Centralised discussion space for TfL plans and cycling in London

I wonder if area 2 is so large because of the cemetery and housing estate in the middle? There isn't a lot of through access in that area anyway so maybe making it smaller would have cut certain roads off?

The reason seems mainly because they don't want to make Odessa Road a cell boundary street. I know why--it doesn't have suitable characteristics, but I do think two smaller cells (which would still be quite large) would be better.

Has there been much success at getting one way streets changed back to two way? From what I've read on the local feedback map is that, if anything, there seems to be an appetite for more one way streets. I guess people must assume it's safer as they only have to worry about traffic from one direction?

Yes, as it's the most important network characteristic that benefits cycling, we emphasised it in Hackney. The biggest triumph was having the Shoreditch one-way system (largely) returned to two-way. It's still not complete, but the simple fact that people coming down Hackney Road no longer had to turn left to go down a long detour of a four-lane one-way Shoreditch High Street but could carry straight on into Old Street caused a huge increase in cycling.

As I said, filtering is largely worth pursuing for the two factors that it makes it possible to return streets to two-way and because it reduces main street turning crashes.

Would you say implementing this scheme is worse than leaving things as they are? Obviously you wouldn't look to start a bad scheme but as there is a 6-18 month trial period with feedback after 6, is it a good thing that this is starting and can hopefully be improved on in the future? Or are you of the opinion that it's so bad it'll fail and be scrapped?

No, it wouldn't be worse than it is now. Still, there's no point in getting filtering wrong, as once it's done it probably won't be touched again for decades. I don't think that it'll be scrapped even if the features I criticise are implemented, but it won't be as good as it can be. The key is to try to get the supporting residents to understand the above and get the officers to change the scheme. I'm not saying that they should leave Odessa Road as a boundary--as I said, it really doesn't have the right characteristics to be one, but it's worth looking at. In principle, it's good to filter as large an area as can be filtered, but there is that difficulty that you may later find driver behaviour leaves something to be desired because of the long distances they have to cover inside the cell.