This morning's commute and other commuting stories

I used to come up wightman (from clissold park)

Do you mean Finsbury Park?

to take the left on to hornsey high st where I ~live but it feels so aggro and so narrow for 2 way traffic.

Yes, it is obviously not designed to be the effective by-pass for Green Lanes, the busy, multi-functional high street which should really be the only through motor traffic route in the area. (It wouldn't get more congested if it were, overall through motor traffic in the area would just go down a lot.)

Oliver’s knowledge of London road layouts never ceases to amaze.

*bows* It's really just area-wide traffic management, which anyone can understand by looking a map and a bit of StreetView or checking in person where the banned turns etc. are. My interest is mainly in what happens when you make rat-running impossible rather than just slightly more difficult, which used to be the default approach and which can be seen all over this area. It was nonsense even when people didn't all have satellite navigation devices and is obviously now completely absurd.

A very large proportion of the problems caused by through motor traffic are related to rat-running, e.g. side street junction crashes, the vast majority of which are caused by drivers making injudicious turning manoeuvres in their attempt to shave a few seconds off the time it takes them to drive through a residential area between main streets.

I just heard from someone I know tonight that she was knocked off in a hit-and-run last year by a rat-runner turning right across her into a not-quite-filtered street (a point-no-entry plus banned turn at the bottom, but no consistent filtering and a couple of well-worn rat-running routes through the area). Typical scenario, she suffered a broken collarbone and a frozen shoulder, which apparently won't heal completely, she did everything right, got the number plate, got legal representation, the registered driver refused to name the person who was driving, and that was apparently the end of that--she didn't know why it wasn't pursued further.

The more areas that rat-running can be cut out of, the better. Those few drivers who need to access and deliver and things like that aren't so much of a problem. It's people recklessly speeding through who cause most of the crashes.