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Walworth Streetspace - Public Meeting on 21 October 2020
Southwark Council is holding two meetings on Wednesday, 21 October 2020 (one at lunchtime and one in the evening to give more people an opportunity to attend). We want to hear from local residents about the benefits and issues with the trial Streetspace measures that have been installed in Walworth.
Register by clicking the link at the bottom on this news item.Don't worry if you can't make this date - we are planning to run similar sessions over the next year, and there will be a full public consultation later next year before any measures are made permanent.
PLEASE REGISTER FOR HERE: https://tinyurl.com/yyoyvymoTell your neighbours! Please share this News item by clicking on the social media sharing buttons below
Experimental travel measures as a response to Covid-19
Southwark is committed to quickly rolling out schemes to make travel safe and healthy as lockdown eases. This is in coordination with TfL's Streetspace for London programme.
Walworth has been identified as a priority, as it receives a very high volume of through traffic and also has a high concentration of residents who may be vulnerable to Covid-19. To help ensure the safety and health of all road users and residents in this difficult time, we have reviewed the measures informed by the earlier consultation for the Walworth Low Emission Neighbourhood - 'Our Healthy Walworth' - and identified the ones that will increase pedestrian space for social distancing and encourage active travel.
We have set up a new Commonplace map for people to tell us about the impact of these changes on the streets where you live and travel. This will be live for comments once the measures are installed - this should be in late June/early July. For full details and to register your interest go to Walworth Streetspace
Our Healthy Walworth closing 31st December – Last few days to have your say
Over 1300 people have now visited our online map , and we’ve had many hundreds of comments from local residents about the roads in Walworth. Lots of you have expressed concerns about the volume of traffic and the air quality in the Walworth area – in future phases we’ll be looking at some of the radical steps we can take to address these issues.
But what do you think?
We need to know street-by-street what the issues are. We know this is a busy time for everyone, but please take a few moments to look at our online map and give us your thoughts – and pass it on to your friends and neighbours using the links below. Encourage them to sign up to the mailing list too, so that they get to hear about the next phase, coming in 2020.
Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Our Healthy Walworth. Over 1200 Visitors… 600 suggestions… have we heard from you?
We’re in the last few weeks of the Our Healthy Walworth online map and survey . Still plenty of time to get involved and have your say, as hundreds of your neighbours have already.
Many people have been telling us that improving air quality is a priority. To do that will probably involve changes to roads to reduce the volume of traffic and make the area less inviting for drivers taking short cuts – this could mean road closures, banned turns or ‘school streets’ – timed closures at morning and afternoon peaks. Are there opportunities to make these changes benefit local businesses and create a more attractive neighbourhood for everyone?
We’ve received a huge variety of comments. Take a look at the map and see what people have been saying on your street. Below are some examples:
Brandon Street: "Too much rat running along Portland Street/Brandon Street""There is too much rat running along Brandon Street/Portland Street. It makes the area dangerous and difficult to cross the road. We need less traffic."Browning Street: "Traffic, pollution, air quality, poor narrow pavements""Browning Street is horrible and probably one of the worst streets in the areas - constant through traffic with high polluting and noisy vehicles, really bad air quality, poor quality narrow pavements, dirty with lots of garbage/litter. Makes it really unpleasant to walk down, and makes me feel concerned for my health."Larcom Street: "Cars idling outside primary school""Parents who drop their kids off by car should turn their engines off while they're waiting - keeping the engine idling is very bad for the air quality right outside a school."Sturgeon Road: "The area outside the school""Some parents drop their kids at school by car on Penrose Street and Sturgeon Road. The unpredictable vehicle movements are unpleasant for other road users, pedestrians and cyclists, because the kerb pull-ins and U-turns are confusing. It is unnecessary for anyone to drop their children off by car unless disabled. It is difficult for me to navigate through the traffic in this area by bike in the morning, so I have changed my cycle route to work."John Ruskin Street: "Too much through traffic""John Ruskin Street is really dangerous. The cars go incredibly fast. It's really bad trying to cross the road and you'd have to be pretty brave to cycle."Please share this with all your friends and neighbours (you can use the buttons below) – it really makes a difference the more people we hear from, and we can only make the positive changes Walworth needs if we hear from people what they want.
We want to change Walworth for the better, but we need your help to do it right.
We’ve been out and about all over Walworth and spoken to hundreds of local people about Our Healthy Walworth – the plan to design a Low Emission Neighbourhood for the Walworth Road area. Walworth has high rates of asthma and childhood obesity, and roads dominated by cars – most of them coming from outside the area - make these problems much worse.
We think there are ways to make our streets healthier – such as traffic-free zones outside schools, banned turns to prevent through traffic, and even road closures to turn parts of the neighbourhood into healthy public spaces . But we want to hear your priorities to help us get this right.
Over 1000 of you have already contributed to our online map , but that means thousands more have yet to speak up. There’s still plenty of time to have your say – Phase 1 closes on 31st December.
One of the questions that we’ve been asking, both online and when we meet people, is that you rank your priorities for improving the streets and roads around Walworth. Below shows the current rankings, with the first three priorities well out in the lead. Do you agree?
1. Tackling air quality
2. Reducing through traffic
3. Encouraging people to walk/cycle more
4. Reducing traffic accident hot-spots
5. Improving bus journey times
6. Making the area attractive for shopping and leisure
This is a real opportunity to help us to come up with plans for Walworth that will have long term benefits for the health, safety and community wellbeing of local people. In future phases we will be using all the suggestions we have received and working with residents and local businesses to develop practical proposals for the area.
Make sure your friends, neighbours and colleagues are part of the conversation too – share this news using the buttons below.
Come and meet the team!
Over 900 of you have now visited the ‘Our Healthy Walworth’ Commonplace map, and we have hundreds of comments and ideas about ways we can address issues such as through traffic, air quality and road safety. There’s still plenty of time to add your comments and see what other people are saying – the map will be open until the end of December.
If you’d like to meet the team from Highways and discuss your ideas face-to-face, there’ll be a couple of opportunities in the next week.
As well as these events, we have been dropping in to local schools to speak to students, teachers and parents, we’ll be running drop-ins at some GP surgeries, and we’re visiting local businesses to get their views on the issues.
If you have an idea for a community group, organisation or location in the Walworth area where people might like to speak with us, let us know at highways@southwark.gov.uk .
Also, if you know people who might struggle with the online questions, we have paper forms available – in both English and Spanish – so get in touch via the email above.
Once again, please encourage everyone you know locally to have their say, using the Twitter and Facebook buttons below or good old word of mouth. The more people we hear from, the better idea we have of what the issues are and what we can do to address them.
Your top concerns... so far!
Over 750 of you have visited the Our Healthy Walworth Commonplace website and we are starting to form a picture of the issues that are of greatest concern. In the survey we included six issues that our previous research identified as being critical to quality of life in the Walworth area. Here is how you have ranked them so far:
1st: Reducing through traffic
2nd: Tackling air quality
3rd: Encouraging people to walk/cycle more
4th: Reducing traffic accident hot-spots
5th: Making the area attractive for shopping and leisure
6th: Improving bus journey times
This tells us that the daily impact of traffic volumes is a major concern for local people - there is a direct link between improving air quality (2nd ranked priority), encouraging walking and cycling (3rd ranked priority) and reducing through traffic (top priority). Quite simply, one is a key to the others.
We know that this matches the air pollution levels we have found on the ground. The UK air quality target for nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant linked to life threatening lung problems, is 40 micrograms per cubic metre (ug/m3). Measurements for 2018 showed many locations in Elephant and Castle and Walworth are regularly over this recommended limit:
· Notre Dame School – Annual Mean NO2 (ug/m3): 40.59
· New Kent Road – Annual Mean NO2 (ug/m3): 43.91
· New Kent Road, near Rodney Place – Annual Mean NO2 (ug/m3): 54.22
· Walworth Road opposite junction to Elephant Road – Annual Mean NO2 (ug/m3): 50.39
· Newington Causeway – Annual Mean NO2 (ug/m3): 67.56
· 239 Walworth Road – Annual Mean NO2 (ug/m3): 49.97
· 351 Walworth Road Annual Mean NO2 (ug/m3): 39.32
· 80 Camberwell Road Annual Mean NO2 (ug/m3): 60.52
Do you agree with our analysis of the issues? There’s still plenty of time to have your say on our online map – we’ve extended the opening until 31st December.
Please share this news item with your local friends, family and neighbours so that they can add their voices using the sharing buttons below. If you have a street, community or school parents' WhatsApp group, please copy and send this link and encourage more participation: https://ourhealthywalworthmap.commonplace.is/
A great start - help us reach more local people - Our Healthy Walworth
Our online consultation has been running for four weeks so far and over 500 people have visited the website, leaving many contributions that you can see on the online map. 72% of people responding so far have said they are supportive of measures to stop traffic making short-cuts between the Old Kent Road area and the Kennington area. This will be an essential part of the strategy to improve local air quality, create a safer and more pleasant environment for local people.
We held our first community event last week at East Street Market and the response was very positive: there is an appetite for changing the local environment: less through traffic - better bus journeys - safer walking and cycling - more attractive shopping and leisure. We'll be out again on Walworth Road on Friday 22nd November in the afternoon.
We need to hear from many more of you - especially younger people, older people and members of minority communities.
This is an important opportunity to influence the quality of life in Walworth, which impacts all who live and work in the area. Please go online and respond to the really simple survey - it is at https://ourhealthywalworthmap.commonplace.is or scan this code with your phone:
Please share this information widely using Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and email - or just tell your neighbours!
Thank you!