In Spring this year, the Labour-run Westminster City Council announced a consultation on the designs for the C51 cycle lane, which is due to run the length of Hamilton Terrace.
After looking at the details of the consultation closely, your Conservative Councillors for Abbey Road were left very concerned about the impact this cycle lane will have on local residents, in terms of the impact on
parking, as well as safety for pedestrians, our disabled residents and cyclists themselves.
We believe the plans that have been put forward by the council are seriously flawed – in the most intensive option, the cycle lane involves the removal of all of the central parking on Hamilton Terrace – with residents losing up to 130 parking spaces by the most accurate estimates, a figure far higher than the council suggests.
This will also affect surrounding streets such as Carlton Hill, Marlborough Place, Hall Road, and St John’s Wood Road, whose residents all use parking spaces on Hamilton Terrace.
Two of the options put forward for consideration would put the safety of cyclists themselves at risk – putting them at risk of dooring (whereby parked car doors open directly onto a narrow cycle lane), limited visibility
around driveways, and complicated arrangements at junctions.
We all want to see more journeys completed by bike in Westminster, and it is important that there are safe routes for cyclists. However, Hamilton Terrace is a quiet, residential street that does not warrant segregated
cycle lanes and a major upheaval for its residents.
Despite incredibly strong local opposition, with many hundreds of responses to the consultation, we remain concerned that the council is going to try and push the most disruptive option – leaving residents on
Hamilton Terrace and the surrounding streets with inadequate parking and a visual eye-sore in the form of brightly painted cycle lanes.
We are also very concerned that these plans have been formed using old traffic data from 2018, which does not reflect the journeys that are being made today.
There is very little time left to make our voices heard in this process. Therefore, we are calling on all local residents to stand up to these plans and to say no to Option 2 and Option 3.
Residents of Hamilton Terrace will be presenting a petition to Westminster City Council at the next Full Council meeting on Wednesday, 12 November.
Please support your neighbours by signing this petition, and hopefully we can protect this beautiful street from Labour’s dreadful plans.
I, the undersigned, call upon Westminster City Council to preserve parking in St. John’s Wood and safety of residents on Hamilton Terrace!
I am opposed to the design options considered for Hamilton Terrace that would remove well over 100 parking spaces and endanger residents due to unintuitive and dangerous kerbside cycle lanes.
