• WONDER what it will take – my guess is the death of a pedestrian – to wake up the powers that be to the dangerous idiocy of so many of their traffic decisions.

The bike lanes are bad enough giving preference to healthy, and mostly young, people on bikes over everyone else. But the “entry treatments” are more dangerous still.

As you walk along, say, at the point in Prince of Wales Road where Harmood Street enters it, you would not, with the fancy new brickwork and no change in the levels, have any idea that you were now walking in the road.

It is only a matter of time till a car sweeps into Harmood Street from Prince of Wales Road and carries a couple of happily chatting pedestrians along on its bonnet. It is an accident waiting to happen.

There are others. The removal of the traffic islands does not favour the elderly, the old, the blind, the otherwise disabled, pram-pushing mothers, the very young: that is to say the majority of pedestrians.

As for those absurd black and white poles which mean, among other things, that a slow cyclist (such as I used to be) will have a tail of cyclists stuck behind him or her… they are not only space-wasters, they are also an eyesore.

ESTHER WHITBY
Harmood Street, NW1