If you think traffic has increased on local roads this year, you’d be right. That’s because, since June, traffic has been diverted off Finchley Road by the removal of a lane and erection of blue barriers outside the O2 Centre and Finchley Road station: creating a bottleneck. The Ham and High reported on the chaos. You can read it here.
We’ve spent months asking Transport for London and Camden Council to remove this bottleneck, and want your support for this. You can express this — or, indeed disagree and tell us why! — via a survey we’ve launched at www.camden.team/FinchleyRoadTraffic
The bottleneck has been created to widen the pavement, but the extra pedestrian space has rarely been used except to stack up rubbish or by Deliveroo riders parking their bikes. That’s unsurprising, since that stretch has one of the widest pavements in north London. It has, however, caused:
■Major congestion due to the removal of a third of the road’s capacity
■Increased journey times due to the gridlock, which also jeopardises the viability of bus routes due to bus punctuality being reduced
■Rat-running on residential roads as people try to find a way around the bottleneck through South Hampstead
■Greatly elevated air pollution due to engines continuing to idle in traffic and people rat-running to avoid it
This has been criticised by apolitical residents’ groups on both sides of Finchley Road. However, Camden and TfL have not acted on their wishes to end the traffic chaos.
TfL won’t remove the bottleneck until Camden Council ask for the bottleneck to go. Yet Camden’s Labour Cabinet member for transport has repeatedly opposed removing it, despite us asking several times.
We want your help to pressure Camden and TfL. You can do this in two
minutes by filling out our survey visiting www.camden.team/FinchleyRoadTraffic
