Modal filtering

There's a modal filter near me in E10, part of the Francis Road project, which is right outside a secondary school.

Every day at school pickup and drop off time, it is rammed with parents dropping their sons off or picking them up.

There is less through traffic, but it has turned the road into a mini car park.

I'll try and get some photos tomorrow if anyone is interested.

I take it you're referring to Norlington Road and and Norlington School? That's definitely not a very good scheme. It seems rather isolated. Many streets around there, e.g. Claude Road, Murchison Road, and Albert Road, are still one-way (one of the main things that proper filtering must enable is to return local streets to two-way and to get rid of those (mostly one-way) loops that former generations of engineers created), and on StreetView you can see a traffic island with its plastic illuminated bollards shaved off in Norlington Road (south), which indicates speeding and.or badly-managed conflict. I haven't been in that specific area for a long time, but again, filtering needs to be done by area, not by trying to address problem spots.

I actually saw a similar problem just recently outside Uphall Primary School in South Ilford/Loxford. There's a kind of turning hammerhead at the end of Wingate Road created by very poor filtering that as usual isn't area-wide. I rode past just before chucking-out time and watched in fascination as six or seven drivers turned up to pick up their kids from school and tried to somehow share this area in a really elaborate elephants' ballet.

With schools, what people have found is that you have to define a kind of wider exclusion zone. It can be time-limited to school run times. I think this works quite well at Gayhurst School in London Fields, which is one example I know. 'School streets' are no substitute for good filtering, but I think they're better than an isolated filter like the one at Norlington School. There are still one-way loops that people can drive along to access the school and those need to be got rid of in the same go.

There are loads of scooters and mopeds who bomb it through, this is a personal pet peeve of mine and I'm not too sure why

Quite understandably, as it undermines the purpose of filtering. I don't know if it's now possible to include powered two-wheelers in ANPR, but famously this was still impossible when Congestion Charging was introduced in 2003, leading to some guff about how two-wheelers generally helped with congestion. Until it is possible to fine people for driving PTWs through filters, this will continue, unfortunately--the only thing that could stop them would be the towpath-style gates designed to exclude them. These we don't want to see, as they're a pain to navigate for cyclists, and unless the footways were fitted with them, too, which isn't possible, all two-wheelers would just go along the footway, anyway. This is an unresolved problem, unfortunately.