Sam Kelly, Kersley Road, writes to Hackney Council:
I am writing to you in order to express my concerns on your plan to remove our resident parking places and use our streets to funnel additional traffic due to the LTN implementation focused on Stoke Newington Church Street.
Our concerns started when some parking suspension notices were placed on the poles of Kersley Road.
On the parking suspension it is mentioned that the temporary restriction will last from September 19-24 and the reason provided is that it is for highway maintenance. This would imply that after September 24 things should go back to normal and parking bays would be back in use. However, after investigation it turns out that you are putting double yellow lines in those places instead. This is deceptive and we do not feel that these major changes to our neighbourhood have been specifically highlighted or consulted upon with residents.
Kersley Road (as well as Kynaston and Defoe Roads) is a quiet and safe residential street where children are often present.
The permanent removal of bays reduces parking for residents, who pay for resident permits, in an area where parking is already limited. It also implies that more traffic and therefore pollution is expected on these roads. Indeed the only way to now access this residential area south of Church Street for both residents and commercial vehicles is now limited to a few roads as other routes previously used by residents (eg Via Albion/Barbauld) have now been blocked.
We fully understand the need to reduce pollution, however your actual plans just divert the traffic elsewhere creating more problems for some residential streets but also already busy streets such as Manor Road and Stoke Newington High Street.
This plan should have been discussed openly and transparently with residents – we are not even properly equipped with charging poles for electric cars should we wish to switch and we could have helped propose better traffic management to find a common ground for everyone.
We want to:
- Preserve all our residential roads’ safety and keep pollution at a minimum (not increase in some streets)
- Have freedom of movement for residents
- Discuss more incentive to switch to alternative options such as electric cars and provide sufficient charging stations
- Reinstate parking bays and at the very minimum make the parking bays resident permit only 24/7
- Understand how you will measure success of this 18 month trial and how traffic on the “escape route” roads will be monitored.
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