A Green New Deal

You are complaining about car clubs? Car clubs mean that many people who cannot afford a car have access to a vehicle when they need one. Car clubs help reduce the space needed to store private vehicles. Most private vehicles sit unused 90% of the time. We need to reduce private vehicle ownership so shared street space is not blocked up by a privileged minority.

What GLA has done is simply what they have been able to do, and something has to be done to discourage car use and support and encourage other sustainable forms of transport.
Tooting’s problems are particularly hard for GLA to address. Wandsworth council took money to implement LTNs* last summer, but did so in the worst of all possible ways: no consultation; no education; no real alternatives in place. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Wandsworth council had set out to sabotage the scheme; what they should have been doing - what we must all do - is to set aside opportunities for short-term political gain, see the climate emergency as a very real emergency, and get on and do what needs to be done.

(*And, sorry to appear smug, my response to these was to sell my car and buy an electric bike.)

Central London is no longer sustainable. Now is the time to think radically, be creative, reshape London. Turn many non-central London high streets or locales into attractive, greened, distinctively different and exciting 'town centres'. Rebuild so that residential areas are off main roads, take the shopping, restaurants and etc off the main roads, make town squares and village greens. Keep the polluting vehicles away from these and from residential areas. Each centre should have attractions, heritage sites, museums, arts, whatever is appropriate, so that tourists will visit them, taking the pressure off the West End and central London. The GLA should have the vision to see London differently, with transport linking local centres. People should be mostly working from home or close to home, with local work/eat/play/exercise hubs designed for them. Many more parks are needed, more wildlife refuges, in all these 'towns' and 'villages'. The current GLA local tinkering improvements is risible. Think bigger, think better. Get over the very limiting view in which only the very centre of London is important. Disperse it all.

A ban on deliveries, waste collections, shop or office refits, between 9pm and 8am, where ever there are residential properties. This would make a huge difference to residential communities that are in mixed areas. The local residential streets would feel like community streets between 9pm and 8am. Though eateries have to have earlier essential food stuffs deliveries of course. And PUT A STOP TO SUNDAY SHOPPING except for essentials, food and pharmacies. At one time residents in mixed areas could emerge on Sundays and actually see their neighbours around the place, as no crowds. It felt great. Now the 'hood is swamped with strangers 7 days a week, the community is invisible, do not see each other to stop for a chat. Our council had a choice with our community - give it some protection from the crowds and noise, a bit of greening as camouflage, stop using community streets as a servicing area for businesses OR ignore the needs of residents & community, open it up as a deliveries & waste collection zone, dump extra traffic on residents so as to save shoppers from it. They chose to, basically, defaecate on the community.

The primary thing that would improve our neighbourhood would be if the Pedicabs Bill, just this week reintroduced to parliament as a Private Member's Bill by MP Nickie Aiken, were to get through all the necessary readings in parliament, go to committee and whatever else it has to, and become law. This Bill would bring in licensing for London pedicabs, bringing them in line with pedicabs in the rest of the UK. It would mean pedicab operators would have to be licensed, would have to have safe pedicabs, charge reasonably, and would not be allowed to broadcast roaring music day and night to residential communities in central London.

But there is an MP who stops this and other Private Member's Bills from having their Second Readings, so they do not succeed. He may do the same again to the Pedicabs Bill, even though it affects London MP's, it is their business, not the business of him or his constituency (elsewhere in the UK).

Noise is a very serious problem for many residential communities, as well as air pollution. Both have bad effects on people's health. There needs to be far, far stronger protection for the quality of life of residential areas, however small they may be. Why cannot the GLA and London Mayor do more about this?

TfL and our local council have removed bus routes from our main street, so now elderly and others who can only go by bus have to catch two or three buses to get about London, eg to reach hospitals. Why no free electric runabouts? or electric shuttle services? People have to go shopping, for those 20k bags of rice or other stuff, because it is hard to get an affordable delivery of a small quantity of goods. There are minimum orders e.g. £40 or more, plus a too-high delivery charge. The one shop left that does smaller orders for a smaller delivery charge only has a limited range of goods, no 20k bags of rice, for e.g. People who have small homes, small kitchens, small fridges & cannot have huge deliveries of food all in one go have to go out shopping.