| Topic: | Re:Re:a few planters will resolve the issue of air quality in the High St | |
| Posted by: | Andy Howard | |
| Date/Time: | 02/02/13 16:59:00 |
| Yes I actually read it. Also I actually read Roland's earlier post ("additional greening to help mitigate the air quality problem") and it was upon this which I was commenting. Any number of plants in the High St will have no discernible effect on the air quality because (a) You need a lot of plants to fix a small amount of CO2 (b)There are a lot of vehicles used in the area (c)Plants don't do a great deal to counteract other pollutants such as sulphur and nitrogen oxides and carbon particulates (d) Air currents mix the pollutants from all over London. I have a lot of sympathy with David Irwin's proposal and in an earlier post pointed out that many of the negative comments saying it could not cope with the traffic volume were incorrect. But in it's current form, it's never going to fly. All users of the space, minority and majority, need to be accommodated (the idea of allocating width exactly according to % usage is farcical - the users don't occupy the space 100% of the time - so you don't need a 2 inch gap for the 1% of cyclists, you need a 2 foot gap for the safety of cyclists who occasionally pass by). The streetscape needs to cater to pedestrians, motorists, cyclists plus disabled groups such as the blind. I would favour single vehicle width carriageways plus a cycleway. Call this "David Irwin light". The 15 mph speed limit would be fine - most of the time, traffic doesn't get through the high street faster than that anyway. But giving pedestrians priority on a busy trunk road, and leaving cyclists to dodge in and out of a single lane of traffic are ideas which are never going to fly. Even then, were the High St a more attractive destination, would we see more shops that are actually worth buying something from or just the multiple betting shops/fruit machine emporia, mobile phone shops, banks, building societies and fast food outlets we have at the moment? |