In their wisdom, our Council have proposed introducing bike lanes – at great expense and with virtually no preliminary consultation – in a street* that doesn’t need and has no room for them.
Were the plan to go ahead, this non-arterial, non-shopping street, with its mostly pedestrian traffic, would not only lose its traffic islands (of inestimable value to the old and disabled) but there would be a stretch of road where cyclists and pedestrians would be SHARING THE PAVEMENT!
How did the Council come up with this preposterous plan?
To pretend, as they do, that this scheme would save lives is nonsense. I was a cyclist myself for thirty years. Cyclists are generally young and always fit. The pedestrian traffic, on the other hand, consists mostly of pram-pushing mothers, often with a toddler in tow, or old ladies (like me) heading for the High Street with their shopping trolleys.
These are not people who can take in two streams of traffic at a glance or jump out of the way of a speeding cyclist.
One can only hope that the proposal bites the dust, as did a previous Council scheme, in the early seventies, to build a pedestrian bridge across this same road when there was nothing but an area of waste ground on one side of it.
The outcry at that time has saved generations since from having to climb up and down circular concrete ramps in order to cross from one side to the other. The zebra crossing we got instead is all we ever needed.
If only Camden Council would spend the money they collect from driving high-street shops out of business on the homeless, whose lives really are at risk, instead of on a handful of cyclists.
* Prince of Wales Road, Kentish Town West, London NW5
