Hello Richard,Thank you for your comment.I do not think that it was only a concerted campaign by the black cab lobby. The amount of residents, in this case West Putney as well as neighbouring Roehampton and Putney Heath, that wrote to the Council, the Councillors and the MP about it was staggering. The main bone of contention was the ill-thought-out scheme without a shadow of a doubt. On Dover House Road, the scheme split the road in two in order to stop rat running. This meant that residents from the bottom of the road could not get to Putney Heath and those from the top could not reach URR. But, they instituted a true, formal and official rat run in surrounding roads that are much narrower than DHR which caused chaos as only one car could pass at a time. This was done on roads that children played on - until the trial. There were very many near misses.Another consequence of the scheme was that the shops at the parade on URR saw a frightening drop in takings. One of the shops saw an eye-watering drop of 80% in the first week alone. There is repaving going on there and the parade had no customers at all! Nobody can sustain that level of losses for long.Also, it is interesting to note that emergency services, bin men, Council vehicles could not enter DHR and, what is more, in some surrounding roads, the residents could not enter the road they live in. For me, this is total madness.I have no doubt the Council will put their proper thinking caps to come up with alternative arrangements. The LTN scheme was approved at the Finance and Resource Overview Scrutiny Committee in January 2020. So no, it was not due to COVID. But what is really interesting to note is the amount of Councils in the country, not just Wandsworth, that got it so wrong, virtually at the same time and in the same way. So this came from government, not even TFL.So no, the Council did not run away in a feeble manner as the opposition to the trial was more than substantial. They got it horrifically wrong and I really appreciate that they had the guts to suspend it. Note, suspend, not cancel. Thank you.
Ivonne Holliday ● 1322d