How the new care home will look

• AT present, when two vehicles meet on the roads of Dartmouth Park, a usually polite confrontation ensues as one pulls into a space in order to let the other pass.

I can’t see this working with the volume of traffic the proposed colossal care home would create, particularly delivery and collection vans, which are bigger than cars. A one-way system will be necessary.

The site itself is in the very middle of a quiet residential area. Its entrance is on Croftdown Road. A residential road, Croftdown runs from Highgate Road to another residential road, Chester Road.

As you go up Croftdown Road, the entrance to the Mansfield site is about 200 metres on the right, more or less opposite the rear entrance to La Sainte Union girls’ school.

Traffic going to the Mansfield site turns into Croftdown Road from Highgate Road. At present, traffic going back to Highgate Road comes out of the Mansfield site and turns left to go back the way it came.

With the number of vehicles this care home could generate, this will not be possible as large vans will meet head-on and be unable to pass. Instead, traffic leaving the Mansfield site will have to turn right, and carry on up Croftdown Road.

With traffic going one way up Croftdown Road, to leave Dartmouth Park it will have to go down St Albans Road, which leads out onto Highgate Road.

It will either have to cut across via Kingswear Road or carry on up Croftdown Road to the Triangle to where Croftdown Road and St Albans Road meet, in order to turn left towards to where St Albans Road ends at Highgate Road.

A problem with one-way roads is traffic moves faster because drivers know they are not going to encounter something coming the other way.

As has been stated in many letters of objection, there are hundreds of children moving around the area – to and from Brookfield school, to and from La Sainte Union Catholic school and all the other secondary schools in the Laswap consortium.

This is not a twice-a-day event, the Laswap students are on the move all day as they go between LSU, William Ellis, Parliament Hill and Acland Burghley schools. This area is just not designed or intended to carry such traffic. There will be accidents.

AMY SILVERSTON
Laurier Road, NW5