Surgery this week for Rosendale and Turney Road residents

This week we organised a surgery for residents on Rosendale
and Turney Roads, who will be directly affected by the Quietway going past
their homes – it was an opportunity for those residents to have a one-to-one
discussion with the scheme designers to work through any potential issues with
access to their homes or driveways once junctions are redesigned or speed bumps
put in. Designers will use residents’ feedback and local knowledge to ensure
the scheme doesn’t inadvertently cause issues for individual residents. Anyone who couldn’t attend, we have offered to visit individually – do let us know if you would like us to come and meet with you.

This surgery follows a number of meetings that we convened over
the summer between designers and stakeholder groups like the Rosendale
Allotments and the businesses on Rosendale Road to revisit designs and make
sure their concerns are taken on board. We have also doorknocked residents and
had individual meetings with anyone who wanted to discuss the plans but has
been unable to attend meetings.

The feedback from these meetings is being used by the
designers to revisit plans and draw up suggested changes to the design which
take on board local residents’ and stakeholders’ input.

Full public consultation in September

These new designs will come to full public consultation –
which will be four weeks of on- and offline opportunities to see plans,
comment, and speak with officers and councillors throughout September. We will
organise public exhibitions in Thurlow Park ward and Gipsy Hill ward, and will
circulate plans by email and on the Lambeth website.

This work to involve the local community follows our “call-in”
to the designs which went to a decision in June – we didn’t feel these designs
accurately incorporated local feedback and asked the cabinet member to withdraw
the decision to enable us to get the designers and residents round the table to
revisit sections where the designs weren’t good enough. We were also concerned that cycling groups didn’t support the designs either. 

We have consistently,
for the last two years, championed the importance of involving local residents –
from the start, we challenged a road closure that hadn’t been consulted on and
got it taken off the table. Over the last two years, we have organised many
public meetings, design workshops, stakeholder meetings with businesses and
other groups of residents, doorknocking, online surveys, public exhibitions and
walkabouts.

Changes we have secured to the design

So far, we have ensured that parking is retained by Turney School, and that the changes to the Turney Road/ Rosendale Road junction meet the
access needs of the allotments. 

We continue to be unhappy about the proposal to
make Rosendale Road a through road at the junction with Parkhall, which would
involve removing the existing roundabout. We believe that this will encourage
traffic to speed up and will cause queues on Parkhall, without delivering the safety benefits that cyclists need – this is being
re-examined by designers who will come back to us with some new ideas. 

The
designers are also looking at adjusting the location of the proposed zebra crossing
by Scotch Meats so that we retain shopping parking spaces, following our meeting with businesses.

Investment to tackle speeding we are pleased about

However, the scheme isn’t all bad. We have shifted the focus
of the officers from just a cycling route to a scheme which delivers wider improvements for
everyone, with a much greater focus on walking, reducing speeding and air
quality than was possible when Boris was Mayor. 

The investment in Rosendale
Road is a unique opportunity to make sure we do get some changes made that
residents have asked us for – new zebra crossings, putting in a lot more cycling parking, getting rid of the useless “cushion”
speed humps we have now which encourage cars to swerve and speed and replacing
them with gentler humps which go across the full width of the road, more
planting and trees put in, and raised informal crossings on the side roads so
that cars must slow down instead of swerving round corners. 

As cyclists and pedestrians ourselves, we think that reducing average speed and preventing excessive speeding will have the greatest positive impact on Rosendale Road in terms of it being and feeling safer to travel along. We’re pleased that we will be able to invest in cycle parking and greening, and to work with businesses to improve the area outside their shops further. 

And while we’re happy to see these improvements on the table, we will continue to champion residents’ and businesses’ concerns about all the other
issues raised such as shopping parking and the Parkhall roundabout. We are also
keen to work with residents who live on the side roads, who experience high
levels of ratrunning traffic, to secure additional investment to help them to
reduce speeding on their roads too.