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Had a lovely time in Rotterdam in the early 90's. Very peaceful housing estate with free bikes leant on trees in the middle of green pedestrian areas.
The problem with our current scheme is Wandsworth Bridge Road is under serious pressure. Maybe we have to be the first but obviously people who live on the road are starting to experience breathing issues etc. and we're all so nice round here we don't want to pile that suffering on our neighbours. However they are in a pincer movement and giving the west side an LTN does sounds like it will please a lot of people.
I've been adapting to less motor transport for many years. I work very locally and I have been drawn into the fight to show people that tradesmen could use electric cargo bikes etc. Or even as in my case work in the street they live in or streets very close.
There's quite a few people putting this perspective across but as others have said there's a lot of people who just want to drive where they want to.
Airhead-
If WBR is already chokka, would additional LTNs make it worse or exactly the same? I live on a main road and would love LTNs on the back streets round here, because I can't see them making air quality any worse than it is.
The real problem is too many bloody cars, and too many heavily polluting ones. Hopefully the ULEZ extension in less than a year's time will be the end of a lot of the worst of them.
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I'd like to understand this situation a bit more, as I used to commute that way. WBR has always been a bit borderline in terms of capacity. What additional traffic is now being pushed onto it? Is it just local school-run stuff? The main flow on WBR as far as I could work out was all the way through to the New King's Road (and then up to Fulham Broadway). There was never any other way to avoid that by rat-running, so what is the change in traffic flow that the LTN has caused that is making WBR busier?
grams
ffm
The only solution is more LTNs and incentivising a transition to mobility forms that mean less motor traffic.
If you try to 'create road space' for motorists, all you do is scare off the people who could cycle or use cargobikes etc, and they revert to driving. Further, Waze and Google Maps detect the 'empty' road space, and route increased volumes of motor traffic onto them.
We had this massive argument in the Netherlands in the 70s when communities closed the roads they lived on to people driving through them. That was the foundation of what the Netherlands has today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQk0O09gP4g