Peter Underwood, the Green Party’s parliamentary candidate for Croydon South, has launched a petition against the plans to build urban motorways through Waddon.
Peter Underwood at the site where TfL wants to build an urban motorway in Waddon
Transport for London has announced a proposal to build a multi-lane flyover – with possibly five or six lanes of traffic – from Croydon Road towards Duppas Hill and the Croydon Flyover. It seems inevitable that this will require demolishing some houses and building over Duppas Hill Park, something of which the MP for the Whitgift Foundation thoroughly approves.
TfL’s consultation offers an alternative of building a four-lane route along Epsom Road, through a gap which is half that size.
“They are in effect planning to build motorway-sized roads through an urban area,” Underwood said.
“TfL claims that these proposals will reduce traffic problems by increasing road capacity. But we all know that building bigger roads just attracts more cars into the area. Opening up one section of road just moves traffic on to the next bottleneck. These proposals will bring even more traffic into Waddon and central Croydon to add to the congestion and exhaust pollution we already suffer.
“The TfL proposals make vague references to cycle lanes and widening pavements, but it is clear that the main motivation is to increase car traffic.
Croydon Council’s own figures show that the A232/A23 junction already exceeds air pollution limits because of too much road traffic
“The money proposed for building the Waddon motorways could instead go towards extending the tram network or other improvements to public transport. The money could be spent on making Croydon’s roads safer for cyclists and pedestrians. But we are not being offered these sensible proposals. The TfL consultation only offers a choice between the two urban motorways.”
“Residents of Croydon are rightly suspicious of politicians setting up petitions. However, these urban motorway proposals are a genuine threat and the petition I’ve set up feeds directly into the TfL consultation process.”
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Delighted to see Peter taking the lead on this, Croydon South residents deserve the chance to vote for an alternative to the bleak Los-Angeles style vision of the future promoted by Labour and the Conservatives.
Building urban motorways is an absolutely ludicrous thing to do. It is based on the so-called “predict and provide” model of transport planning for road traffic which has been out of date for about at least three decades. The people who dreamed this up are living in the past. Croydon deserves better than that.
I want it. should have been done ages ago. We are being left behind. Car free areas are for more built up and connected areas, not for the suburbs were everything is so spaced out.
Suggesting “go by tram” is not a solution; try telling those to those with a car full of Ikea flat-pack queuing on the A23 trying to get out of town.
I suspect the reason this junction fails it’s air pollution limits is the fact the average speed of traffic is probably around 5 mph with all those buses and lorrys caught up in the congestion.
Unfortunately it’s unclear from the proposals if either scheme will increase capacity and reduce congestion at either five ways or the A232 junctions. Even if it managed to do either, you’re just going to move the bottleneck elsewhere (e.g. Purley Cross) whilst the number of cars on the road increases each year with a growing urban population.
An expensive temporary fix to a much bigger problem.