10-04-2025
LTN increases traffic past primary school by ‘frightening' 700pc
A Low Traffic Neighbourhood has led to a 700 per cent jump in traffic past a primary school and nursery, campaigners have claimed.
Lib Dem-controlled Bath and North East Somerset council has been condemned as 'irresponsible' for establishing the 'experimental' LTN next to Bath Spa University's campus.
The scheme, in which bollards were erected to block off what was previously a key route for people getting across the city, has displaced hundreds of cars on to local side streets since it was introduced in November, residents say.
A residents' group paid for a professional traffic monitoring company to count vehicles in roads immediately adjacent to the Lansdown LTN.
The Heart of Lansdown Conservation Group (HLCG) said the survey established there had been a720 per cent increase in vehicles passing Kingswood Junior and Nursery School.
Nearly 1000 cars a day pass school
In the week in March when the figures were collected, there was an average of 951 cars per day passing northbound along Sion Road, the location of the nursery and school.
Prior to the LTN, there were just 116 per day, HLCG said, citing data gathered by consultancy Smart Transport Hub.
'It is frightening and highly irresponsible that a council can push up to 1,000 cars on a daily basis past a junior and nursery school,' said a spokesman for the group.
'Local residents – who know their area better than anyone - have been warning the council for months (through safety reports, heavily signed petitions, correspondence and successful High Court action at a cost to the council of over £40,000), and even before the implementation of the [experimental traffic restriction order], of the safety issues.
'It should be noted that Sion Road is not only a narrow residential road but also within the proposed LTN itself – the very area where the council is seeking to reduce traffic.'
The Lansdown LTN was installed in November on a trial basis for six months, prompting 3,600 people to sign a petition against it.
But residents are worried that the trial – legally known as an 'experimental traffic restriction order' – will become permanent, following the example set by another LTN elsewhere in Bath.
The LTN on Bath's New Sydney Place led to accusations that the council's imposition of the anti-car scheme had 'eroded trust in politicians'.
Fear of zones being imposed
Despite the strength of local feeling, the council made the New Sydney Place LTN permanent in March.
And Manda Rigby, the council's cabinet member for highways, suggested last summer that future LTNs could be imposed in Bath without the public being given a say.
The council has previously insisted that residents were properly consulted in advance of the schemes being put in place.
Council cabinet member Mark Elliott, who took the decision to make the New Sydney Place LTN permanent, was reported by the Local Democracy Service at the tie as saying: 'The accusations of corruption ... I think are frankly offensive and I know them not to be true.
'The insinuation that there is anything other than sound decision making based on reasonable decisions, rather than backhanders or whatever it is you are suggesting, it is just wrong.'
Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, formerly the MP for North East Somerset, previously called on the council to scrap its LTNs.
'The car is an essential,' Sir Jacob told The Telegraph in the run-up to the 2024 General Election.
'It's not a luxury of the well-to-do, it is an essential for the least well-off for going to work, for doing their shopping, for leading their ordinary lives.'
