London mayor, Boris Johnson, has demanded the removal of guardrails and other ‘obstacles’ for pedestrians, in order to increase the number of journeys made on foot ‘by more than one million a day’.
Johnson’s proposals for a new mayoral transport strategy go further than the policy in Transport for London’s 2005 streetscape guidance – that guardrails will be minimised where ‘they cannot be shown to be needed to maintain pedestrian safety’.
The mayor attacks ‘sheep dip-style railings fencing and herding pedestrians’ and pledges the ‘zapping, one by one, the baffling posts which have sprouted in the pavements’. The TfL business plan for 2009/10-2017/18 also confirms that Johnson has asked TfL to consider the removal of traffic signals as part of a review of traffic signals timings designed ‘to make a significant contribution to smoothing traffic flow’. The mayor also backs shared-space schemes, if they can be achieved without ‘excessive’ delays to traffic.
However, while Living Streets welcomed the mayor’s commitment to de-cluttering, it questioned whether his plans would bring about a ‘revolution in walking’ as he claimed, particularly given the axing of public realm projects favouring pedestrians.
Johnson said he was withdrawing more than £100M funding from schemes such as Parliament Square and Victoria Embankment because they ‘offer limited transport benefits and would restrict traffic flow’.
Tony Armstrong, chief executive of Living Streets, told Surveyor: ‘You’re not going to create a “revolution in walking” by removing a few errant posts and utility boxes. What pedestrians need is extra capacity, something the mayor appears unwilling to provide.’
He claimed that shelving schemes such as Parliament Square which would tackle pedestrian congestion because they would add time to vehicle journeys represented ‘a failure to improve the transport system as a whole’. ‘We can’t halt improvements simply because they add a few seconds to stop-start journeys. Improving conditions for pedestrians reduces traffic congestion, and prevents pedestrians spilling out on to the carriageway and crossing anarchically.’
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