| Topic: | FOLLY OF CS9 ON CHISWICK HIGH ROAD. Ruth Mayorcas | |
| Posted by: | Richard Bryson | |
| Date/Time: | 20/03/19 11:48:00 |
| Dear Ruth I fully appreciate you have very strong views on cycling, and you want to encourage others to cycle. There is obviously no harm in that. I also believe that in principle, even though only about 3% of journeys are undertaken by bicycle and more than two thirds of the population don’t cycle at all, most people don’t object to dedicated cycle paths. I also commute to work from Chiswick most days, by bicycle. However, with CS9, the main issue is that the vast majority of Chiswick Residents do NOT want a 3 metre wide Cycle Superhighway down the entire length of their High Street (albeit some small sections will be reduced to 2 metres). More so as this can only be ‘achieved’ by reducing the pavement width for pedestrians, reducing the road width and removing some of the bus lane and bus stops. It is inevitable that the businesses on the South of the High Road will be significantly impacted and I believe we have already had more than 20 shop closure in Chiswick in the last year. Also one of the ‘benefits’ muted has been the reduction in pollution. We are going to end up with FAR more stationary and slow moving traffic with this scheme. One can’t just dismiss this by saying people should be driving. Unfortunately with the plans for CS9 to go down Chiswick High Road we have a Dominant Minority of people, mainly from the London Cycling Campaign, who monitor blogs such as this, and try to nip any dissention in the bud. Also unfortunately the original ‘consultation’ was ‘hijacked’ by the London Cycling campaign, and as a result, it significantly distorted the statistics to give the perception that that there was overwhelming public support for the scheme. Which there certainly isn’t in the four post codes it goes through. I have copied and pasted my views below from an earlier posting. Lastly I would say we have the ideal alternative which is quicker, easier and safer. It is the A4. I cycle down it most days to work and it is far better than Cycling down the High Road. ‘The headlines after the original consultation were 'Huge public support for the Cycle Superhighway ‘at 60% and TFL had revealed that '75% of the respondents were local residents'. Both of these statements were complete LIES. When pressed for the postcode breakdown they refused for a year. When they finally reluctantly revealed these, less than HALF the respondents were in the four postcodes CS9 go through. As for the so called 'huge public support' at 60% this is also a nonsense. The numbers in favour were HUGELY distorted by a mobilisation of the LCC membership the moment the consultation came out. I quote from their website to their members at the time 'London Cycling Campaign will be producing a campaign action so everyone will easily and quickly be able to respond to TfL’s consultation in the next week or two.' They followed this with direct links to the TFL consultation for their 11,000 members to use and told them it would be far better to post direct on the TFL website than through their LCC template. So the huge public support is in reality, the London Cycling Lobby significantly swelling the so called 'Public opinion' numbers. Finally, if you take the 2,453 responses from the four postcodes, less than 40% were in favour and over 56% were against. It’s a disgraceful manipulation of the Consultation results to totally mislead the public. What we need is to have the results independently audited.’ |