending/scrapping the scheme after or during the trial period. The feasibility of the scheme and therefore why it has been planned the way it was has been repeatedly explained on this thread.

On the matter of evidence. Observations from officers are our evidence base. They deemed Eliot Bank not a priority when we could only trial one or two schemes in the borough but worthy of intervention when we had funds to run more trials. Their observations were based on resident’s complaints, on feedback from schools and their School Active Travel plan involvement, on several observation visits (not just the one I attended), on the traffic volumes and speeds, on pollution levels, on pavement width and pupil numbers, and on the feasibility of a closure.Opinion, you might call it.

You claim you do not support the School Street because there is no evidence for it, yet you dismiss it with ZERO evidence and claim that it won’t work. At least our officers have an evidence base that helped formed their opinion, and I after hearing your points and theirs - I believe their judgement and their arguments have more weight, and that this trial, should go ahead. I am elected to make those calls.

Time and time again there is a crowd that opposes any trial of any traffic intervention, if they believe, even without evidence, that it will personally hinder them. They claim no evidence is ever good enough. No reasoning ever strong enough. Observations and expertise of officers and the judgement of elected officials are not enough.

For minor schemes, like individual model filters or School Streets, they want levels of “data” (as if that is a neutral arbiter) collected and a threshold of ‘evidence’ that would simply be unfeasible for a cash-strapped local authority to cover resource-wise… and is unlikely to still satisfy them anyway. It is a transparent way to prevent any traffic-reduction intervention trials and to argue that therefore despite all the observation work, all the assessment made by civil servants based on the criteria outlined in my comments here and to @DevonishForester 5 days ago, they say ‘there is not enough evidence for it’.

We want consultations, but before implementation, so feedback can be made on presumptions. But we don’t want consultations during a trial when the reality of a scheme can actually be viewed.

Call me cynical, but it is almost as if some people do not wish for the trial for fear of it succeeding and benefitting the wider community but burdening them personally.

I am sure this exchange has been thoroughly dispiriting for all parties involved. But I am sure @anon5422159 is happy because has got me engaging on his forum.

Regards,

Leo

Firstly please bear in mind that, as of yesterday, I’m no longer owner, admin or moderator of this forum.

I now have no personal vested interest in the participation of anyone here. That said, I hope SE23.life remains popular and I hope that councillors continue to engage. I like how candid you are and I respect you on a personal level.

I’m sorry that you get challenged a lot, but that’s what happens in politics, right? If you make zero-sum policies that help some people by hurting others, then you should expect to hear from the others.

If I were a councillor I would value platforms like this. More so than platforms like Commonplace. Here, you’re interacting with people who are demonstrably invested in the local area, and you’re able to respond in detail to their concerns, if you wish - with your comments reaching thousands of local people.

It’s an opportunity to sell LTN policy by putting forward the hard evidence you used to make the decision in the first place. If the evidence is sufficiently convincing, then the opposition will pipe down. If the evidence isn’t forthcoming, then you’ll have a rough ride until it is.

Disrupting and blocking up the road network will of course get people’s backs up. The burden of proof is on you, in this case, since you (and the other councillors) are the ones who took the action.

If you can’t handle the heat get out of the kitchen, as they say.

Well, being Heston Blumenthal is fine … if everyone likes experimental cookery.

I agree, it’s good to have candid open discussion. It’s great to have @LeoGibbons and other councillors here and I’m sure they’re getting good at balancing all the views from all their different communication channels.

Let’s keep it going and keep it civil (and that’s not directed at anyone in particular). This thread has been well debated as some of the hot topics can be: we’ve seen some well presented arguments on both sides.

I agreed with you that this discussion had run its course but I will tackle two points here that I don’t think you have got. I have added two photos.

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I will explain the two photos, the first is the main entrance to Holy Trinity School and the second is the main school buildings which has the road name on it which is Thorpewood Avenue. The main entrance to HT is on TA evidenced by this photo which during normal times would be used by all the children Nobody, not myself has ever asked you or ever will to close off Dartmouth Road.

This is a narrow piece of Thorpewood Avenue, when cars are parked on both sides, it cannot support two way traffic. Traffic has to take turns to go up/down the street. Your proposal means that every car exiting TA will use this bottleneck as the other exit will be closed. This will mean more pollution and congestion. It might be slightly offset by the school street for 2 hours a day but will be added to by the other exit being blocked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

I am in favour of a School Street but not a half School Street. I am in favour of traffic measures that benefit hundreds of households not just 50. I am in favour of a scheme that benefits both schools not just one school. I don’t in any way feel that it is wrong for wanting something that will benefit the wider community and my family rather than the narrow scheme currently proposed

You have already said multiple times this is what you wanted (“My Ideal”) before you were asked to compromise because of a lack of money.

What confidence would any residents have to just accept and see what happens? If you have a lack of money now, you are unlikely to have money to scrap/amend the scheme and we will be left with it for years if it leads to more congestion and pollution.

I’m a Thorpewood resident and really DON’T want any cameras on my road. I’m furious we haven’t been consulted. There are other ways to deal with traffic issues. Big brother?—no thanks and no more!!! I’m telling the council, no thanks.

Emma obviously feels very strongly about this. Would it be against the forum rules (which I always seem in danger of breaching) to ask whether she has a personal interest, e.g. because of where she lives or because she has connections with one or other of the schools? It would be helpful to know where she’s ‘coming from’.

I think we should view any posts here as having some personal interest. There are very few people that don’t have some form of personal bias.

Robin, I value my anonymity and have deliberately not used my real name and would ask that you respect that right to post anonymously without disclosing who I am.

I think from my posts you could deduce that I have a connection with Elliot Bank and that in my opinion where I live will be negatively affected by this scheme. I want the best for EB kids when they walk down the road but I also want the same for Holy Trinity kids.

I have tried where possible to do two things:
Ask the right questions and where possible argue with some evidence.

I asked the question about whether the one way system was permanent when you had assumed it would be for 2 hours. I pushed that question and it took 11 days but we got the answer that it would be 24 hours a day.

I have included two photos of Holy Trinity to evidence that the main entrance to Holy Trinity is on Thorpewood Avenue and the bottleneck caused if cars are parked on both sides.

I am biased but would expect people to use their personal judgement in assessing anything I say.

I look forward to learning precisely the criteria for selecting these two streets. Not clear why we are waiting, unless the decisions were really about social or political expediency, and the ‘evidence’ is being compiled post facto.

Thank you for demonstrating my point, I owe you one.

Just to be clear, I am not in any way trying to get behind your mask. Whatever one might feel personally about the rights and wrongs of being able to post anonymously on a forum like this, one has to follow the rules.

Thanks for all the responses. @EmmaJ I will speak to officers about what data we can publish (I have previously pushed for the criteria/ data being used to decide on healthy neighbourhoods to be made public because I generally think that more transparency is better) and I will let you know. The reasons for not being able to do this, though, often have to do with officer capacity, as it involves quite a lot of work.

Please do continue to share feedback with us, both here & by email (my email is cllr_sophie.davis@lewisham.gov.uk). As you do, though, I’d appreciate if we can bear in mind that all of us engaging in these forums (including councillors!) do so in good faith, and with the benefit of the community in mind. This is also true of council officers, who are hard-working public servants, working under difficult conditions and doing their best to serve the community.

Finally, to reiterate: this is a trial; we are listening to your feedback as part of an ongoing consultation process; any final decision will be subject to a formal consultation.

Thanks @SophieDavis , this is a very positive move.

It hopefully will address the concern that the majority of residents will be negatively affected for the sake of 50 households but hopefully we are all proved wrong. This is probably more about the effect of a permanent one way system on half the road than a school street which is only for a small amount of time. A complete road plan was considered initially but now it is only half because of money, were the criteria re-applied against doing it for half the road with the impacts and benefits considered including value for money. I think people do ask that question and anything that answers this in a transparent way will stop people thinking they have no voice.

Hopefully the council have considered this but it would be good if you could get information about the impact of changing the narrow bottleneck on Thorpewood Avenue to be the only exit for traffic. It will now handle twice the traffic. This was not able to handle traffic pre-covid in a two way manner as expected. It handles resident, commuter, teacher, pools and shopper traffic and parking. It is not as busy now because of Covid but when this ends and in the likely event that The Bridge closes permanently, it will attract all the swimming traffic from Forest Hill and Sydenham especially in the evenings and Saturday mornings. I was there when the Swimming Pool rebuild was discussed and the council officials expected 100% of customers to be car free which is why no parking was provided. This has not turned out to be correct and the the answer to feedback about the parking issue this generated has been to ask residents to pay a few hundred pounds so they can park outside their houses.

I think it is great that you are engaging on this forum but I do feel that this represents communication between people who have access to technology. I think the primary means of communication to the residents is the letter that was posted to residents’ houses.
This omits two pieces of key information:
The creation of a permanent one way system for half the road, this needs to be clear from the text and also needs to be put on the map/graphic
The second thing is that the scheme is temporary and subject to a formal consultation and only then does it become permanent.

Most people know the green reasoning so what is really important to people are the details. Is the council planning another letter to residents to include these details so that everybody knows?

Finally, thanks again for the positive and listening post. We are all grateful for the work the council/councillors/officers do and want to make sure it best serves the community.

@EmmaJ I’ve emailed officers to raise all of these points:

• I’ve asked about what data we can share/ make public
• I’ve asked that we monitor the impact of Pools traffic (when the Pools are eventually able to re-open!)
• I’ve asked what we can do to communicate these two points to other residents as, you’re right, many people don’t access this forum. If we’re not able to send a second batch of letters, I’ve suggested putting signs up.

Another point, which has been raised with us separately is making alternatives to cars easier to use. As a council, we do quite a lot to help people who want to cycle (get in touch separately if you want to find out about that) but I’m keen to look into what more we can do to make public transport more accessible (as someone who uses buses with a toddler + buggy, I’m very aware of this) - we’ll liaise with TfL about this.

I will update when I hear back.

Finally, I know in the past meetings have been organised part-way through the scheme with officers & councillors for residents to share feedback. I’d be keen to do this, if our officers have the time (v much COVID dependent).

Sophie

Announcement yesterday from Sadie Khan that a new City Hall body will be starting in the new year to identify heavily polluted school areas paving the way for further road closures in the capital.
Hopefully Holy Trinity School children will get the same protection from car pollution as Eliot Bank School children will be getting at the beginning December

I think it would be very hard. There has been an application for a school street and it is written down now that one end deserves it, one doesn’t. It would be hard to backtrack.

It would then be time to say sorry you know we got all that money from you, we were confused. The bottom was busier than the top back then but now with the traffic from 2 schools and all residents in the area going through the small bottleneck outside the school it is even busier, can we now get more money for it?

Unfortunately I think there would be many other school streets in the queue that have recieved no money that would expect to get something first such as Haseltine before seconds can be given to a school that wasn’t seen as deserving the first time round.

I hope I am wrong.

Interesting discussion on ITV’s The Late Debate. The Lewisham East MP Janet Daby was asked to comment on why they got the Lower Traffic Neighbourhood blocked streets in Hither Green wrong. The concensus from all the politicians seemed to be to consult with residents before, during and after rather than just build these schemes.

Hi all,

A quick update:

I spoke to our lead officer about communicating to residents who don’t use this forum. There is an FAQ page, specifically about school streets, on the Commonplace website - https://lewishamschoolstreets.commonplace.is/schemes/proposals/frequently-asked-questions/details - she will add a couple of questions raised here to this page (e.g. how the schools were chosen, temporary traffic orders and consultations, the one way systems and monitoring) - please point it out to residents you might speak to. She also thought putting posters up by the school was a good idea. I’m following up to ensure they get done.

I haven’t had an answer on the data point yet (I expect this takes more looking into/ approvals etc) - will follow up with the Cabinet member if I don’t.

Sophie

Thanks Sophie, I think the message about the school street is out there and EB have a good newsletter so the 50% of parents who are using the TA entrance will find out.

I think the message that is not out there is the One-Way Street I think the letter to residents was not clear and it has just been copied and pasted to the CommonPlace website. Anybody looking sees the words Timed Closure and then sees some times and will assume it it is between certain times. It doesn’t convey the message that the top half is permanently closed to cars who want to travel up to Kirkdale. Sorry to sound like a broken record but it is unclear.

Are there any plans to put in signposting at the bottom of Thorpewood to let people know that it is no longer a through road, whatever the usual is Residents Access Only or No Through Road?

@SophieDavis, Any updates on these points which you said you would raise on the 5th of November.

Can you also add to these points, how you can reduce the impact of traffic/pollution displaced to Holy Trinity as it is outside the school street while being on the same road as the school street? I know the answer has been given that it is up to the school to act and it doesn’t have the money but does the council not have some duty of care if it moves pollution from one school to another?

Firstly I’d like to say that I have lived in the area for 54 years. Living in Round Hill and using a vehicle for work, this is going to make my working day longer. A small inconvenience if it were to make the street safer for children going to school, but this is clearly not the case.
Most of the main points are covered in the thread - Why not Holy Trinity (ridiculous to say the entrance is on Dartmouth rd and number of students), why not timed (as originally indicated). This is really going to inconvenience me every working day, and I am willing to fight this with likeminded residents. I will now, instead of passing one school (Eliot Bank) have to pass two schools (Holy Trinity and Kelvin Grove) and wait in traffic heading up Kirkdale (which in early morning can be very heavy). How can that be beneficial?
The whole issue outside Eliot Bank is caused by parents double parking dropping children off (very dangerous). Thanks to them I am being punished. I would have had to accept if it was timed, but never to be able to turn left is just a step too far.
And encouraging kids to cycle to school - well we should be getting some Olympic champions in a few years time! What 7 year old can negotiate Thorpewood Avenue? Or Kirkdale? Or Sydenham Hill?

The pole and signage that’s been installed on the pavement at the bottom of our drive means we can’t reverse on. My husband had to drive on forwards today and that was hard enough a manoeuvre with no traffic and nothing parked opposite. We can’t imagine how we will be able to safely manoeuvre to reverse off onto Kirkdale, into traffic, especially with the traffic increase this divisive decision will cause here.

It’s a quite legal dropped kerb that’s always worked well and was clearly installed when the house was built. Quite apart from Lewisham’s complete disregard for road safety, this is a Conservstion Area and there’s a grass verge just a few metres away which already has a pole with school signage on it to which this could easily have been added. It would have been safer and cheaper for council tax payers too.

What evidence do I need having lived in the area all my life (48 years in Round Hill, 3 years in Derby Hill and the rest in SE23) that this is yes, inconvenient for me. It will create more emissions from traffic leaving Round Hill FACT. Any traffic leaving Round Hill will go past two schools to get to Sydenham hill FACT. No resident of Round Hill will use Dartmouth Road to get to the south circular (to head towards central London) as it moves a lot slower. This information is gained from experience living in the area, not ‘even without evidence’.
What’s happened here is that allowing children to go to Eliot Bank from a wide area (?) and drop their children by car has caused the road to be altered. I drive up Thorpewood Avenue and have parents just stop on the corner with no regard for the danger of their children. Yet I and others (especially Round Hill) pay the penalty by being effectively penned in with one exit. If Eliot Bank is over subscribed and such a popular school, surely it should be filled by local children? Holy Trinity is less popular, so perhaps should be the school that needs help with dropping off by car? Tackle the issue at source (ie those parents dropping by car) not by making the traffic worse for the majority of local residents. I remember seeing a camera car outside the school on a number of occasions. Surely a camera installed permanently would have been cheaper in tackling these irresponsible parents?
For the record I am a London Taxi Driver. I have a contract with a company in central London where I need to get a short notice. It already takes me an hour to do 8 miles in the morning, and this will increase by at least 10 minutes. That’s around an hour a week, and something I would have accepted for a timed period to make it safe for children.
One thing I predict is that, not evidence based as yet, it will be a nightmare getting out onto Dartmouth Rd. This often gets backed up so any traffic turning left from Thorpewood Avenue will be waiting for the lights at the junction with London Road to change! Traffic will increase on Derby Hill and Derby Hill crescent (which in places is impassable by two vehicles). I hope I’m wrong. If my job is impacted, and I potentially lose the contract if delayed, I will be taking this further. How, I don’t know, but this is the biggest change affecting local traffic that has occurred in my 54years.

There is evidence that it will cause extra pollution to local children and local residents and extra expense which I have posted in another thread Invisible killer: how one girl's tragic death could change the air pollution story - #31 by BorderPaul .

The simple facts are:

The one way street will cost local residents up to £100 extra a year.
It will lengthen the journey for local residents by 1Km.
It will increase pollution in the local area by an extra million grams of CO2.
The school street actively discriminates against Holy Trinity by doubling the pollution going past it.

I have illustrated below the distance of classrooms in both Holy Trinity and Eliot Bank to Thorpewood Avenue. HT classrooms are 5 metres from the road while EB classrooms are 58 metres from the road.

The council proposes to double the pollution for kids sitting in classrooms 5 metres from the road for the benefit of kids sitting in classrooms 58 metres from the road. I don’t think we need the expertise of council officers to say that doesn’t sound fair or right.

Eliot Bank Classrooms 58 metres from the road

Holy Trinity Classrooms 5 metres from the road

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Again, you have succinctly demonstrated the fact of the matter.

Not forgetting Kelvin Grove, with its playground at the front of the school on Kirkdale. I don’t have Paul’s skills to work these really excellent maps and figures, but I fear Kelvin Grove is being forgotten in all this and that Thorpewood Avenue will be made a complete school street in order to silence a more articulate lobby and Kelvin Grove’s children will be sacrificed. Please, please don’t let that happen.

I didn’t receive any response to my request for Eliot Bank’s Travel Plan, by the way. There’s a certain smugness in that lack of openness I feel.

Spot on Paul

What about all those vehicles that cannot cut through Thorpewood Avenue from East to West so will avoid that road? Has that factored into your equations into the pollution impact on these schools? I guess not.

What about the parents who decide to get PT or walk with their kids to Eliot Bank now they can’t park outside the school gate?

If you want to improve air quality around Holy Trinity and Eliot Bank, make a real concerted effort to use your car less and encourage your neighbours to do the same.

Isn’t there a short-term problem here that with an aim of reducing the number of shorter journeys by making driving unpleasant / impractical effectively through manufacturing conditions for congestion (albeit on fewer roads), the actions of the council will increase pollution?

I agree with the aims of those trying to make the air cleaner, but I just don’t think it’s something that can effectively be done by borough action alone, particularly where we have the South Circ as such a major factor / impact on all local traffic conditions.

What is more important - safety of dropping children outside the school (which has been evident to be very low on some parents priorities) or air quality around the school and the environment?
I have invested in a £65,000 Electric London Taxi. I’m doing my bit. My reward is now to be sent around the block, at the busiest time of the day, when just trying to get to work.
Some people need encouragement not to use their cars. That helps me in my job and also the environment. But this method of creating problems, and punishing those who’s vehicles are essential for work and the economy in order to change habits, is not the way to do it.
Has any thought been considered for those less able ? If, for example, I need to take my 86 year old mum (who also lives in Round Hill) to a hospital appointment at Kings College (a pretty regular occurrence) then the new route will create her an issue.
What if a disabled person needs to be dropped during the restricted hours? Is there provision for that?
To you and your esteemed experts the new scheme on paper may seem to work. But I assure you the problems at the bottom of Thorpewood Avenue will be real, and the inconvenience to local residents extremely under estimated.

Has anyone seen Conways around this week? Lewisham Highways Department tell me they’ve shut down for Christmas. It’s only Tues 22nd! It’s extraordinary if no one is around now to take care of highway safety matters until the new year.

I have factored into account the small number of vehicles that will avoid the road as a cut through. Unfortunately in most cases, cars are destined for this area for one reason or another rather than rat-running, they will just turn around and use the single exit past the Holy Trinity kids in their classrooms 5 metres away from the road.

Local residents will have to do a 1km extra detour which will cost them up to £100 extra a year and add extra pollution to the area while going past the classrooms of kids who are sitting 5 metres away from the road and past Kelvin Grove as well.

I think you seriously underestimate the intelligence of the parents who have not been persuaded by the green message. You seriously think that given a choice between parking at the school gates or parking 150 metres below the school gates, they will opt not to drive. Most will opt to drive and park a little bit further away and turn around and drive past the kids in their classrooms 5 metres away from the road.

Most local residents agree with the idea of a timed school street that includes all the children going to school on the street.

Most local residents don’t agree with the imposition of a 24/7 one way street that puts a £100 tax on them and adds extra pollution to the neighbouring streets and schools.

I think you should make a concerted effort to improve your scheme so that it works as a school street for all children on the road including both schools and doesn’t penalise the majority of local residents while adding extra pollution to the area.

@EmmaJ I am still following up with officers on the points I mentioned previously. I will update as soon as possible (although likely in the NY as I am now taking a break over Christmas).

I would be very interested to know what proportion of the children attending Elliott Bank actually live within its stated catchment area and are therefore able to walk or PT with their parents. I suspect it is quite low compared to neighbouring schools as I know of one family that continue to bring their children to EB having moved to West Wycombe, another who “borrowed” a family member’s house until their children were accepted and then moved back to their own house 2 miles away and yet another who rented a nearby flat for the address but had a family house in Chislehurst.
That’s just the instances I have personal knowledge of so I suspect there are many, many more such stories and I very much doubt any of them will forsake their cars.

I have heard stories of people knocking on front doors and offering to pay the Council Tax for a year to be registered in order to get their children in the local school.
When I attended primary school pupils went to the nearest primary school.
There was not much chance of differentiating between schools until the league tables were introduced.
It makes more sense to me to abolish the league tables. I believe this would bring an end to parents travelling miles to the school of their choice.

When I attended primary school pupils went to the nearest primary school.

Most people start out like that (with the exception of the ‘cheaters’ you mention), but then moving for a secondary school is common, or just moving because of a job change or maybe to a different flat or house as a family grows or whatever. Add in a second child, and things get more complex again.

Absolutely. The school is over subscribed - so should be full of LOCAL children. But guess what - some will do anything to get their children in and travel a fair distance. Understandable some will say, but it still has created the issue. Holy Trinity (I attended between 1971-76) will have people travelling from further away.

My house is on Kirkdale and roughly equidistant between Eliot Bank and Kelvin Grove schools. Huge numbers of small children walk past my house every day. That’s almost the entire length of upper Kirkdale. Quite apart from the road safety issues and the lack of social distancing, those little children will be exposed to vastly increased levels of air pollution when they return to school in January to find Kirkdale choc a bloc with extra traffic. That’s a long walk at child height and child speed.

Only the lower part of Thorpewood Ave is in the conservation area, the area stops about where the one way system signage has been put just after Radlett Ave. No idea why the the conservation area was not for the whole of Thorpewood Ave when imposed some years ago. It is very difficult to get permission to do changes to our houses. Surrounding houses, not in the conservation area, having permitted development rights to build large loft extensions intrusively over looking our houses & gardens.

From today’s South London Press:

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Sorry I tried to make that bigger, but just ended up making it a bit stretchier.

There is now another potential pollution/congestion issue looming over the lower half of TA.

There is a parcel of virgin land behind the houses at the corner of TA and Radlet that over the decades has become home to dozens of mature and semi mature trees, including a number of oaks, plus much wildlife. The previous owner had pledged never to build on it but unfortunately she died a while ago and the new owner has submitted a planning application to clear this “forest” and build a 4 bedroom house on the site with access adjacent to 1 Radlet Avenue.
I know a number of my neighbours have objected to the plan for numerous reasons and, as I often see bats close to it in the summer months I have asked LBL to order a bat survey as well as giving my more general objections. However, with the pressing need for housing (although this plan is certainly not affordable housing!) I rather suspect that LBL will try to wave it through with little consideration for the adverse effect that the additional pollution/congestion will have on the lower half of TA and Holy Trinity School.

We considered formally objecting to this, but in the end decided, rightly or wrongly, that the direct effects on us (further along Radlet Avenue) would be comparatively small and that the wider arguments against the proposed development weren’t strong enough…

Hi @SophieDavis, I wondered if you managed to get any information that you can post to reassure local residents that the school street has taken into account all those affected including the school which has been excluded and not just those who benefit.

You said you would do this on the 5th of November.

As well as pollution, many residents will now have to make a 1km detour which seems to go against a scheme to reduce pollution which in many cases will cost residents an extra £100 a year if they need to drive, more if their mobility requires them to rely on taxis.

Thanks for looking into this and I look forward to reading the impact assessment or at least knowing if it wasn’t done that there is none.

Hi @BorderPaul. So, first, my apologies for the delay - as I’ve mentioned, our staff are really busy at the moment as many of them have had to be re-deployed to deal with COVID (leaving other teams even more stretched than they already were). This means that it’s taking longer to get responses but I’m still following up.

On the points that were raised previously:

• Providing more information and data.
  The FAQs have been updated on our website (https://lewishamschoolstreets.commonplace.is/proposals/frequently-asked-questions) to provide more information on how the schemes work, how the schools were chosen and how we’ll be monitoring the impact ( If there is anything else you think you should be covered by the FAQs let me know and I can ask officers to include it). There was a discussion about including more specific/ broken down data - I think the constraint on this at the moment is time but we (cllrs) are continuing to push for this to be done when we come to review these schemes/ in relation to other schemes. I personally agree that greater transparency is best.

• On comms for those who might not be accessing the website/ commonplace/ this forum. We discussed this being done at / with the help of schools but due to the schools only being open for the children of key workers, the wide publicity has been delayed until the schools invite the majority of children back to onsite education. However, our officer is going to the school street locations next week to put up lamp post posters with an update on the school street programme. I’m still following up about the one-way system point (making the one way rules clearer).

• I am still waiting for answers on a number of other points - will update when I get them.

• On your wider questions - how the schools were chosen is covered in the FAQs (& we’ve addressed it on here before). I would also make again two points that I’ve made before: (a) the aim is to reduce traffic overall (by encouraging people who can to walk/ cycle etc), not to displace it, which should benefit everyone ; these kinds of behaviour changes take time to bed in, though, so you need the scheme to be in place for a little while before you can really assess its impact (b) this is itself a trial, not a permanent scheme - we had to put it in place quite quickly but the impact of the scheme (on traffic, pollution, longer distances for residents etc) is being monitored and will feed into the review of the scheme.

Sophie

This piece of land is part of Thorpewood Ave & therefore in the conservation area. This means that no trees can be removed without planning permission. As I understand this covers not only trees in front gardens but also tree in back gardens. If this is correct no tree on this piece of land should be touched until permission is gain. I am with you on the bats, we have bats flying in our garden in summer & have for years. Have often wondered where they live & hibernate in winter. Bats are protected by law. I had been told that the past owner of this piece of land had left this land to somebody who lives near but with instructions in her will that it should be left for the wildlife & not built on. Would be a sad turn of events if people’s instructions in their wills are not abided to.

Please could you give me the planning reference for this as I can not find it on Lewisham’s Planning website.

Thanks @SophieDavis Sophie for the reply,

I appreciate your greater transparency and the fact that everybody is really busy at the moment.

Most people agree with the School Street, the permanent one way system is seen as negative and is going to cost local residents up to an extra £100 a year in driving costs as they now have to make a 1km detour. By closing one of two exits, all traffic is forced to use the other exit with more displaced pollution.

I had a look at the link, Commonplace still has a misleading map, it communicates that it is a timed closure whereas it is a permanent closure westbound.

It is good that you recognise the issues for local residents and the school outside the scheme

There is an issue with communication to the Holy Trinity school community including parents who aren’t going to get a chance to read the notices on lampposts. It would be good if you communicated to them that the scheme is likely to increase pollution going past their classrooms but they should wait and see as you think it will reduce over time and also why their school has been excluded from the scheme.

Lastly, hopefully all the displaced traffic will disappear but I think it would be good to set out the timeline for formal consultation with dates and can we make provision in any consultation for the school community excluded from the school street to have some input?

PS. I privately requested monitoring data on the scheme from Lewisham Highways Department in November. I received it a few weeks later. I am happy to forward on what I got which wasn’t a lot. You may get a lot more from them.

KimD, it is Planning Application DC/20/118194 titled LAND ADJACENT TO 1 RADLET AVENUE, LONDON, SE26 4BZ.
I do know who the previous owner bequeathed this land to and although I feel it’s inappropriate to name names on here you can probably work it out from the PA and it’s attachments. I too was told by a long time friend of hers that a condition of this bequest was that it would not be built on “in perpetuity” but I’m not a lawyer so I don’t know what legal weight such conditions carry.

I think that restrictions can be removed by a Land Tribunal.
I think i would need to examine the will. Normally there would need to be something like a condition that the land would revert to someone else if the restrictions is not observed. But this is all very contentious.

Yes, I’m aware of the discrepancy with the FAQs on Commonplace - I’ve asked officers to update them.

Re Holy Trinity - just to reiterate what we’ve said a number of times on this thread, the school wasn’t “excluded”. Two important factors were: (1) the interest of the school - one of the early things officers did is write to all schools to gauge interest in having a school street, as it’s very difficult for the Council to implement a scheme like this without the school’s support; on this I understand Holy Trinity wasn’t as forthcoming; (2) another is the feasibility of having a scheme at the location & a number of factors weigh in to this (for example, I know many parents at Fairlawn are interested in having a school street & I have asked about a scheme there but the location - on a bus route - makes it much more difficult). Having said that, I’m happy to ask officers if we could include information at Holy Trinity too.

On consultation - the FAQs referred to before have the answers on this - https://lewishamschoolstreets.commonplace.is/proposals/frequently-asked-questions. As we have said, there is nothing stopping anyone from feeding back to us at the moment - either to traffic@lewisham.gov.uk, to us here or (preferably) on Commonplace.

I had a neighbour ask me on Saturday what is happening with the road.

“They told us back in October it was a timed closure in the leaflet for an hour in the morning and evening and now they have put up barriers to make the road one way permanently. Closing the road is just going to double the pollution going past Holy Trinity”

Thanks @SophieDavis or all your posts here.

I think the council should look at doing something about the permanent one way scheme which seems to be the real problem here.
The small school street if it was as intended for 2 hours a day would not make things much worse.
The problem is the permanent one way scheme which has been tacked on which is going to make things a lot worse, costing locals time and money due to the 1km detour and doubling the pollution for many residents and schoolchildren.

Could you not change the permanent one way to be a timed one way only during the school street hours?

It would seem a lot less disruptive, would not cost residents up to a £100 a year or double pollution going past Holy Trinity and other residents outside the school street hours.

Thanks Sherwood. I understand that wills are public record once probate is granted so it may be worth thinking about if the PA looks like being granted and enough residents are interested as it sounds like a challenge could get expensive.

I know nothing about this case.

But I don’t think Will provisions or land ownership is considered a planning consideration. For example, it’s perfectly possible to apply for planning permission for a piece of land you don’t even own. But I guess if the person who owns the land now is also the person who is applying for planning permission, and if they only own the land as a result of an inheritance where the land was willed to them directly and on condition they didn’t build on it then it might be open to challenge by the person who would have been next in line for inheritance. If that alternative legatee were a charity, I think they would maybe contest the will knowing what has happened in cases where for example a charity was left property in a lady’s will and her berieved daughter had to pay the charity for family mementoes and photos.

I received a letter from LBL Planning this morning to say that the planning proposal for the land adjacent to 1 Radlet has been REFUSED.
I imagine they will probably appeal but, for now at least, that is one less inconvenience.

An updates on this? The no entry is active but no sign of any one way system?

It seems to be being largely ignored although just had 2 lorries performing 3 point turns to go back down the road. I hope LBL are just sending out warnings for the first couple of weeks rather than instant fines.

It is a bit strange. Perhaps I missed something when I saw the signs on Sunday.

You can’t enter the top half from the lower part of Thorpewood but you can exit onto Kirkdale from the top half with no signposts to say it is one way.

It does seem to defeat the purpose of a one way system if only applies to entry to the section rather than the section itself.

I do notice on this thread that @SophieDavis has not published any information which she said she would 4 months ago in November.

I think there have been questions regarding the impact of this on Holy Trinity and I have heard calls for the publication of an Equality Impact Assessment. It would be interesting to see if one was done or the need for Emergency/Covid legislation means there is no need to take this into consideration.

Note that Sophie is now on maternity leave, and so this may have slipped through the cracks I guess.

I understood the intention to be that the top half was one way, downhill only, so that the only exit from TA was onto Dartmouth Road. If the top half is still two way, just inaccessible from the bottom, it makes no sense. Perhaps @LeoGibbons can clarify.

Apparently this isn’t going to be enforced until lockdown is over.

I’d just like to add I’m really unhappy about this. The already heavy traffic on Kirkdale is going to be even more dangerous for children who do walk to school and need to cross on the junction of Kirkdale and TA.
Residents in the area have asked time and time again over the years for a ‘ lollipop lady/man’ and have been told there haven’t been enough incidents or fatalities to warrant one.
I’ve lived on the junction of Kirkdale and TA for 50 years and know exactly how dangerous this road is and know it’s going to get so much worse!

Also, over the years there really wasn’t a huge push with traffic enforcement officers on TA to man Eliot Bank parent offenders.
EB School staff have also been verbally abused by parents when asked not to double park or park over driveways.

Why not? Isn’t the main purpose to stop through traffic?

So residents below the signs are restricted from exiting up Thorpewood Avenue (which saves going past three schools and joining traffic at the lower part of Kirkdale) just so that people who drive their children to school can do so?
People doing u turns on Kirkdale will create more issues? No one is going to go all the way down to Dartmouth Rd.
The whole thing is ill thought out and devisive. The original notification I received in Round Hill was a timed closure. Although I drive to work every day around those times I would have swallowed that for safety of children (although forget Holy Trinity/ Sydenham/ Kelvin Grove)
The permanent no entry to the upper part of Thorpewood should be removed.

Whether it’s one or two way at the top doesn’t change through traffic, they both allow it downhill and the no entry signs at Radlet stop it uphill.

Why should I be stopped using Thorpewood Avenue because I live in Round Hill? I have used it for over 50 years and suddenly I have to sit in extra traffic via a longer route past more schools.
It is empty most of the day and has never been a “rat run” in my experience. The only issue was the school - caused by people double parking dropping off their children dangerously. So I pay the price of inconvenience.

I thought the main purpose of a school street was to stop parents from driving their kids to school for a limited period of time during drop-off and pick-up.

The main outcome of this scheme because of the addition of the one way scheme is to drive more pollution past the other school on the street during the full school day which some people see as economically and racially divisive.

The secondary outcome is that the residents in Thorpewood Avenue, Radlet Avenue, Round Hill, Featherstone Avenue, Shackleton Close, Derby Hill and Derby Hill Crescent below the no-entry sign will now have to drive an extra kilometre past 3 schools.

The third outcome is that it will protect the driveways of those residences opposite Eliot Bank.

It makes no sense.

There are strategic objectives, there are strategies and there are plans and tactics. Air pollution is a major health problem, and to reduce air pollution seems an obvious objective. Lewisham has a strategy to reduce pollution close to schools by encouraging people to walk their children to school. No one would argue with that, especially in view of the level of unfitness in our society (affecting some parents as well as their children). This scheme is a tactical intervention and the question is 'will this intervention contribute to the strategic objective by reducing air pollution close to local schools.

My understanding is that the original plan, for a wider school exclusion scheme, was not pursued on cost grounds. If scheme A is unaffordable, the choices are a reduced scheme B or do nothing. The Council opted for reduced scheme B, I understand on an experimental basis. There is obviously a need to monitor the performance of the scheme once people have got used to it. Holy Trinity is working staggered opening and closing hours at the moment, and this is just the second day. However, as I walked by this afternoon, it was obvious that the traffic outside HT was worse than usual with some inexpert driving and blocking of the road as there is not room for two cars to pass. At one point there were six cars stationary outside HT two going up and four coming down with drivers unclear how to get out of the problem (some of them eventually remembered reverse gear). I imagine things will improve as people get used to it (and worse if the school moves to a single opening and closing time for all years), but it is important that the council does monitor results beginning in a week or so when parents are more aware of the scheme.

They can be stopped, but it takes enforcement.

That is indeed the purpose, but it is a sub-set of a wider objective of improving health by reducing air pollution.

Some of the pressures on this one may relate to local residents objecting to inconsiderate parking outside schools and across driveways, but that doesn’t alter the main objective.

Just a small point -
With the objective being to reduce pollution for children pretty-much at the school gate, and given that cars idling (or doing 3-point turns) in that immediate vicinity would cause WAY more pollution than cars merely passing the school (going up or down the hill), why don’t the council just face the facts and make a total ban on parents dropping-off within say 50 metres of the school because, from my observation, that is the real problem; and, in this particular location, I’d be very surprised if the experiment proves to meet its target objective all the while parents stop and spew fumes at the school gates.
(I’m also balancing the argument with the knock-on chaos for Holy Trinity and the environmental impact from fuel consumption and fumes associated with the extra mileage for journeys, not only to access Elliot Bank school, but for local residents’ access to and from their homes).

Everybody wants to reduce air pollution which is why most people are in favour of a school street but against this costly/polluting/discriminatory scheme.

You are right about the reason for the decision but I think it doesn’t tell the full story. The cost of not doing scheme A has been transferred to the residents who have to drive or take a taxi now for an extra kilometre if they need to go to Kings or someplace else that was quicker/shorter/less polluting before.
It is effectively a stealth tax on residents below this barrier. A regular driver will have to pay an extra £100 a year and taking a taxi to Kings will cost at least a £1 though probably more, if they can’t take public transport.

If you couldn’t afford to do something properly, would you impose a stealth tax on your neighbours so that you could do part of it or would you wait till you could afford it?

How will the council know whether pollution has been reduced or increased at the gates of the 3 obviously affected schools? Did they perform a proper survey in the vicinity of EB, HT and KG when they were fully open pre-Covid and will they repeat it post-Covid? I think the answer to both of those questions is most probably no.
One of the first things I was told when I first entered the workplace many many moons ago was that if you can’t do something properly don’t do it at all.

Absolutely agree. The scheme affects some with absolutely no connection to to the school and increased pollution instead of tackling the actual issue.

My understanding from speaking with the local councillors is that there are a few reasons for the changes to Thorpewood Ave. They want to disinscentivize parents driving children to school, lower car pollution around schools and discourage dangerous drivers “rat running” from Dartmouth to Kirkdale. Different options (eg CCTV cameras) were deemed out of budget. The original plan was to split Thorpewood in half: make upper Thorpewood one-way going only towards Dartmouth and lower Thorpewood two-way. Both upper and lower would only exit onto Dartmouth. It appears this has changed.* There is still the split and you can still only drive from upper to lower, but both upper and lower Thorpewood will be two-way. I would prefer there was no change at all to Thorpewood, but this is better than the original plan. Both lower and upper Thorpewood residents will be able to exit to their nearest street. The prior plan would have prevented someone who lives on upper Thorpewood right next to Kirkdale to exit onto Kirkdale. Again, I would prefer this change did not happen at all.

*Based on signage.

I assume someone is monitoring whether these desired outcomes are in fact being achieved. I must say I hadn’t realised that number three (‘rat running’) was a problem - I don’t think it figured in the initial discussions I listened in on.

I live on the lower part of Thorpewood Ave.This is what I have observed since the changes to a school street started 10 days ago.

Certainly rat run traffic has gone, I was aware that there had been an increase especially with large lorries using the road as a cut through before Covid. It had returned to some extent with this lockdown but has gone now & the road is much quieter between school drop off & pick up times.

On the school traffic, on the first day of the no entry to upper part of Thorpewood Ave it was pretty chaotic. Car zooming up the road & then come to an abrupt stop at the no entry signs. Radlett Ave & Featherstone Ave took the brunt of the disruption & turning traffic.
This week is a bit better but still has cars speeding up the no entry signs, stopping & children being let out of cars to run up the road to Eliot Bank school mostly without parents.

The school street closure times don’t seem to being adhered to this week. Lots of cars seem to coming down despite the street closure at school times in the morning & again in the afternoon. Too many to be residents. Would indicate to me that some have worked out there isn’t any enforcement or penalty. If this is the case then something needs to be done ASAP before the whole point of this & it’s disruption to us residents at the lower part of Thorpewood Ave becomes meaningless & possibly more dangerous to walking schoolchildren.

I do feel for Holy Trinity schoolchildren. The congestion at the bottom of Thorpewood Ave is far worse. The drivers seem far more aggressive since the changes causing gridlock outside Holy Trinity which must be increasing air pollution there.

I wasn’t aware that the top part or TA is now two way or why things changed, it seems to me somebody has been pulling strings to get the best for the residents around Elliot Bank.

Thorpewood Ave is one road & changes should not be to advantage residents that shout the loudest. Thorpewood Ave traffic & parking problems first came to light with the controlled parking consultation in 2015 which highlighted the problem with residents parking at the lower end, as most houses here do not have drives. There was a lot of work done on the possibilities to improve this especially with all day parkers & pool parking. This group got taken over by the problem of parking over driveways at the top by Eliot Bank parents at school times.

Covid hit & without any consultation the present road changes have happened. The only warning was a letter put through the letter boxes informing us of the planned changes.

It appears these have now been changed more to the two way traffic at the top from one way. Why?

I am not against school street changes but only if it is done to reduce air pollution for all schools in a road & not used so that some residents in a street with two schools get advantage more than others.

I too live on the lower part of TA and when I walked up to the top this morning I found that the School Street signs are still covered and there is a notice tied to a lamppost stating that a letter would be sent to residents, presumably just those in the top half, when it was to commence. Also, judging by cars parked facing either direction it is still two-way traffic and the notice made no suggestion that that would change.

I wonder if Google Maps follows when roads are open or closed when they have limited hours of closure?

What bothers me is, if I’m visiting somebody in Radlett Avenue, how do I know that I can go up Thorpewood from Dartmouth Road when I see the signs on Kirkdale that tell me I can’t go down? Is there another sign somewhere on Thorpewood that explains the alternative route?

Michael, you can go up TA from Dartmouth to Radlet 24/7 but you cannot pass the No Entry signs just past the junction, that is operating and won’t change. Currently you can also go all the way down TA 24/7 but that will change when the school street is made operational. Hope this helps.

I would say to avoid the junction of Thorpewood and Dartmouth during the school pick up both as a motorist or a pedestrian. It really is chaos as the traffic that used to be split between two exits is now concentrated on one that can’t cope with the traffic.

Today was chaos, cars backed up, I saw a car reversing into a resident’s driveway as well as many cars parked over them, while other cars were blocking the turn off to Derby Hill Crescent. It was very dangerous for young children who are walking.

There is currently little traffic apart from that as most of us abide by lockdown.

Most of the traffic currently is from local residents outside the school run with the occasional lorry for local house building work and delivery vans. I don’t think there has ever been that much traffic that I would call “rat running” and I would agree with @robin.orton that it wasn’t discussed in the past. I have only really heard it mentioned after the compromise to the School Street which seemed to justify the compromise.

My opinion is that the majority of the so called rats driving up the the road are local residents like myself who have now been asked to detour via 3 schools. You have to wonder why a compromise was made that creates more pollution, inconveniences the majority of local residents while puts the school children excluded from the school street at a serious disadvantage?

I read @Michael’s post as being more about the lack of clear signage than as actually asking for advice on the route!

Personally i know how to drive to Radlett Avenue and alternative routes. My concern is not so much about clear signage of specific hours of road closures but of alternative routes when this is imposed.

When there are temporary roadworks there are clear diversion signs, but i don’t think this is the case for school street closures.

I totally agree about the chaos at the Dartmouth Road end with the increase in cars now exiting Thorpewood Ave.
I saw today at least two very near misses at the one entry signs at Radlett Ave/ Featherstone Ave junction. Two cars at separate times choose to ignore the no entry signs & had very near misses with cars doing the right thing coming down the road. Due to the narrowing of the road due to the no entry signs there is no room for two cars.
If these changes are not being monitored with penalties & some drivers are aware of this then it is only time before a nasty accident happens

@Michael, you are right there should be a clear diversion sign.

It is easy for locals as many will know you have to detour past the other three schools in the area whereas if you didn’t know the area it is quite complicated. I think it would be hard to put the new route on a sign. I have put in a map below which illustrates the new route back to the top of Kirkdale.

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I’m actually less concerned about this direction than the other direction. My understanding is that the no entry sign is permanent, so Google will know that that would not be a suitable route. But coming the other way, would Google know the route to your house from Sydenham Hill during hours of school drop off? I suspect it will try to direct people down a road that is not open at that time? That is what causes more confusion than anything else with time-limited road closures.

I think the algorithms used by services like Google Maps and Waze are clever enough to ‘figure it out’ though there may be a lag in the advice they provide. I also think local authorities are able to inform these services of changes to road layouts but again, there is probably a lag.

I’m not entirely sure maps will ‘figure out’ the valid hours without some human help - normally Google Maps sees unexpectedly closed roads as being great traffic free routes and does everything it can to send you down them! At least these days you can tell it about closures and other problems you may encounter, but it’s just a ‘problem here now’ button.

It also took a while for it to understand that the closures on Silverdale Road were only for vehicles and not pedestrians (though that is at least fixed now) - see this walking route:

image1093×850 220 KB

Last year when LTNs etc had been introduced, I found google maps completely unaware of them either driving across town through different boroughs or taking my son to play football at different locations on Sundays, meant you could go down a road with no way of turning out that you could see as each side road was blocked at the end. Some cars would simply drive through, partly out of desperation I imagine. In the end which made sure we planned our route along the main roads, which I guess in an unintended way meant we were not going down as many residential roads.

Everybody seems to be under the assumption that most people are using Google while driving on local residential roads.

I think many don’t expect to have to use google to drive locally. It would be good for the council to put details of the diversion that people will now have to undertake below the no-entry signs.

@Michael, I think many locals will decide that if they are visiting Radlet Avenue or places below the barrier via Kirkdale that the least polluting thing to do is park on the upper part of Thorpewood and walk down rather than drive past three schools on the return journey. It will probably end up being the quickest option.

From reactions to some of my other posts, I’m clearly seen as one of the more backward in our midst (in terms of what’s right in today’s World), but, for crying out loud, even I can’t be wrong to say that Lewisham Council should immediately accept that the chaos caused by this ‘scheme’ has led to unacceptable and rapidly-increasing hazardous & dangerous conditions on the roads and pavements, which far outweighs its intended benefit, and they should abandon it immediately.

Absolutely. The exit from Radlett Avenue onto Thorpewood is dangerous, and that also meets the Featherstone Avenue junction. There will be an accident.
With cars doing U turns at the top of the road (now the one way has been forgotten) and cars causing issues at the bottom (Dartmouth traffic has also been back past the junction with Thorpewood heading to Forest Hill - and we are still in lockdown) then how has the safety been improved?
I HAVE to drive as I am a London Taxi Driver (working a contract for a company in the city) and this scheme could actually cost me that if the gridlock I expect materialises. To say I’m fuming is an understatement.

I can imagine your frustration, so I sympathise.

However, inconvenience to residents is of no concern to Lewisham Council - their concern is [supposedly?] childrens’ health and safety.

But the problem in this particular location is that the interests of the children at the top of the hill are being looked after to the unquestionable detriment of those at the bottom.

Are the kids at the top more deserving?

If not, then Lewisham must demonstrate immediately that Holy Trinity pupils haven’t suffered even a 1% drop in air quality, street safety and travel inconvenience as a direct result of this badly thought-out and totally unbalanced scheme.

The irony is that if many of the parents - oops, can’t say that any more - guardians were considerate, there wouldn’t be any need for any of these divisive and disruptive measures.

This is also very hard on the children at Kelvin Grove school. And also on all the children (and other pedestrians!) who have to cross Kirkdale. When all the deliveries for the several sets of householder building works approved for the top of Thorpewood start, it’s going to make a bad situation even worse.

By the way, I don’t use Google or a SatNav either. Nor do I want to. I know how to read a map and have never got lost in London (or anywhere else for that matter … apart from driving into Canada by mistake, but in my defence I wasn’t the navigator). But I am really nervous now of driving anywhere for fear of coming across unexpected road closures. The signage is ridiculously complicated and by the time you’ve focussed on some of the signs, you’ve driven past them they have so much info of what you can or can’t do and when you can’t or can do it.

As an affected resident on upper Kirkdale, I’ve yet to receive any kind of notification of the promised consultation on this.

Intrigued.

Dartmouth Road shut due to a fire at the Bird in Hand (Hope all ok). Mindless closing of the road at all times means no get out for local residents to get up to Kirkdale.

It doesn’t make sense that the school street applies to the rest of us at all times while those within can still drive out to Kirkdale. It is not exactly busy outside school pick-up and drop-off as shown below.

I think it is half-term for most schools in the borough. I did wonder why Lewisham decided to reveal the school street signs during half-term, though a recent tweet makes me question whether enforcement is yet to start:

Either way, I wouldn’t chance driving through the camera at any time!

There are no cameras, no effective school street just a no entry sign 24 hours a day applying to all local residents who want to travel up to Kirkdale, costing them up to a £100 a year and displacing traffic past three schools.

I’d be quite happy with a school street that benefited all the schools on the street and applied during school times only.

Leaflet sent to Eliot Bank school parents about the school street scheme:
Lewisham Update School Streets Scheme.pdf (814.3 KB)

Thanks for sharing that. Why the permanent no entry sign? If the one way was in place (which was ridiculous anyway) I could understand - but this is simply restricting access for no reason at all (outside of school pick up times). I’m wondering if anything is illegal about it?

Is the one-way to allow enforcement to be cheaper (because you only need one set of cameras which cover the entrance)? That seems to be what the council have done on Kilmorie Road (albeit that it works well there, I think).

I wonder whether this is a one-size-fits-all approach which just hasn’t worked well in this particular instance.

There are no cameras at all or one way system. They will be using the mobile unit I’m sure - which used to turn up now and again to catch the real culprits, who double parked and acted irresponsibly when dropping their children off. The councils way of dealing with that is to inconvenience local residents who have absolutely nothing to do with it.

A camera has been installed on the grass verge outside Otto Close, looking onto TA today.

There is no camera, just a pole with a power socket as shown in the photo. Currently there are no restrictions on exiting out of the top to Kirkdale and no signs as shown. They would need to come first. Restriction is only inward during school street hours at that junction with the usual school street sign.

If the council has money for extra cameras then the residents and the school children of the three local schools that are getting displaced pollution must ask why can’t the council use the money to protect everybody not just the ones chosen by this very narrow scheme. I think we need a version of AC-12 in Lewisham to investigate these schemes .

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Although not all schools are covered by school streets, this is a scheme covering 23 schools in Lewisham next week (including Kelvin Grove). Whatever the merits ir demertis of this particular scheme, it is no longer a very narrow scheme - it is wherever the council can find the opportunity to partially close a road close to a school without massive disruption to main routes.

Michael, I am being specific here. I fully welcome like most people the School Street scheme and I think implemented correctly it has great benefits for all local residents and children.

Implemented narrowly in this specific case on a specific street with the exclusion of the other school which has a poorer and primarily BAME intake is wrong.

Implementation of a School Street Scheme for 24 hours a day rather than 2 hours penalises local residents excluded from the scheme and causes excessive pollution as they have to detour for 1km because of the new restriction which will cost many £100 extra a year.

I apologise in advance, I have to drive today and previously I would pollute the planet but now, I will be adding an extra 100gms of extra CO2 pollution due to the narrow council scheme.

The pole has been there for some weeks. On Friday there were workmen doing something to it ( all day!) I assumed they were installing a camera…

There is no need to apologise. The good news is that, if his scheme works as intended, then there will be fewer cars making the journey to Eliot Bank, offsetting your extra pollution.

Eliot Bank does not have entry based on ethnicity or race, so if this makes a big difference in the decision of local schools then their proportion of BAME children will rise. I don’t believe it is helpful to categorise this as a racist policy.

Eliot Bank is a brilliant school, I sent my kids there, I don’t think anybody believes that EB wanted a compromised school street that excluded the other school on the street and displaced pollution to it.

The point really is that if a street has 2 schools on it, then making that street a school street should have both schools on it so that both will benefit rather than one benefits and the other gets displaced pollution. It seems a fair and equal policy.

As for the net pollution question.
15% of the traffic is school traffic, about 85% is outside the official school street hours mainly local residents.

Forcing the 85% to make in many cases a 1km detour is unlikely to reduce pollution.
In April last year, every 100 journeys up to Kirkdale created 30km of traffic and the resultant pollution, now a year later, the same 100 journeys will cause 130km of pollution. You need a lot of people to stop travelling to offset that extra pollution, 3 out of every 4 journeys would need to stop.

There is more chance of a new pedestrian bridge linking Dartmouth Road and the Perry Vale car park being built than this scheme working as intended and off setting pollution. I respect your optimism. The good news is that the bridge is being built next year.

I don’t own a car and am able to cycle around town (I appreciate not everyone is able). It is worth remembering that a significant proportion of Lewisham residents do not own cars. There are many factors to reducing car usage, LTNs and road restrictions such as this displace traffic and those residing on the main roads suffer the consequences.
The response that other schools did not engage as much is interesting and possibly a selective interpretation of how effective community consultation should work. On other planning matters, those who do engage in consultations have been deemed ‘the minority with too much time on their hands’. Which is it?
Given the restricted catchment area of Eliot Bank, the number of parents that drive is surprising. How vigorous are the checks on addresses provided in applications? I know this debate has been had a few times but surely the process can be tightened up.
The rise of SUVs is a menace, I have had many debates with friends and family who choose to buy these vehicles for the prestige. Take a look at the cars idling and parking where they shouldn’t - selfish, me me me behaviour, whilst they poison other kids. I would happily see more penalties given out for this behaviour.

There is no way to address the climate challenge without challenging the polluters.

This is the heat elected officials will have to bear implementing their manifesto, while remembering that car drivers in Lewisham are a vocal minority.

Traffic flow only improves if there is less traffic. More roads and more parking encourages more cars. As simple as that. Lewisham suffers because for years the council spent money on cycle training, and bike loans rather than safe cycle routes. Opportunities were missed. See Lewisham Gateway, a wide expanse of car lanes with painted cycle lanes on the pavement as an after thought. Instead cars increased, accommodated by on pavement parking across the borough.

The Mais house development includes an assessment that points out the poor (unsafe) cycling facilities around it. Steep hills like Kirkdale with no cycle lane. But you just have to cycle through Southwark to see what is possible. But it takes years and money that TFL no longer has.

At least the school streets are permeable by bike.

This is my biggest grievance, not only incentivising driving but actively making the public realm worse for pedestrians, and at no additional cost to the car owner. I recently asked the council if I could use what would otherwise be a car parking space on my street to install a bike hanger, but if that isn’t successful I could always just buy a van from a scrap yard and keep my bikes locked away in there for free, conveniently parked on the pavement right outside my door!

If it was on the road you’d have to tax it, although if you removed the engine and made a hole in the footwell you could probably claim CO2 emissions are 0g/km and then it would be tax free.

Maybe I could keep my accessories in the engine bay!

Or you could get a fully electric vehicle which is exempt from Vehicle Exercise Duty… or a historic vehicle made before 1 January 1981 for that matter.

Source: Vehicles exempt from vehicle tax - GOV.UK

I looked into this after the council never got back to me about a hangar and somebody tried to nick my bike from outside my house and concluded that a broken down classic car exempt from tax was the answer, looked at black cabs but too expensive. It could store my bike and I’d put in some good speakers so the kids could use it to play their music with obligatory wifi.

Pavement parking is also one of my biggest grievances and I will keep plugging away to put it on the Mayor’s agenda.

Regarding cycle hangers - our programme of hangers was funded by Transport for London and due to Covid-19’s impact on their finances, the tap has run dry for any new installations. As soon as a new funding settlement is agreed upon between the Government and TFL, I will try and again put our cycle hanger programme back on the agenda.

@PV your story reminded me of this https://twitter.com/adamtranter/status/1384552059010170882

I cannot see why dealing with pavement parking is so hard. It has been against the law in London for over 40 years, but there is no enforcement. The Council’s outsourced parking firm, NSL, will not deal with it. But a sticker on the windscreen saying ‘next time you will be fined’ would probably do the trick. Not even costly.

In Devonshire Road yesterday there were 20 cars parked on the pavement towards Tyson Road. This is standard practice. I have informed the Council about this dozens of times with zero effect. The pavement here is particularly narrow so with social distancing pedestrians have to walk in the road.

The Council Parking Policy ‘draft’ March 2020 starts with this statement:
6.9 Footway parking
In Lewisham, as with other London Boroughs, it is a contravention to park a vehicle wholly or partly on the footway and is therefore subject to a Penalty Charge Notice. This is because footways are provided for pedestrians, and parking vehicles on them causes problems for many people including the visually impaired, people with prams, pushchairs or wheel chairs, and many of us just wishing to walk along the footway.

It is significant that absolutely zero action is taken in respect of this, which means that all the people referred to just have to suffer. Car drivers continue to park illegally and Lewisham Council says one thing and does nothing.

On Honor Oak Park there are signs that specficailly advise drivers to park two wheels on the curb like this:

Makes the pavement really narrow, despite the road being quite wide and there being a bunch of driveways and car parks on the same road

What I am unclear of is why it seems very difficult for the council to move bins and cars parked on the pavement, but then very recently, very quick and easy for the council to close G&G, and force The Moustache to move their tables and chairs from the pavement. Do tables and chairs carry more of a risk than bins and cars? Why were the council so quick off the mark with the two local businesses, but so slow with bins and cars?
If I had to vote on what the councils time and money should be spent on, it would without doubt be on cars and bins, not tables and chairs… I agree that H&S absolutely has to be considered, and that rules ref licenses must be followed, but in the current climate, it seems OTT to close businesses down, specially when indoor trading will resume in 30 something days anyway.

We might need some fact-checking here, but I’m doubtful that’s what has actually happened. Most likely some businesses have been reminded they should not be using the pavement without a licence - and it’s then up to the business themselves if they want to trade as take-away only or not, noting G&G did not previously choose to open for take away.

That said, I don’t disagree on priorities and have commented elsewhere that there should be some grace and streamlining of such licensing.

Anyway, back to Thorpewood Avenue…

What about refining the ULEZ rules? Why does ULEZ charge based on vehicle age rather than emissions? It is a green light for people to go out and buy a EURO6 SUV. This could be more equitable, instead of people living on main roads breathing worse air.

Sorry I meant to post a general reply - not very practised with this message board!

Talking about the Thorpewood Avenue one way and school street poll, what do people think the meaning of life is?

42

Is that above or below Radlet Avenue?

Closer to World’s End.

This post was flagged and is temporarily hidden.

I think we need the Infinite Improbability Drive to restore normality.

As we approach the end of the term when the school street and one way system has been installed, is it a good time to take stock of the impact the changes have had?

Is the lack of complaints on here since the start of the school street because it is working fantastically well - with fewer cars on Thorpewood, a lack of gridlock by Holy Trinity or Kirkdale, and easier parking for residents all along Thorpewood. Or has traffic got worse on Kirkdale and Derby Hill and parking issues just been shifted elsewhere in the area?

If it has worked well then there are a few other streets where partial road closures may be beneficial, if it has had unintended consequences then it would be worth discussing them now - when we have evidence of how this scheme has impacted residents, and children and parents at both schools on Thorpewood Avenue.

Much worse on Kirkdale, with associated shouting swearing and hooting of horns. Eg a few days ago was was a typical example. Because vehicles park willy nilly on both sides of Kirkdale you can only pass one vehicle at a time. I was cutting flowers in my front garden when the commotion peaked. A female had parked on the "wrong"side of the road (ie against the direction she had been travelling), she returned to her car with a child then pulled back into the stream going uphill, regardless of the fact that traffic was already coming in the opposite direction. So there was a bit of a stand off, with her shouting “I can’t get through,” at the stream of vehicles that had right of way. She wouldn’t budge and the cars behind both front vehicles started honking their horns. So the downhill traffic all had to reverse until she had enough space to get by. Except she couldn’t. I could have driven through the gap no problem, but she couldn’t. More kerfuffle.

When that was sorted, we had no more than three minutes of several vehicles at a time proceeding in each direction before a boom box fan in a black Mercedes decided he was going to overtake the queue of waiting cars coming downhill. The language was enough to make the yobbiest of yobs blush … all in front of little children.

The fact that parents can just very easily park on neighbouring streets means the journey now takes only a couple of extra minutes walk than it did previously.
You’d have to make all streets within a radius of maybe a 20 minute walk within EB School pay display or no parking between school pick up hours for the LTN to serve its purpose in reducing the number of cars driving within close proximity of EB.
Residents are being punished, not the parents who drive their kids to the school! Why do so many parents drive to EB school when the catchment is so small?

To qualify for a school street the school is supposed to have an up to date Travel Plan. I wrote twice to Eliot Bank requesting a copy. They didn’t even have the courtesy to reply. I don’t think they enforce a catchment area.

A parent only needs to be living in the catchment area on a particular day for the child and all subsequent siblings to qualify.
This continues even after they have moved away even into another borough.
The whole system is absurd.
I think the objective of this scheme is another attempt to discourage car ownership.

I’m in favour of discouraging car ownership/usage and switching to healthier and greener modes of transport but I think this particular LTN has just shifted traffic to other streets. It’s noticeable at school collection hours, and more needs to be done to discourage kids being driven to school as parents in cars are a lot of the traffic problem.

Has the council done any tests on air pollution before and after? I suppose not but I bet you’d find Kelvin Grove and Holy Trinity, plus lots of homes in the neighbouring streets have much higher pollution as a consequence of this LTN. Was pollution an issue at EB school? It’s pretty far back from the road to begin with so I’d say it was already the least polluted school to begin with.

The school needs to play their part now and take a look at why so many children are driven there. Can’t they use public transport. In other boroughs you’d suggest biking in but I agree it’s not very safe in Lewisham due to unmanaged speeding and an absence of cycle lanes.

This money would have been better spent on a cycle Lane. I think Lewisham is the only borough without any, putting them maybe 15 years behind other boroughs. Not sure how they’ve got away with it really.

Yes I imagine they’d rather not reveal the % of children who are driven to EB! It’s clearly quite a few. And some very expensive cars as well…

Looking at Lewisham’s policies as a whole it is more pointed at discouraging car use rather than ownership.

Yes this implementation is causing chaos. Habits are unlikely to change overnight. The 20 mph limit didn’t have much effect immediately. But you can certainly feel the effect now some years later.

So Mary’s observations this afternoon shows doing it by car is now much more inconvenient and unpleasant. That will likely have an effect - eventually

Sadly, the location of the school on a hill makes cycling less attractive than in Dulwich. A shift to mummies (and a few daddies) delivering kids on bikes is now commonplace there.

Even if it worked in reducing parental car use at Eliot Bank - which I’ve seen no evidence that it does - it redirects all traffic (parental or resident) past Holy Trinity and Kelvin Grove schools. If I had a child at either of those schools, I’d be furious. And what about the children who live where the traffic is being decanted to?

And the Dulwich LTN hasn’t exactly gone smoothly, has it?

There is a school street near me. All that happens now is that parents stop just outside the school street and watch their children walk the rest of the way to the school.

I’m not sure fitness should be a reason for people to avoid the hills around EB as it’s possible to get up the hills on a bike it just takes a while. You can always walk the steep parts.
Safety is another matter with all roads being dangerous due to the gradient of the hills, the fact the hills end on the south circ, or Dartmouth road which is narrow and with lots of speeding problems, and because there are no cycle lanes.

Good points @NewtoSE. Initially the thought of cycling up Thorpewood on the old bike at the back of the garage that hasn’t been used in years may feel a little daunting. But as my Dulwich experience shows there is an easy solution if the alternative is a SUV.

There is now a growing number of a particular model of child carrying e-bike. A bit like a miniature ArcelorMittal Orbit on wheels. They cruise effortlessly up College Road. I guess its the new cool ‘must have’. It only works if a few set an example - but those of us who think the Dutch have cracked this know where it could end.

But, as I said earlier - it doesn’t happen overnight. It took them decades and only when combined with other measures to make people feel safe beyond the school street. It’s a long journey

But we shouldn’t get this mixed up with just cycling. Pedestrians may be the people who benefit most. Those that live within a mile who don’t currently walk may now find it more convenient and safer to walk combined with that little bit of extra exercise for parent and child and less pollution for the rest of us.

I live almost next door to Holy Trinity which seems to have the situation under control. They put cones along Dartmouth Road at arrival and departure time and engage with parents about their driving and parking. Perhaps as a church school they remember the injunction about thy neighbour.

I’ve only seen the Kirkdale situation once when passing through at school closing time. It looked quite fraught with parents parked on both sides of the road and ferrying children across. I think this is possibly a worse, and much more dangerous situation than before the introduction of the school street.

Hopefully, this is only temporary as eventually all vehicles in London will be electric.

Which is interesting - if this is about the pollution, why not allow electric cars on School Streets and help create incentives for people to upgrade cars if they aren’t going to walk \ cycle \ scoot \ whatever?

I must admit, I’ve been disappointed by the school street at a primary near me. On the first days it seemed great - parents and children took to the road, some cycling and scooting as depicted in the yellow signs that had been put up. It gave space to socially distance, and felt refreshing.

But the school has since repeatedly warned that children should not be in the road as cars may be present due to residents being allowed to drive there still. And then when there was a summer event I saw one angry resident in a car berate some parents for standing in the road (though there was plenty of space for the car to pass and I think the parents were just shepherding a queue of children from straying into danger )

Of course, there’s much increased traffic and disruption as parents pull up short of the school street and drop off their darlings a few tens of meters from the gates instead… navigating that lot by bike certainly isn’t great either.

So it doesn’t feel to me like much of a win for anyone but the residents who now have exclusive use of that road during pickup and drop-off times. I guess there’s slightly less car pollution right by the school gates, but those cars are just at the end of the road instead. In time it might be interesting to survey how children get to school to see if it has made much difference, but I suspect the majority of those that drive their children to school are doing so because they are coming from far enough away that stopping a few 10’s of meters away from the gates isn’t much of a consideration.

As a resident of the lower part of TA I can attest that the parking problem here has got worse. I now consider myself very lucky if I get to park outside my own house about once a fortnight! Of course, this isn’t all due to the school street as the problem has got markedly worse since “Freedom Day” when the commuters and pools users returned to our “Free Car Park”.

I’m not sure why it’s not permits and pay & display only being in such close proximity to a station.
These LTNs may have been effective if they were considered in the scope of the wider area.

I know the residents were there first BUT I think real consideration should be given to NOT allowing them the use of the highway during the school street hours, and probably to the use of physical barriers for safety sake. It’s for an hour or so twice a day and is scheduled so can be worked around. And for some schools, such as the one I think you are referring to, the stretch could 50 addresses or 80 addresses depending on where the area ends.

Again that would only displace the problem to other streets. It would only be fair to all Lewisham residents if parking permits were free and brought in borough wide, so that everyone could only park in the own street, with the exception of blue badge holders and carers. But then we’d become more of a dormitory Borough than ever, with people commuting out of Borough but not in.

And joy of joys, just to add to the chaos, the double decker buses are being diverted up Kirkdale this morning.

Would it not make people rethink their travel mode entirely, and use public transport, or a bike? Most people with school age kids must be under the age where driving is likely to be necessary for health reasons?

They’d have to stop parents driving their kids to EB school then, if they want to stop residents driving!!!

sorry, I don’t follow.

Well, if residents of the streets around EB aren’t allowed to drive during school drop off hours, why should parents be allowed to continue driving their kids to EB? Parents would be driving during school drop off, but not residents and that wouldn’t fair.

There are plenty of kids walking around the neighbouring streets to KG and HT schools, and so we don’t want EB parents driving on those routes, putting those kids at risk.

oh, they shouldn’t be. I think I was suggesting we consider school streets (in general) being closed to residents, parents and every Tom, Dick and Harry.

Yeah I agree. It’s just hard in this particular area to create something that doesn’t just move problems from one place to another.

I think this is the question - what is purpose of the scheme? I seem to remember these were brought in to free up space due to covid so people were not to crammed together outside schools.

However I think councillors like @LeoGibbons (please correct me if I am wrong) saw it (and LTNS) as an opportunity to use these as a tool to reduce travel by car, with what I assume was a perceived drop in pollution.

The schemes were introduced quickly without as much planning as you would hope for, but that will have been due to the timeframes.

So if we look at different elements:

1. Changing people’s mode of transport to work

Of course initially using public transport was discouraged due to Covid. Covid wise, cars were possibly seen by some as the safest option so this should probably be factored in.

Would people change to cycling to school? It seems unlikely and you would need to look at cycle routes from multiple points for most parents to feel comfortable cycling on the road, IMO.

People who could walk probably continued to, though I guess more people drive when it’s raining etc.

The real question is whether any analysis was done on whether these had any effect?

2. Pollution levels

These I guess would be hard to monitor as you would have had a drop, and then say now an increase as things opened up.

However one of my bug bears is this - we know the majority of children in the borough will be in school Mon-Fri 9-3. Many are on or near main roads. So for me forget these side street LTNS - these are the areas to target, divert traffic away from and plant greenery in front of.

The real question is whether any analysis was done on whether these had any effect on pollution?

I can understand why these things were brought in an tried in a hurry, but what is happening now, how are these being judged?

As mentioned above, change can take a while to come through, but you also need a well thought out plan.

I hope the council looks at the various schemes, works out what went well but also what didn’t and then proceeds accordingly.

Yes I’m not sure actually. Either way there wasn’t enough thought behind it.

Absolutely right and particularly galling when you live in the “another place” it’s been moved to.

Yes I know! I think EB school will have to come to the table with some sort of plan on how they intend to discourage car use because in this area pollution is very likely being concentrated on two other schools.

Holy Trinity children now have to contend with a less safe street and more pollution. The parking situation is more controlled mainly down to the caretaker who is part of the school community but also part of the local community. Holy Trinity is on Thorpewood Avenue but not part of the TA school street. The main school door is 2 metres from the footpath and classrooms are 5 metres from the road. The caretaker puts out about 10 cones everyday to safeguard the area directly outside the school which is on the narrowest part of Thorpewood Avenue and on the footpath on Dartmouth Road to stop parking on the pavement/across a driveway.

There is no real control on Thorpewood Avenue above the school, HT parents park across driveways and across the double yellows on the junction with Derby Hill Crescent. I think it is a reasonably balanced approach that for these 15 minutes either side of school the high risk areas mentioned are prioritised. It is not perfect.

It worked reasonably well until the School Street. Now the problem is that you have more traffic going through an effective single lane with cars parked on both sides including across driveways with therefore no passing places and cars turning round at the Derby Hill Crescent junction. This works if it is just HT parents but the problem occurs when the convoys of EB parents’ cars come rolling through early or late and gridlock appears or sensing apparent gridlock they speed up to try to get through or divert up DHC. The HT caretaker has been brilliant and has diffused major arguments/gridlock. It is definitely a worse and less safe situation than before the introduction of the school street.

I agree with BorderPaul about the Holy Trinity Premises Officer. He does a outstanding job. Without his efforts the situation would be much worse.

I think the answer is that after 6 months in relatively low traffic, the Thorpewood One way School Street has worked badly.

The most basic reason is that all children should be treated equally, we shouldn’t implement something that reduces pollution at one school and displaces pollution to the other school. We are pushing pollution from children in classrooms over 50 metres from the road to children in classrooms less than 5 metres from the road. You can use the arguments for and against, there are more children in EB, there are more children with less advantage in life in HT but we shouldn’t even have to go there.

The outcome for all kids are more dangerous roads especially where the EB traffic and parking has been displaced to Kirkdale and area below the school street. @davidwhiting @marymck

It is not proportionate, a school street should inconvenience local residents for 2 hours a day on school days. It is the school holidays now and local residents except for the chosen 50 residences will have to make a 1 km detour polluting all the residents along the way costing them time and money. My estimate is over 200 residents on the local roads are punished with extra mileage/cost while about 300 others get extra pollution for the sake of 50. 50/500 winners to losers, how has Leo picked the winners?

I would agree with most of the comments that it has been badly thought out though I don’t think you can fully blame EB @NewtoSE for the actions of the parents. There seems to be disagreement as to how consulted they were as many from EB have said they could have told the council the obvious result would be displacement. It is probably easier for them now as residents a few hundred metres away are less likely to complain than residents in front of the school.

So what next? I think our councillors have not been perceived as listening which can probably be blamed on Covid. I do think though they will be given the chance in September and October to listen and act. At the same time I think there will be a concerted effort amongst the FH500 and some community representatives who are concerned about this implementation of a School Street.

We live on Radlet Avenue. The changes have not really affected us at all. If we want to drive to Sydenham or beyond we have to go via Dartmouth Road rather than turning left into Thorpewood Avenue and then left into Kirkdale - takes hardly any more time. If we want to drive to Dulwich or beyond, we again go via Dartmouth Road and Kirkdale, rather than going up Thorpewood and turning directly into Kirkdale - an extra two minutes at the most. And we haven’t noticed any additional parking in Radlet Avenue.

It is good that is hasn’t affected you at all.

The impact of these journeys previously as you say was just up Thorpewood whereas now you go down Thorpewood past Holy Trinity School, turn on to Dartmouth and round Kirkdale past Kelvin Grove School.

Previously 50 residences and a school set back over 50 metres was affected, now about 300 residences and 2 schools, one 5 metres from the road are affected each time you make these journeys.

Do you think that it is a good idea that the people on the lower end of Thorpewood, Holy Trinity, Dartmouth Road, Kelvin Grove and Kirkdale get this extra pollution/traffic?

I wonder how much extra traffic there’s actually been. I don’t suppose it’s being monitored?

But, as you alluded to in a previous post, many re-routed car journeys, such as this one, divert the pollution away from the front gates of Elliot Bank straight into the lungs of the Holy Trinity children, who haven’t got the benefit of a 50 metre safety buffer.

There have been traffic census boxes on many roads around Forest Hill in the last weeks, so there maybe some data coming. However, given changes in traffic patterns due to Covid & homeworking etc… I think it is going to be hard to reason about what had caused any changes in the collected data.

Slightly aside, I wonder if the boxes can classify e-scooters yet?

‘Slightly’?

Definite deviation with signs of hesitation?

No traffic monitoring box has been placed outside Holy Trinity recently or before the current school street. There is no way to monitor the extra traffic except to say that locals as you have illustrated have been forced to drive past Holy Trinity generating more pollution since no before measurement.

The main question on this School Street seems to be:

Should we displace pollution from a school with kids in classrooms 50 metres from the road into the lungs of kids who sit in classrooms 5 metres from the road?

We haven’t heard any good answers regarding the School Street, wait and see traffic will go away, through traffic will disappear, locals will stop using their cars, local residents driving an extra 1km will reduce pollution, it will make the area safer for children, the biggest problem in the area is parents parking over driveways and it sends out the right signal.

Oh I’m not blaming EB parents, just that their children are now benefiting from less pollution, likely at the expense of the other schools.

It’s likely that some residents now live in an almost pollution free zone, while others have likely been doubled up with pollution from elsewhere.

I think EB could try to discourage car use by I don’t know asking parents use public transport once a week or something.

Also, the commonplace thread listing the aims of this school street doesn’t match up with system that’s in place!?

I actually don’t think EB children are experiencing less pollution. The classrooms and playground are such a distance from the road that any fall in pollution is likely to be just at the school gates and that benefit is likely to be outweighed by them having to join the Kelvin Grove children in running the gauntlet of the huge increase of standing traffic on Kirkdale. Traffic and parking problems will of course increase even further when the Mais House development goes ahead.

The only people who I can see benefitting are the school street residents, the staff, and the Council officers and members, who can tick a box but not experience first hand the ill effects.

It got a bit snarly down the bottom end this morning when I was walking up. Cars were trying to squeeze into gaps by people’s driveways and a bin lorry had to reverse back into DHC all because some idiot thought they could drive up from DR while traffic was coming down and was either too selfish or didn’t know how to back up again.

Look on the bright side, normally this would have affected the children in their classrooms 5 metres away from the idling traffic as well as the residents but now due to holidays, it is only making it worse for local residents.

You highlight some local information about this bottleneck where only single file traffic is able to pass, not known by this motorist or the council.

It gives school streets a bad name and goes against the mayoral agenda of “fighting the climate emergency and tackling social and racial inequalities” .

Not sure if this has any input into whether the scheme stays or goes, as not sure where the funding for this came from:

If evidence is needed, that will be hard to do as it doesn’t really appear much was collected before.

Surely the aim is longer term behavioural change. It displaces traffic in the short term but in time people stop making short journies.

The only way we are going to get cleaner air is by people making fewer car journies full stop.

It will also be hard to assess a success \ failure as there seems to be no clear and specific objective, or exact problem statement for each of these schemes.

Alternatively ensure that where cars are used, they are as clean as possible.

There is that and it is a good aim. However I would also like to see fewer motor vehicles on the road. We can all see the deadening effects a busy road has on Forest Hill centre.

A lot of short car journies simply do not need to be taken.

I’m unsure whether this particular LTN will actually discourage car use long or short term. The LTN is only a few metres long, and it’s not that difficult for drivers just to park elsewhere very close by.
I think it’ll only work if drivers are dislodged into eg a pay and display area that’s actually enforced, or if the LTN was large enough to mean that there’d be a walk of eg 20 mins tagged onto your journey.
This LTN just doesn’t do anything do discourage driving as I think it’s now just two minute extra walk or something.

I don’t know why the entire area isn’t pay and display + permits. In other boroughs streets this close to the station definitely would be.

Displacing traffic is not without consequence. Here we have a school with classrooms 5 metres from the road, have we asked these children if they are happy to take one for the greater good?

Would you volunteer your lungs if you had a window 5 metres from the road for extra pollution so that 2-3 years later behaviour might change?

I am totally in favour of School Streets but ones that actually reduce pollution not just displace traffic to a school that is nearer the road or causes more pollution by making people drive an extra km past 2 schools at all times.

@oakr, in the absence of evidence, perhaps we could use common sense.

Indeed the displacement is not without consequences. But the obvious solution lies in everyone driving less rather than some people’s lungs taking a hit more than other peoples. That is the solution to a lot of the woes experienced by drivers - parking, congestion etc… bit one it seems many are not willing to countenance.

I completely agree which is why this School Street is completely wrong, it causes people to drive 1km extra past 2 schools and hits some peoples lungs a lot harder, in this case kids in classrooms fronting the road. It doesn’t reduce or discourage journeys just makes them longer and more polluting.

Those people could - you know - not drive. That is a choice in the hands of drivers.

Why doesn’t making a journey longer discourage it?

Some years ago my neighbour’s sister used to call and take the children to the local primary school in her car. It was the same primary school I used to walk to every day (except one day when my grandfather wanted to show off his new car).
She then drove onto her job. The point is that whatever you do to the area round the school that car journey will still take place. I think a lot of the car journeys to school are made by parents on their way to work.

Living relatively central, it is quicker to walk than drive short journeys to local facilities such as Sainsburys and the station.

The only time I tend to drive is when I need to make a long journey or there is another need such as giving somebody who can’t walk that easily a lift where 2 buses and 3 walks is not really going to work. In these cases the pollution saving 1km detour although lengthening the journey proportionally won’t make the journey time that much longer.

I have already cut my journeys not because somebody has told me to but because I get Climate change. I think measures like this School Street which lengthen the journey for local residents at all times while increasing pollution for local kids do not win hearts and minds. They are completely counter productive and give School Streets a bad name

What difference will that make? The dangerous way parents were double parking when dropping off their children was the main issue? Electric cars make no difference

Do ‘those people’ include me, who has to go on the 1km detour past 3 schools when I have invested £65,000 in an electric Taxi? I saw the real issue regularly - all caused by parents with no regard for safety. The no entry on Thorpewood Avenue (out of school hours) is a complete joke. Traffic levels on Thorpewood never warranted such a thing.

The aims of school streets, LTN’s etc are laudable and the traffic solutions are obvious but they are currently unattainable because, in the real world, there are numerous reasons why the vast majority of people aren’t going to swap their car for walking or a bike or even a bus eg physical ability, hills, rain, part of a longer journey, convenience, comfort, load carrying, laziness etc.
Electric cars may become a solution but not until they are affordable and convenient. EV versions of existing cars cost far more than their petrol equivalent, their real world range is nothing like that claimed and, according to ?Which, the only car that will do the 300 miles or so to Cornwall without a lengthy recharge is a £50k plus Tesla that the majority of people can’t afford . On top of that over 60% of properties in London have no off street parking where they could install a costly home charger so would have to rely on the currently few public charging points available.
In my opinion, if the powers that be are serious about cleaning up our air they need to invest a lot of money in things like public transport, charging points in every lamppost, EV subsidies, battery technology, carbon capture and not just use sticks; we need carrots too.
And let’s face up to the fact that there are no short term solutions to the current pollution problems and until there are the Council should be implementing the least worst and the TA Half School Street isn’t it.

John,

In my time few believed Afrikaaners would peacefully cede control of South Africa to the majority, that Ian Paisley and Martin McGuiness would ever share a laugh let alone Stormount and smoking inside a restaurant or a pub would be history. But they all happened and quite quickly once the will was there. Specifically the Netherlands changed its major modus of short distance travel. That took an oil crisis but like many life changing exercises it transformed the old to the new normal.

It took less than a decade to change the majority of London homes from coal burning to gas and smokeless fuels and look what a difference that made to the living environment.

Hence I find your analysis rather too pessimistic and lacking that historical perspective. We can always find reasons not to change. But they don’t justify it. And when they depend on myths - is it not one’s duty to dispel them? I have an EV and can authoritatively say much of what you wrote about them is plain wrong.

This scheme or any other School or LTN is not going to change much overnight. Mistakes will be made but overall in time we can, we must, change our transport modes to reduce pollution and emissions if we are to breathe or keep the sea t’other side of the Thames Barrage.

Many of us, if not yet all, can change how we get about very quickly - seeing the benefits and using those to overcome problems. Please look on the bright side John!

Charging point installation in Lewisham does seem very disappointing. I was particularly disappointed that the Lewisham Homes Bampton Estate developments were preceded by that building of new parking spaces - none of which appear have EV charging.

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As you say, if the powers that be were serious about clean air, perhaps planning should refuse any new provision for parking without EV charging and Lewisham Homes could lead by example? And of course, new developments should also have cycle storage, and be built to high environmental standards. However, I guess this would all add costs to the developer, which would eventually be passed to tennant or buyers. So I’m not sure if this is carrot or stick!

Yes I agree @ForestHull. But the point about this issue is not EVs or even bicycles but Shank’s Pony. Most live within walking distance but not all walk. I do walk that route many times and the north side Dartmouth Road pavement coming from Kirkdale is truly appalling - viciously narrow fenced in by metal railings and cratered by tree roots. Impossible with a pram, difficult if you meet someone coming the other way - no social distancing conceivable.

That’s why we need to tackle the issues holistically. As John says carrots are better than sticks. But that works both ways. Making it nice to walk (or cycle) has to be part of the solution. Agitating for these rather than seeking to make motor vehicle drop offs easier would seem to be a better idea.

I used to walk my daughter from school a couple of decades ago when few delivered by car. So things have changed quite quickly one way - so they can be reversed if we have the will. Do we?

And the manufacture of so called smokeless fuels dumped poison on the Welsh valleys. Heavy electric vehicles aren’t Green either.

Mary,

I doubt anything is entirely green. But some stuff is much less green than others. It’s a case of moving in the right direction and learning the lessons of the past. [Perfect is the enemy of good]

Good that the new Highway Cade recognises the “hierarchy of the road”. It’s surely our turn to put it into action - directly or agitating our council to enact it. Don’t you agree?

Also don’t forget around half of Lewisham residents don’t own a car. So plenty of people in the borough are already managing ok on foot, by bike or using public transport.

Has this thread maybe got a little off-topic?

I’m not sure there has been comprehensive research locally as to why parents choose to drive kids to school (South London might be a bit of a bubble), or how far they go to drop kids (it’s interesting the Transport minister has called for ‘evidence’ before schemes are scrapped, but no such rigor was needed to make changes, but hey, politics), but I suspect society has changed significantly over the years, now with both parents commonly working and with longer commutes. Of course, you may have been ahead of your time

The closest research I found was this:

Still agreeing with you, but if it’s about time for parents and getting to work, roadblocks might not help persuade this group very much. Instead extending school hours with affordable or free wrap-around care may make a big difference so you can drop earlier and collect later. Schools are very incompatible with many forms of employment.

I doubt ‘both parents working’ has changed much. Then as now both parents had to work to afford a mortgage or even the rent. What has changed is the proliferation of second cars so the (usually) mother had to walk the kids to school whereas now the perceived cost of driving a mile to school is near zero. Also schools have expanded the age by which they insist kids are collected by an adult.

The latter is getting quite ridiculous. My 8 year old grandchild is not allowed to walk 50 yards to/from the school gate to her front door alone.

We need to reflect that the need for school streets at Thorpewood or elsewhere has, in part, been created by policies of offering ‘choice’ rather than a presumption ‘nearest school’ policy that increases the need for polluting travel and congestion by bus or car and diminishes the community aspect of any school.

School streets are a piecemeal solution that in the short term may displace some of the problems caused. But in the longer term combined with other measures may help take us back to a time when most kids could walk safely and pleasantly to school either alone or with a parent.

Surely it is a self defeating loop. If parents drive their children out of fear of pollution and traffic they are increasing the pollution and traffic that leads to that behaviour. It’s nuts.

Some of these parents’ attitudes need to be legislated against.
First of all, they’re scamming their children into schools and then they stick two fingers up at common decency and respect for anyone or anything.

That’s not just in this location, but, lamentably, in too many places.

Aside from that, whatever current reasoning or historical analogies might be mildly applicable here, this is about the health and well-being of the pupils of the schools at either end of Thorpewood Avenue and, unfortunately, due to a lack of proper thought in its planning/evaluation, the outcome of this scheme is very unequal for these two groups.

We can talk a lot about how we change behaviour but I think we need to first look at the simple inequality of this School Street. This doesn’t change behaviour, it just says one side is more equal than the other.

We know from our historical analogies that inequality should be tackled rather than left to fester. We should be questioning why children in classrooms 5 metres from the road deserve displaced pollution from a small section of road where children sit in classrooms 50 metres from the road.

We seem to have missed a great opportunity to do something in the Thorpewood, Dartmouth, Kirkdale triangle that could benefit 4 schools with over 2,000 pupils.

On the contrary Stuart, I’m very optimistic about the future (although at 74 much of it won’t involve me) I believe battery technology will move on apace, EV ranges will probably double quite quickly, the price will tumble as more people buy them and charging points become ubiquitous; heat exchangers will become more efficient and affordable; there is already a plant in Iceland that is capturing carbon from the atmosphere and turning it into stone; scientists can now harvest Lithium from seawater avoiding the environmentally damaging mining; there are airplanes propelled by electric turbines and no doubt much more I don’t know about which, once commercially viable will change so many things.
The fruition of these innovations though is probably a decade or two in the future and like your examples will happen quickly once the “building blocks” are in place, unfortunately though, that time is not now and point I was trying to make is that people are reluctant to change their habits if it inconveniences them or costs them money so our Council just shifting the existing, or even increased, pollution from outside EB to HT, the bottom of TA and Kirkdale is a very poor example being seen to “do something” without any thought to the consequences.

I remember when I was studying economics that the original biro sold for $50.
Prices have tumbled since then!

A street school at the other end of Thorpewood Avenue would have a negligible impact on the pollution levels at Holy Trinity. Most of the pollution is from Dartmouth Road. Not that this is a good thing, but the only way to tackle pollution at Holy Trinity is to move the school or reduce the polluting traffic on Dartmouth Road.

Has the pollution increased at Holy Trinity or Kelvin Grove? Probably, but negligably. And i don’t think we have heard on this thread from anybody who sends their children to Holy Trinity, the teachers or governors - with complaints about a noticeable increase in pollution.

One way the reduce driving to Eliot Bank would be to provide a pedestrian cut-through at Forestholme Close or Taymount Grange. It would also be sensible to put double yellow lines on one side of Kirkdale. It would be nice to see some ‘carrots’ and well as ‘sticks’.

I think it depends on your viewpoint, if you are sitting in a classroom 5 metres from Thorpewood Avenue then anything that stops traffic idling or congested because of traffic displacement is good and not negligible.

It has to be said that generally the schools have been pretty quiet. EB didn’t lobby for this, their main concern was for their staff that they were being confronted by residents asking them to control traffic and double parking, they weren’t consulted from what I know, they were just told it was happening. They haven’t come out and said that parental traffic has disappeared.

I do agree with you completely about the pedestrian cut-through and it is interesting to see that many houses now have a private gate onto Dead’s Man’s Alley or whatever it is officially known as to avail of a private shortcut.

I also agree that we probably need to do something on Kirkdale because of the displacement of traffic from the School Street to this border and perhaps double yellow lines on one side of Kirkdale is the answer but we should ask the people on Kirkdale what they think.

A green Thorpewood Dartmouth Kirkdale Triangle that harnessed the energy of the 2,000 kids who attend school here and the 500 residents might be a very compelling carrot rather than the current divisive stick that is only seen to benefit a few residents and have negligible impact for the kids 50 metres from the road. I hope they will all be consulted when this emergency measure is up for review.

It is good to hear that after relative silence on this for a long time that Leo has confirmed that the permanent road closure will expire early next year and that the Council are required to consult local residents to retain it.

I think there are many issues with the current scheme:
Holy Trinity children who sit in classrooms 5m from the road excluded from the school street
Permanent Closure upwards causing local residents to have to drive past 3 schools now instead of one causing more pollution and imposing a £100 tax on local residents in extra travelling costs
Safety issues for Eliot Bank kids on Kirkdale and disruption for residents with calls to have double yellow lines imposed
School Street promised, LTN with 24 hour closure delivered, questions raised about why there was so much unclear communication from the council under the guise of COVID

I think a School Street limited to School hours is a good idea but needs to take into account all local residents rather than primarily be about making sure parents don’t park over a limited number of driveways.

A simple improvement would be limit the 24hour closure to school street hours, it has been done on loads of other School Streets.

It is time to mend it. The council will lose the vote in any representative consultation as it is and Labour won’t be rewarded in local elections. Locals will remember an extra £100 tax, unfairness towards school children and being forced to pollute more by driving past 3 schools.

Seconded… almost. I believe all that happens with School Streets and LTNs is that problems are decanted elsewhere to possibly less influential, vocal and (ducks) wealthier areas (witness Bishopsthorpe). So I’d say only a School Street for Thorpewood with the proviso that it MUST be extended to include Kirkdale. Upper Kirkdale has been made increasingly dangerous and more polluted since the Eliot Bank exclusion zone. This is a main walking route for children from all three schools and more and we don’t even have a safe crossing point. Why aren’t Kelvin Grove school pupils and Kirkdale residents and pedestrians considered worthy of the same level of protection as Thorpewood Avenue residents and pupils?

Has anyone got a PCN for going down Thorpewood Avenue during the restricted times (or know of anyone who has)?

I got one from there but when I tried to make the payments it had already been cancelled

Cancelled? Living in the area for so long, and rarely coming home on weekdays at the restricted hours, I have inadvertently driven through once at 15:43. I thought that was too near the cut off time so had got away with it. Then I turned left at 15:00 and, when I saw the time, then reversed straight back and U turned out. I’ve received nothing. Strange. Or not enforceable for some reason?

I was also close to the cut off time so its possible that they subsequently gave me a few mins grace. I called Lewisham to confirm that the PCN has been cancelled but I wasn’t able to speak with anyone.

I think there are other safety issues that haven’t been put forward here. The closure of Thorpewood Ave as a through road isn’t all bad. Children from many schools walk up & down the lower end of Thorpewood Ave, this includes Holy Trinity, Kelvin Grove, Eliot Bank & Sydenham Girls schools. Thorpewood Ave has always been used as a cut through, often with speeding cars. Less traffic means less pollution to breath in & more safety for pedestrians. I have seen so many near misses with cars & pedestrians at the lower end of Thorpewood Ave. I have had two cars righten off parked outside my house by speeding cars. Thank goodness no nobody was injured as the cars ended up on the pavement. Much of the problems with school parking is the appalling driving of parents dropping off their children. I have witnessed some really dangerous driving on Kirkdale, recently a parent just drove her parked car straight into passing traffic with cars having to take emergency action to avoid collision. She then calmly set about doing a three point turn, she only needed to go a short distance to the roundabout to turn around safely. Policing Kirkdale would be more helpful & a few tickets & fines would hopefully deter this dangerous driving. Surely the main emphasis should be safety & reducing pollution for pedestrians. The change to making Thorpewood Ave a no through road has nothing to do with parking over driveways

Parking at the bottom and surrounding streets seems to have returned to the bad old days. Covid reduced traffic and parking but now it seems to be busier than normal perhaps due to the extra pressure of the the road closure at the top which most people allege rightly or wrongly was mainly to protect the driveways of those in the party and Covid/Schools was used to push it through after the schools concerned had taken their own measures to significantly improve social distancing.

@LeoGibbons before you leave as our local councillor are you going to clear up this up and do something for the majority not just the 50 residents you have chosen. Why do we deserve more pollution and a £100 yearly tax? Do the kids at Holy Trinity not deserve cleaner air? Do the residents of Kirkdale not deserve some consideration not just displacing the issue and making it worse?

I did see an interesting quote from you.

How come you set up a working group and then never consulted them about the solution you came up with or subsequently about how well the solution worked?
@SophieDavis , why would anybody have any future faith in getting involved in councillor led working groups if the members are dumped when the councillor has come to a decision without taking into the account the view of the majority?

I notice that most of the local wards have been able to hold local assembly meetings whereas Forest Hill seems to be unique in that they have been off air for more than 2 years. Even our neighbours in Sydenham managed to hold a few remote assemblies and have the mayor present (virtually). Why have our local councillors stopped these assemblies which have been used in the past for locals to question councillors on local issues?

Sorry to butt-in on a side issue but, although I’m not aware of the situation regarding local assembly meetings, as such, the councillors have been making themselves available to us every 2 weeks at 11am at the library, which I found very helpful and insightful when I managed to meet Leo and Peter on separate occasions. I didn’t know if you were aware of their open surgeries.

I have also noted that both Sophie and Leo often give their email out on this forum and other social media for people to contact them with specific issues.

The local assemblies are restarting with the next one for Forest Hill on January 29th.

The Perry Vale one is on January 24th.

@Anotherjohn I am sure you understand the difference between private meetings and public meetings or private communication and public communication. This shouldn’t be seen as a private issue to be decided in private.

I think one of the issues here was that there was a feeling this was decided/influenced by private meetings/communication rather than public ones such as the Assembly or Working group.

@starman It is good that you know the Assembly is restarting after 2 years, most of the public don’t, perhaps you could share the time and location.

Patronising!!!
We should meet face to face

Happy to meet face to face as long as we are socially distanced!

Sorry, if it came across that way, it wasn’t meant to be patronising. The sentence that followed was the point I was making.

I do think most locals see as Patronising that this decision was made in private without proper consultation, without engaging with locals especially those residents and schools adversely affected before or after the School Street which turned into a Road Closure was introduced.

Fair enough.
Thank you.
I know that I’m not the best at getting my meaning across in writing.
Unfortunately, I’m one of those who communicates best when I’m face to face with someone; and not even on Zoom.

Parking at lower end of Thorpewood Ave has increased, I don’t accept this is due to the no through road. From what I see everyday, most parking is from people living in other roads, these cars are often left for many days. Occupants leave their cars & disperse along Dartmouth Road. There has been a lot of housing built in the last few years with no provision for car parking. Parking has also increased from Forest Hill Pools since reopening, I think people are not using public transport as much due to covid.
I still fail to see that the closure of Thorpewood Ave has anything to do parking over driveways around Eliot Bank school at the top end of Thorpewood Ave. That is to do with the school street closure. Less speeding traffic up & down Thorpewood Ave can only be safer & less polluting for the residents & all pedestrians using this road. I will support a no through road on Thorpewood Ave for a safer & quieter road as we have now.

I knew by looking at the website earlier. I suggest you bookmark the link I gave you. I don’t live in Forest Hill ward so won’t be tracking it myself.

I think we can agree to disagree about the causes of the parking and whether the road closure confines it beneath those barriers/reduces it or makes no difference.

I do think school traffic now is more confined and concentrated. Most of the school/swimming pool traffic must now turn around at the junction of Derby Hill Crescent and Thorpewood. You just have to look at the right side going into DHC to see that the pavement is now level with the road in most places having been worn away by people using it as a roundabout, it only gets a rest during school pickup/dropoff when parents park on the junction.

I would be supportive of a no through road if it was in the other direction and at a pinch both directions but not as it is. We still get a lot of traffic coming down, a lot it is cabs/ubers and I have always believed most through traffic was down from Kirkdale and people rarely go up except local residents or the road being congested outside Holy Trinity.

I don’t believe the school street has worked, the oneway no-through road has been mixed but ask people their views in some form of consultation, come up with a list of options including the status quo, perhaps separate the school street and road closure options and let local residents vote and decide.

I am sure we will find out in the new year what kind of consultation we will have and I am going to leave the discussion till then.

We sometimes get three or four vehicles a day using our drive as a parking place for Eliot Bank school.
We might start playing pranks on the offending vehicles soon.

I should think this was how life used to be for the 50 or houses now inside the school street.

Can you block them in?

We might start videoing their responses. “I’m just picking my daughter up”, “I’ll only be five minutes”, “do you see anywhere else to park”, “if you need to use it (your private property) just say and I’ll move now (presumably to someone else’s property)”, “it’s raining”…

Eliot Bank could look into some sort system that eases pressure as unlike JK banquets there isn’t a massive car park nearby:
Surnames A-F drop off 8:00 -8:15
Surnames F-P drop off 8:15-8:30… ??

Or just enforce a walking distance catchment area for all except the disabled. And have a “how did I get to school and did my parents damage the environment getting me here?” type project. Name and shame the selfish parents.

If not, arrange a drop off in the car park at FH and then walk the children in from there. It’d be good for exercise which is also surely one of their targets.

People need to be aware that consultations only work if people bother to comment on them. The consultation for including the lower end of Thorpewood Ave into the Forest Hill Conservation Area, counted the households that didn’t reply were for the inclusion into the conservation area. I was told this by the person who produced the consultation document.
There has been some complaints about the present school street & no through road but where are the suggestions of how to improve safety for all road users.

Wasn’t the School Street thing about impoving air pollution - not road safety?
If road safety is the issue, then, for me, a big part of it is a societal problem with the ignorance and selfishness of a significant proportion of motorist parents.

Definitely it’s worth contributing to consultations, but beware that the results don’t appear to be binding in anyway:

I have tried to discover how decisions are made regarding traffic calming, road closures etc. and I feel I have met institutional obstruction and indifference. I’m not familiar enough with Thorpewood to comment, but many of us have been trying to get the traffic flows changed or at least monitored in other areas: Devonshire Road, Woodcombe Crescent, Ewelme road, Benson Road, Tyson Road, Westwood Park, Canonbie Road and others.

I have one suggestion that would reduce cars dropping children off at Eliot Bank and encourage more walking to school: build a pedestrian path between Taymount Rise and Shackleton Close.

Families in Forest Croft, Taymount Grange and Grassmount live very close to the school, but despite this proximity and catchment area, the walk is down and up the hill. For parents dropping off children this is four walks per day up or down the hill (total time approximately 1 hour), or 4 x 4 minute drives (total time approx 20 minutes) or 3.2 miles driving per day or 576 miles per year per family driving.

The current proposal for a new block of flats at the top of Taymount Rise provides the perfect opportunity for the shortest path connecting these two roads and providing a fast, safe, and low pollution connection for children walking to school.

If the development is to go ahead in some form, I hope that a new pedestrian route is something that will be supported by residents of Thorpewood Avenue, Derby Hill Crescent and Taymount Rise.

I think most residents here on Thorpewood/Derby and surrounding roads totally agree. It is not just school but social as well which tends to make people drive rather than walk.

There is a path which leads down between Derby Hill Crescent(Shackleton Close end) and Sainsburys which many people here use as a shortcut and it takes you completely away from traffic, low pollution connection in your words. This is used extensively by children coming up to Eliot Bank and people going down to Sainsburys.

This path passes Foreshholme Close and there is a wall between the path and Forestholme Close, if there was a gap in that wall, you would be able to join both areas and have a link at the cost of a slegehammer. I know when this was suggested at least a decade ago, there was resistance from the Close that it would change the character of that residential area but perhaps it is worth asking that question again especially now that we see the importance of reducing traffic which can if done carefully benefit us all.

Failing that wall coming down, a new pedestrian route as you say is a great suggestion.

On a side note, I think many boroughs in London use catchment area according to walking distance rather than Lewisham’s measured distance. Perhaps it is time to change this to encourage the creation of more efficient walking routes as it would add value to houses beside those routes.

Perhaps the Close would be happy if a locked gate was fixed and only opened at school opening and closing times.

I don’t live in that area but know people who were in Taymount and what a pain this up and down steep hills walk was to them. If you have to be ready to start work at a certain time then of course you are going to drive if you can.

We need far more of these cut throughs and other measures to encourage pedestrians rather than punitive measures such as road closes, cameras and LTNs. Or at least an approach that balances both.