• THE traffic chaos in Dartmouth Park is getting dangerously bad, but there’s a solution on the horizon.

The area is used as a rat-run, and is putting the lives of residents at risk.

Between 2023 and 2024 the average number of vehicles on Dartmouth Park Hill increased from 6,400 to more than 8,000 per day. On the notorious Chetwynd Road, it went up by 5 per cent.

The solution is simple: make it harder for drivers from outside the area to use these narrow, residential, streets as a short-cut, and prioritise people who just want to drive to their homes.

Make it safer for kids walking and cycling to school. Let wheelchair users cross the road in safety.

Plant trees and add benches to make our neighbourhood feel like a community.

That’s what the Dartmouth Park Healthy Neighbourhood plan wants to try for a 12-month period. At the end, we’ll be able to have our say on whether to keep it.

People fear that traffic will increase on the boundary roads, but there’s nothing to be scared of. In similar schemes across London there’s been almost no increase in traffic on neighbouring streets. Instead we have seen a 50 per cent reduction in road casualties.

That’s why, despite loud and well-funded misinformation campaigns against such projects, more than three times as many people support traffic reduction schemes as oppose them.

Emergency services say there’s no impact on their response times, because most roads will be controlled by cameras, not physical barriers. And it won’t stop you driving to the Whittington Hospital in an emergency.

We all want quieter, safer, streets where we can all still drive to our homes but aren’t plagued by satnav short-cutters. So let’s get behind this exciting scheme and keep our roads for residents, not rat-runners.

SAKHR AL-MAKHADHI, N19