Oh! We’ve just met someone who lives in Pimlico! 🧵
We think this is the first Low Traffic Neighbourhood in London – it was designed to stop through-traffic around 1970- over 50 years ago!
This is Deborah, and she loves living here. “No-one comes down these roads unless they want to be here, or they’ve got lost”.
The area doesn’t have planters- but a series of one-way streets, and No Entry signs. It’s known as a Bermuda Triangle that even skilled taxi drivers struggle with. “There’s just hardly any traffic at all- perhaps 10 or so cars go past a day. And it’s just so quiet to walk and cycle around”.
Deborah and her husband have lived here for 15 years, and she says it’s altered her behaviour. “When I’m coming out of the house, the first options I think about for travelling are walking or – cycling. I’ll take the Brompton if I can, but if there’s nowhere to leave it I’ll get a Santander bike.
The next option would be the tube, although we don’t use it that much, and then the very last option would be to drive. We’d only do that if we really had to”.
She thinks it’s a positive circle when there’s not much traffic. “Neighbourhoods are simply much more pleasant to walk around in, so people feel more like walking and cycling”. But Deborah thinks that it would be difficult to bring in a scheme like this now, because “change is hard, and people complain”.
She says that no-one complains around here, because everyone’s used to it. “The problem with bringing in new schemes”, she says. “Is that people just can’t imagine what neighbourhoods are like without cars. All people think is- it will take me 7 extra minutes to drive to that shop.
They’re not thinking of all the benefits they’d get the other 23.5 hours of the day- the peace and quiet, the safety, everything else”. Deborah would like more people to experience a neighbourhood with less traffic. “These LTN’s need to be well-designed” she says. “And you need to give them a chance to bed in”. And she thinks we need strong leadership from Politicians.
She’s a big fan of the local Councillor, Jim Glen, who she says is very supportive of cycling. Deborah thinks the time is now for a modal shift. “If we can, we just have to change our lifestyle” she says. “If we’re serious about saving the planet, we just have to change our lifestyle, and find alternatives to car journeys wherever we can” Hear hear Deborah. We couldn’t agree more.
