7 December, 2000

Dear Mr Brady

Cc: RPA - Simon Richards; Mike Fitt; William Weston

I firstly want to express our support for the RPA's determination to tackle the traffic problem in the park. Merton Cycling Campaign welcomes any degree of through motor traffic restriction as a first step towards its long overdue and complete removal from the park at the earliest opportunity. The park can no longer be expected to provide a convenient bypass facility for the excessive traffic levels generated by the shopping centres which surround it.

We do have some queries and concerns:

The Dame Jennifer Jenkins 1996 Royal Parks Review recommended that, subject to surveys, Richmond Park should be closed to through traffic at busy weekends. Why has this recommendation been completely ignored in the proposals? As everyone knows, the surveys have been done and show that over 95% of weekday traffic is rat-running straight through the park; at weekends this only drops to 80%. Arguably, there would be less local resistance to experimental weekend closures; and weekends are of course the time when most visitors are in the park and therefore traffic causes the highest disturbance. Interestingly, this very suggestion was made by an opponent of gate closures at the public meeting in the Kingston Guildhall on 28^th November - some common ground is beginning to emerge!

Has the RPA thought of closing the park gates at 4pm all year round? Local commuters cope with 4pm closure in the winter, so why not extend it? That would benefit the many people who do visit the park on summer evenings, and who would have much to gain in terms of peace and quiet. Conversely, the opponents of road closures are right in their claim that there are few visitors in the park between 7 and 10am. Perhaps this compromise would be worth exploring?

It could be argued that if the RPA's ultimate objective, whose chief duty is to protect and preserve the park, is to completely ban through motor traffic, the whole process would be far better achieved in one fell swoop rather than stringing it out agonisingly over a number of years. Look at the whinging there's been sine Dame JJ - the local papers letters pages and public meetings cannot get any fuller! - and nothing has even happened yet! Just do it! No-one would ever dream of bringing cars back into Leicester Square, yet similar arguments raged there years ago.

There was indeed chaos on the roads around the park on the day of fog and ice, because drivers all assumed they could rat-run through the park as they usually do, come hell or high water, and so drove up to the gates where their progress came to a halt. If the gates were permanently shut to through traffic, as they are in winter months well before the evening rush-hour, drivers would choose another route, or perhaps another transport mode, or may even decide that their journey is unnecessary. This is what happens when road space is taken away from drivers, it is called traffic evaporation, and is the exact opposite of the now well accepted truism that building new roads will always induce new traffic. Richard E Grant moaned that it took him nearly two hours to drive his son to school on that foggy day instead of six minutes. Poor Richard! I suppose the possibility of cars skidding into deer and each other did not enter his selfish head? Perhaps he and his son should get themselves some bikes - they are likely to speed up their journey times, keep fit, and will be able to go on commuting through the park by bike whatever the outcome of the RPA's consultation.

Why consult at all?

I have wondered why the RPA feels it must consult at all. Its duty is to protect the park, not to provide a convenient bypass facility for the huge levels of traffic that local shopping centres have been designed to generate. The roads of the park are not part of the highway system, and the authorities should never have allowed them to become so. Will Weston of the RPA is to be applauded for taking a first step towards the complete removal of through traffic from the park. The Dame 1996 Jennifer Jenkins report gave the RPA all the authority it needs to proceed without further messy consultation procedures.

With respect, we suggest that your consultation process is fatally flawed since there is nothing to stop people filling out hundreds of forms each - only the responder's postcode is required on the form. We note that the form is computer readable, and so the output will be purely statistical. These statistics will therefore, we suggest, be utterly meaningless, given the level of fraudulent abuse that can be expected to occur on this issue with passions running as high as they do.

What is the point of having a do-nothing option in the consultation when William Weston of the Royal Parks Agency has clearly and rightly said on numerous occasions that doing nothing is not an option? Let's be clear: doing nothing would mean traffic levels doubling in the park, as they are forecast to do everywhere else, in the next 20 years. What would car-addicted local residents be calling for then? Maybe a widening or even dualling of the roads in the park to carry the excess traffic that Richmond and Kingston town centres have been expressly designed to attract? It is time to take action now, and doing nothing cannot be an option.

Why are only local people are being consulted (most of whose views are likely to be against all the proposals) despite the fact that the park is a National Nature Reserve and also a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest and is paid for by all (not just local) taxpayers? Local residents do not have a better claim over how the park is regulated as they make no more contribution to its upkeep than any other taxpayer.

Arguably, in view of the above, the RPA should pay at least as much heed to the results of the Surrey Comet's website vote as its own consultation. The web vote has two big advantages over the RPA consultation:

• it can accept voting from anywhere in the world
• it is sophisticated enough to reject multi-voting from the same computer.

At the time of writing this letter, the vote was going as follows:

• 55% voting for option 3
• 33% voting for no change
• 6% for 20mph

The Surrey Comet website reference is http://www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/richmond/richmondparkdebate/results.html

I look forward to hearing from you

Yours Sincerely, Richard Evans, Merton Cycling Campaign