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Im sick of Nat Express buses using the Olympic “Park” as a rat run. I’ve emailed and written to the park twice about it now and they won’t ban traffic.
At the very least change the phasing of them lights to give peds and cyclists more time to cross the road.
Why promote the Olympic Park as somewhere to get active then have a road running right through the middle?
Shandoom-
The phasing of the lights is definitely a problem. At the crossing by here east all the drivers do is see the green light up ahead, put their footdown, think fuck the crossing and it's only really by luck rather than anything else that there hadn't been an accident there before now.
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Why promote the Olympic Park as somewhere to get active then have a road running right through the middle?
I assume you mean the 'new' Waterden Road? This is roughly on the alignment of the old Waterden Road, which was the main north-south street through the area. It was intended partly as a post-Olympic replacement for that (during the Olympics, it was, of course, part of the large concourse between venues), and was also the unfortunate result of lobbying by Westfield to gain a more-or-less-direct access street from the motorway to their development there. It was originally meant as a two-lane dual carriageway all the way from the A12 to 'Stratford City' (much as it is now in Newham), but Hackney forced them to make it a single carriageway inside Hackney. This is very beneficial, and Hackney tried to get Newham to follow suit at the time, but it didn't. I'm not surprised at all that it's also used by National Express now.
Much of the shape of the area still bears traces of the completely outdated development orthodoxy that informed various stages of Lower Lea Valley plans before Livingstone hit on the Olympics wheeze. Unfortunately, once all this was shackled to the Olympics juggernaut, there was nothing any campaigner could do about it any more. There was an uneasy marriage between the Lower Lea Valley Masterplan, which pre-dated any conception of Stratford City and the Olympics, the Stratford City plan, and the Olympics plan, which was then wedged into the existing ideas and was mainly responsible for the total mess the area is now in.
Don't know if that goes any way towards explaining why the area is a bit rubbish like that, but there you go.
princeperch
Oliver Schick
I hope you get a reply. I haven't heard a peep out of my naughty bus company nor has the CEO replied to my message on linkedin.