We’ve had two deaths on the A12 in the past three weeks: let’s try to avoid more. A bit further south of the tragic Bow roundabout, there is another fatal accident waiting to happen.
Anyone who drives that road regularly, particularly northbound from the Blackwall Tunnel will know what I’m talking about: the most illogical set of traffic lights in Britain. The A12 Blackwall Tunnel Northern Approach is the one of the capital’s busiest and most accident-delayed roads. There are tailbacks every day in both directions near the tunnel entrance. The road is three lanes in both directions.
So the brains at TfL have come up with the ingenious idea of placing new traffic lights – the first ones you will see driving south from the Redbridge roundabout eight miles away – right by Lochnagar Street about half a mile from the tunnel.
Yes, that’s a set of traffic lights on what is essentially an urban motorway. Here’s the lights on red looking south:
These lights allow traffic to turn into Lochnagar Street in the east: left into that street if you’re going south, and right if you have been driving north. So what’s in Lochnagar Street? Well, this:
ie scrap yards and a no-through road that leads into a small housing development that can already be accessed from Newham. The lights have apparently been put there to allow future residents from Newham better access to the A12.
I stood there, as you do on a foggy Monday, watching the traffic flow. How often do you suppose those lights on the sometimes congested, sometimes fast-flowing A12 change to red?
Once. Every. Minute.
Yes, the flow of traffic on the A12 is stopped every minute to let, on most occasions, a single car either turn into or out of Lochnagar Street.
But that’s not the worst of it.
As you drive north from the tunnel or from the slip-road from East India Dock Road 300 yards away, there have always been three lanes of traffic. There still is. And as you’d expect, those in the fast lane tend to out their foot down.
But now the problem is this: just as they’re accelerating, they suddenly realise – because there is no prior warning anywhere – they are rapidly approaching a red light in what has now become a right-hand-turn only lane.
Since 99.99 per cent of those drivers do not want to visit a scrap yard, they brake very suddenly, indicate left and try to squeeze into the middle lane where there is fast-flowing traffic. I watched that happen time and time again today. One car swerved to avoid an accident. And that was in the space of just 20 minutes.
I also saw motorists realising they couldn’t get back into the middle lane and accept they’d have to turn right: they would wait for the green light, turn into Lochnagar Street, do a U-turn and then wait by the red light for the turn back onto the A12. Cursing all the while as they did so.
If a high speed accident hasn’t already happened at that junction, I’m fairly sure that without any change of plan by TfL there will be one soon.
London Assembly member John Biggs is also taking up this issue and has already met TfL. His warning was not heeded last time; let’s hope they now listen to any concerns.
Trial by Jeory 
Those traffic lights strike me as being a monumentally stupid arrangement. But then the traffic planners in LBTH have little history of good planning to call on when it comes to designing such things. Your last post talked of dangers to cyclists; you failed to mention the new and uncomfortably-cobbled speed bumps on the stretch of Grove Road that goes through Viccy Park, that turned a good, long, well-surfaced straight bit of road into an exercise in speeding up and slowing down (two things that you don’t want to do as a cyclist.)
And, of course, at the end of that road is the utterly ridiculous roundabout outside what used to be The Crown pub, where there is a cycle path that goes the wrong way ’round the roundabout. Whichever fool thought that one up should be forced to cycle ’round it, repeatedly, while the local ‘yoof’ are driving in the area; I suspect his outlook on cycle path design would change radically for the better within seconds …
One wonders which bits of LBTH actually do a good job. I am sure there are some. One day I’ll come across them, I hope.
Tim
Yes, they’re all good points. Well said.
Surely, Tim, you’re wrong to blame LBTH for TfL’s mess – or have I got it wrong?
Ted, I wish more of your reporting was like this, it’s bang on the money, and if it leads to change it may well save lives.
I know safety if the prime concern here, but perhaps you could ask how much this traffic junction cost TfL – the *total* cost, including all their planning, as this is one area of their work where they massively overspend and receive astonishingly poor value for money.
And how much more will it cost to put things right?
The A11 is a major arterial route and as such is the responsibility of Transport for London.
Changes in road design affecting traffic flow are done by TfL. A change of this sort would, I expect, have been designed and commissioned by TfL.
It’s not unusual for works to maintain TfL to be done by the local Council but this isn’t maintenance.
This council have such a love affair with speed bumps that I’m grateful on a daily basis that the A11 is the responsibility of the Highways Agency otherwise there’s be speed bumps all the way from Aldgate to the Bow Roundabout. They put them on Benworth Street – a little street between Alfred Street and Harley Grove which is so short and narrow (with parking on at least one side) that you are welcome to break the speed limit but you’ll say goodbye to your wing mirrors in doing so. (And Harley Grove is a dead end so anyone going over the limit there is going to crash in double-quick time).
I can’t believe they’ve put up lights for a turning into Lochnagar Street (although it has to be said that that stretch of the motorway is a triumph of its time when the car was king and the road just ran over everything in its path – the whole area has been blighted for over 40 years with not being able to get across that boundary).
And the Bow roundabout has been a nightmare for many years – another design triumph of its age. I have vague memories of my sister getting knocked down there 15 or more years ago (obviously she survived!) when she came on a visit and tried to follow a publicised canalside walk. I even have vague memories of promises at the time that it was all going to be improved as part of overall attempts to turn the canalside into an attractive area rather than the semi-derelict industrial wasteland that it was at the time. Nothing ever changes though.
I wonder whether the very poor roads are symptomatic of the all-pervasive political correctness that we see everywhere. Standards of driving are abysmally poor in the Tower Hamlets area, but it is not deemed right in modern-day Britain to call people to book and tell them that they are behaving unacceptably, so alternatives are sought. Those alternatives so often involve things like speed bumps and Gatso cameras, which do very little for road safety but annoy everyone. (And the irony of money being found for speed bumps, but not being found to repair roads that would be an embarrassment to the phrase ‘cart track’) isn’t lost on me.
Of course, if money was spent on proper policing, seen to be unholding the law (step forward THEOs … actually, don’t bother – you’re rather less than useless in the real world), the problem would solve itself. But doing this costs money and may reveal some uncomfortable truths, so any other alternative is found.
(Konnu, I understand that local roads are the responsibility of the local council, hence the blame lies with LBTH. Larger roads are TFL’s lookout.)
Tim.
Obviously, the lights at Lochnagar Road are to service future development. Developers must be scrapping over these scrapyards that are sited by the River Lea. Prime real estate. The abysmal ‘Tesco Town’ already plans to exploit this riverside site to the north and could even creep south (over the Limehouse Cut) to this site.
Or Leaside Regeneration is already here, in Gillender Street…perhaps they have plans? Their new development next to Woodworks scrapyard and the old Poplar Library which they now own and inhabit, is perhaps the first of many.
It seems the lights at Lochnagar pre-empted the green-light (arf!) for the mega-development of this area.
Has it not occurred to anyone that the traffic lights might have been put in so that people who live on the Aberfeldy estate can get to and from where they live without getting run over?
James,
Do you mean the Aberfeldy Estate that Poplar HARCA are redeveloping?
Click to access AberfeldyNewVillage.pdf
That Aberfeldy Estate – or ‘Aberfeldy New Village’ to be – is nowhere near Lochnagar Road. Aberfeldy Estate is bound by the B125 (Abbott Road) to the north, the A13 to the south and the lower section of the A12, in front of the Blackwall Tunnel, to the west. If residents are to be run over getting to and from ‘Aberfeldy New Village’, it won’t be on Lochnagar Road.
See this map: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&tab=wl
I would have thought that these new traffic lights are clearly linked to the development of Tesco town and the general regeneration of the land east of the A11
It would be very interesting to know whether Members of the Strategic Development Committee when considering the development of Tesco Town were advised as to the changes which would need to be made to the A11 and the consequential impact on the traffic flows within the borough and for the A11 as a whole.
If they weren’t one wonders whether anybody was sensible enough to ask.
I think it’s quite possible that these traffic lights will turn out to be a close relative of the Heathrow Taxi lane.
Collecting signatures to lobby for a rethink shouldn’t be too difficult given the amount of stationery traffic which is going to build up at that point……..
It might worthwhile keeping an eye on the toxicity levels of stationery traffic in the area.
There’s a very neat app which I’ve got running in Chrome which has been created by the London Air Quality Network – Environmental Research Group (@ King’s College London) . It gives the readings for the different toxicity levels which are measured. One of their locations which provides readings is at the next junction down (Abbot Road). It should be possible to measure the impact of the traffic lights over time.
The readings at the junction with Abbot Road at 16.00 hours today were as follows
Nitrogen Dioxide – 2
Ozone – 1
PM10 Particulate – 3
You can find out more at http://www.londonair.org.uk/LondonAir/Default.aspx