ONE YEAR MORE
The Royal Parks has announced that the current trial in Richmond Park will be extended for a year to evaluate the impact of displaced traffic on the surrounding roads.
The announcement should have marked the conclusion of the Movement Strategy, which began almost two years ago. Instead, there is a 12-month wait. And there is no guarantee that a year from now we will get something better than the trial, which has removed or restricted through traffic from more than three-fifths of the perimeter road.
But with uncertainty comes opportunity. The overall reduction in shortcut journeys by motorists during the pandemic has led to a wider variety of people visiting, and many have taken up cycling in the park. Yet if the trial had been made permanent this week, through traffic would still have had unrestricted access to Queen’s Road – the stretch between Kingston and Richmond gates which is the busiest section of the roadway – inhibiting the presence of less confident cyclists.
Richmond Park Cyclists and the wider cycling community now have the chance to show, once and for all, that through traffic should be eliminated from all the park’s roads, at the very least during weekends, to make it a more pleasant place for every kind of visitor.
And the results of the survey show that this is the outcome that people want: around half of the responses in the open comment section said they would support further restrictions on motor vehicles in the park.
Here, we look at the background to the decision, examine some of the data from the third public consultation and look at a way forward.
WHY EXTEND THE TRIAL?
Judging by the form of questions in the final public consultation, which related solely to the trial, it would have been a fair bet that TRP was going to make the current restrictions permanent if respondents favoured them. Indeed, that seemed the likely outcome based on indications we were getting from the management of Richmond Park in recent weeks. But TRP’s trustees convened on February 17th, and as a result of discussions at that meeting, the extension was announced.
All of the trials in TRP’s parks will now end in a year’s time. But with 10,000 of the 18,000 responses to the public consultation centered solely on Richmond Park, and the restrictions causing more debate than any other of the royal parks, it’s likely that the 12-month extension was influenced by Richmond upon Thames Council – particularly because that is exactly what its deputy leader Alexander Ehmann requested.
Councillor Ehmann, who also chairs Richmond’s transport and air quality committee, wrote in the council’s formal response to the consultation: “We would like to be able to carry out some additional traffic counts and parking surveys in the surrounding area and we hope that the traffic trial will be extended so it runs for at least an additional twelve months. This is particularly important as we have not seen a return to ‘normal’ traffic patterns within the initial six months of the trial. This extension should provide an opportunity for more robust data to be collected.”
This data will only be truly robust if it is balanced against the detrimental effect cut-through traffic has on limiting access to the park’s roads for less confident cyclists, and its urbanisation of the park’s environment which affects the experience of all types of visitors. The data should also be placed in context with wider London traffic patterns. For too long, there has been an assumption that journey times on areas close to the park are much worse than other roads (indeed, statistical evidence in the responses from Richmond and Kingston councils to the Movement Strategy is notably absent). In fact, a TfL survey from 2017 suggests that Petersham Road – invariably the first place mentioned when complaints about traffic levels arise – mostly has higher average bus speeds than Roehampton Lane, which also takes some of the traffic that would otherwise go through the park. (The TfL survey, which Tim Lennon from the Richmond Cycling Campaign has allowed us to share, is available here in the file marked “TfL borough book”).
And let’s not forget that TRP launched the Movement Strategy to prioritise walking and cycling. Can councils in the surrounding boroughs provide statistical evidence that TRP should override that aim on the busiest section of the roadway to accommodate shortcut journeys?
10K RUN-THROUGH
There were 10,765 responses to the Richmond Park traffic trial public consultation. The vast majority said that the restrictions should be made permanent, the park was now a more pleasant place to be and the trial had had a positive impact. Here’s a quick run-through of some other figures in TRP’s 83-page report on the responses to the consultation…
A total of 73 per cent were in favour of the measures taken on the east of the park and between Richmond and Roehampton, while 69 per cent were in favour of the closure to all cars on the East Sheen link.
The text box for open-ended comments at the end of the survey was used by 6,389 respondents. According to TRP, the most common theme raised by nearly half of these was “support for further measures discouraging motor vehicles in the park”.
About half again (presumably more than 1,500 responses, an astonishing number given this was an option which TRP deliberately chose not to give) called for the complete removal of all through traffic.
While accepting that this was not a referendum, we nevertheless wonder why TRP would go through such a lengthy and rigorous process and then ignore the clear direction of public consensus. How is it that Richmond Council, which has no authority in the park, seems to have such influence over TRP’s trustees?
In next month’s bulletin, we will cover the “dangerous interaction between cyclists and other park users” which was raised by some respondents.
SEE YOU NEXT MONTH...
Thank you for allowing us to pop into your inbox with this special bonus bulletin. Our next regular monthly email will be with you at the start of April. Please let us know what you think about the trial extension and our approach to it – we reply personally to every email you send us. If you enjoyed this bulletin, please share it with your cycling friends – and if they like what they read, encourage them to sign up to our mailing list too. The more subscribers we have, the bigger our voice.
All the best,
Richmond Park Cyclists