Traffic on ‘ill-conceived’ new road layout at Highbury Corner

• I WOULD like to say, two months on, that the new Highbury Corner traffic scheme has been a resounding success. Unfortunately, it is nothing of the kind.

As a pedestrian and a bus user passing the Corner on a daily basis, my experience is now even worse than during the interminable years when works were actually in progress.

I walk every day to work from Highbury to Old Street (which is now also a bottleneck owing to the development of a new two-way system).

Where once traffic flowed smoothly (albeit intermittently), now there are queues of stationary vehicles, with idling engines pumping fumes, nose to tail along Holloway Road, Highbury Place, St Paul’s Road and Canonbury Road (the entrance to Canonbury School).

My return journey is on the 271 bus and I am now often obliged to get off two stops earlier than previously (Canonbury Square rather than Highbury Station) and walk, on account of the additional time it takes for the bus to crawl its way around the Corner to the new bus stop, now situated way beyond the station.

I was appalled that about a third of the Highbury Island trees were destroyed to implement this scheme, but had hoped that at least it would lead to improvements.

Instead, disproportionate road space has been taken up by under-used cycling lanes, and there are no designated bus lanes. It seems that two-way is now the new one-way, a shift that seems more rooted in ideology than reality.

An idea that I suggested during the pre-works consultation was to create a bridge/walkway that would take pedestrians across Highbury Corner above the traffic through the treetops of Highbury Island between the bus stops of St Paul’s Road and Highbury Station.

This would have reduced stopping the traffic for pedestrians, as well as the close exposure of pedestrians to traffic emissions.

This simple idea would never gain traction though, perhaps because it required vision and imagination, rather than ideology. And now we are saddled with this ill-conceived scheme until someone else comes up with another hare-brained one.

JOHN KEANE
Highbury Hill, N5