Welcoming our new contributor Tim Lennon. He is the local coordinator for London Cycling Campaign, and is a campaigner for active travel (more and better walking and cycling). His first post is about transport concerns around the The Mortlake Brewery development.

This is what cycling could be like in our area (Photo credit: The Alternative DfT via Twitter)

The Mortlake Brewery development is a fabulous opportunity for the area. But as with all developments, there are concerns.

I’m concerned about transport.

At present our area experiences a lot of traffic, and the modelling done by Peter Brett, the developer’s transport consultants, shows that there will be more traffic as a result of the development. Plans also show that there won’t be car parking on site for all of the units being sold, suggesting that – on present form – residents will need to find parking on neighbouring roads.

But I don’t think it needs to be like that. I think the Brewery is an opportunity for our council to tackle this problem head on. The transport specialist in the local group looking at the Brewery talks about ‘active travel’, and I think he’s right. Not only should we be making sure that the new site is a major centre of active travel, but we need to revitalise our area with active travel.

That means some changes which might initially have quite an impact. First of all, we should fix Chalker’s Corner for walking and cycling – like this. This design has proper cycling on all arms, better (and shorter) pedestrian crossings on all arms, and bans some turns, to have traffic move more smoothly through.

Then, we close the Sheen Lane and White Hart Lane crossings to non-local motor traffic. This could be done a variety of ways, but the key is to prevent them being used for rat-running to the South Circular. Doing this makes these crossings significantly safer for walking and cycling: we prioritise walking and cycling because that’s what we want to see more of.

Thirdly, we re-focus residential roads for, well, residentialling. This can mean all sorts of things, but one of the big things it means is that no-one should be driving down our residential streets unless they live there, or are visiting someone there. The Dutch call this ‘unbundling’ – they make sure every street has a primary purpose, and it is designed to that purpose. This is actually becoming much more important, because the increased use of traffic aware sat navs and apps like Waze means that every road is a potential highway for someone trying to avoid traffic queues.

Finally, the whole area needs to become better for walking and cycling, so everyone sees these as real options for getting around, doing the shopping, dropping children, off, going to school, etc. As an example, Lower Richmond Road should have a dedicated, segregated cycle lane along its entire length, to make it easy to cycle from the Brewery all the way to Richmond.  

Photo credit: The AlternativeDfT