Residents in Gander Green Lane have complained for years about HGVs on their residential road, shaking the foundations of their house at all hours. When the Kimpton Road Industrial Estate was built, plans for a link road were mooted but quickly shelved. That left HGVs looking at small, inappropriate roads to travel between the A217 and the A24. If the road had been put in at the time, traffic in the surrounding areas would run much smoother. Unfortunately subsequent development has meant that getting a link road will be incredibly difficult even if the money was there. That doesn’t mean we should not stop looking for a solution to this long-running issue.
I’ve been running a petition alongside the residents in Gander Green Lane to demonstrate support for action. In doing so, I aim to get Transport for London and the London Boroughs of Sutton and Merton to put it back on their agenda. The first thing to do is the simple quick-hits: making sure the weight restriction signs are absolutely clear at both ends of Gander Green Lane and Hamilton Avenue and get the satnav companies to redesign their routing software to avoid these roads.
As annoying as this is for residents, it affects a small proportion of constituents, but is but one example of a problem that seems intractable and so gets ignored by local decision makers. Central Road in Worcester Park is another place on which politicians seem to have given up. The perpetual traffic jams which affect Lynwood Road, Hampton Road, Green Lane, Browning Avenue among many more are caused primarily by the fact that there is only one road going under the railway line for about half mile in either direction. If there is a problem on the A3, the traffic will quickly back-up. I’m told that the traffic lights at South Lane/Malden Road junction cause tailbacks and are worth reviewing. I’ll investigate this further and see if this bears fruit.
For those travelling to Carshalton or Croydon from Sutton by road, the A232 has got considerably worse over the last few years and the council have missed a couple of chances to ease congestion here. The B&Q and BP garage on Carshalton Road were both given planning permission without thought to remodelling the junctions that they sit on. Both junctions are the cause of frustration to motorists travelling along that road.
We really need to push to ensure that planners take in a long term view of the area and likely increases in traffic if we’re going to keep Sutton moving. So many quality of life issues are determined locally rather than in Westminster. Therefore if elected, I won’t just go out and camp in the House of Commons, caught in the trappings of office. Sutton is my home too and I want it to be the best place possible in which to live and work.
A lot of problems are caused by the sheer number of traffic lights on what are supposed to be arterial roads. None of them are linked in to each other. Between Stonecot hill and Ewell, having to stop for red lights can quite easily double the time taken for the journey. In Holland where numerous experiments have been carried out, it has been shown that removal of traffic lights, and street furniture, causes motorists to take more care at junctions, as they longer have lights to ‘think for them’. I realise that safety campaigners might scream, but can’t we even switch some of them off during the early hours? Outside supermarkets that are shut for instance. Sainsburys in North Cheam springs to mind. That would be a start, and get people used to not always having lights to rely on. Removal would certainly help the flow of traffic, especially along Central Road in Worcester Park.
I love the Kolkata approach to traffic lights at off peak times … they all simply go to flashing red; you can go through them, but you have to do it with caution.
Ref. Central Road … this is an appalling problem for so much of the day. It definitely and not surprisingly got worse when the Green Lane lights system and Hamptons housing came in. I wonder what research has been done on how much worse the lights have made it, and whether turning all the junctions into roundabouts might slow traffic, but actually keep it moving…
Why is it not possible to have synchronised traffic lights , for example, either side of the railway bridge at Central Rd Worcester Park.
The Kimpton link road materalises or not it’s a definite that Gander green lane cannot sustain the HGV traffic that use it. Sutton planners choose to ignore it but it’s a unclassified lane that was designed for horse and cart not for 21st century lorries that use it.
A clear solution is to implement 7.5T weight restrictions at both A24 and A217 end of Gander Green lane. NOT the 18T restriction that is currently in place. This high weight restriction remains from the time when lorries used to enter Kimpton Estate via Gander green lane. This is no longer suitable for Gander green lane.
Even if SATNAVs are updated the problem remains because lorries from both Garth road estate and Kimpton Estate will continue to use it as short cut. Therefore compulsory restriction of 7.5T except for PSV vehicles is the only solution.
What we need is more intelligent filter lights
It would be interesting to know if,in the 7 months since the above comments, anything at all has been done to address the traffic congestion in Central Road. It’s bad enough trying to get anywhere on a weekday during the morning rush hour but to have traffic backed up to the North Star pub on a Sunday afternoon is quite ridiculous. Surely it is not beyond the whit of man to introduce some intelligent traffic flow controls. Can say I have ever seen anyone on the ground looking at the issue. Has this just been put in to the ‘ too difficult’ box?