Ditch Bus Lanes, Cycle Lanes and Road Humps ? Barnet Council is !!!
Road humps, bus and cycle lanes are being axed in the rebel borough of Barnet where drivers are even being allowed to park on the pavement.
Brian Coleman the Council official who has led the changes as Barnet's executive member for the environment, is facing a furious backlash from the Mayor of London in tandem
with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (Rospa). Mayor
Livingstone fears that the U turn in the Conservative-controlled borough will spread through the
capital and ruin his policy of edging motorists out of their cars and on to buses.
The neighbouring borough of Enfield has already started following Barnet by removing
humps while the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is removing bus lanes.
The Mayor has accused Mr Coleman of endangering children's lives by cutting funding for
cycle proficiency schemes and wrecking measures aimed at reducing traffic speed. He has instructed officials at ‘Transport for London’ to put pressure on the Barnet
council by blocking the £8 million that it gives to the borough each year.
Mr Livingstone has even provided an article to the local newspaper denouncing Mr Coleman. He
wrote: "The transport agenda being driven through in Barnet is recklessly anti-public transport, anti-pedestrian and anti-cycling. Barnet has become a laboratory experiment
for some very ill thought-out policies that, in the case of cycling training for kids, must surely be dangerous.
Councillor Coleman and Barnet should urgently go back to
the drawing board." Rospa has produced a special report condemning Mr Coleman's revolutionary scheme at a notorious bottleneck on Finchley Road at Temple Fortune.
The report says that the scheme, which involves removing humps and narrowing the pavement to create extra lanes for traffic, will result in a "major safety disbenefit"
and should be scrapped. Mr Coleman insists that the scheme is supported by most residents, who are fed up with having to queue on the road. "My whole approach is to get
traffic moving on the borough's principal roads and then no one rat-runs down the side streets," he said. "The traffic engineers who promote road humps are like the
local-authority architects of the 1960s who thought high-rise flats were the answer to our housing problems."
Mr Coleman admits he has cut spending on cycling
proficiency, but says: "How could I justify £20,000 on cycle training when we have had to shut two libraries and an old people's day centre?"
