Things have been hotting up…
…in many ways during lockdown – yes the heat and dryness, of course, but we’ve all noticed the lull in traffic which perhaps is slightly diminishing now.
The Council has spotted that this is a great time to bring Covid, schools opening and Low Traffic Neighbourhoods together and have found some funding to encourage a shift to safe active travel. Some social distancing messages have appeared across Bath on lamp posts but of far great significance is a big push on LTNs.
They have launched a new web facility called ‘Liveable Neighbourhoods’. This allows all residents in B&NES to do two things:
1. place a pin on a map where you have a particular issue with a street and explain what the issue is and how it might be solved
2. opt to agree with others’ issues
Click here to access it and register. We, in the Camden area, need to demonstrate that we want change by doing both these things – raising issues constructively and showing interest in others’ issues in our area. Behind the scenes I’m sure there is a lot of counting going on and the most active communities will get favoured. So the future is, to some extent, in our hands.
Thanks to those who responded to our last post and signed up for our long running campaign for a low traffic neighbourhood which sent up another eight last week. We are getting ever closer to our target of 200 – which is about half of all households in Camden.
The CRA met with our ward councillors two weeks ago to get our ideas across. These are being pooled with the ideas from other wards and being considered by the Cabinet member for Transport in Bath, Joanna Wright.
In response the CRA is appointing a ‘sub group’ to take forward the LTN idea here in NE Bath with view to having something meaningful on the ground in September.
So, finally do click here and get started on the map!
The Liveable Streets site is very handy for seeing residents’s views. Camden Road is well represented with the vast majority of popular comments calling for through traffic to be prevented (with a bus gate being the obvious way of achieving this). If you don’t think this is a good idea then you should really get on the site and make your case. But please, the frequent argument that this will just displace traffic elsewhere is probably the weakest one you can make – there is not a fixed amount of traffic that has to go somewhere.