"Step by Stealthy Step"

1.       We fear that if Barnet does turn Sanders Lane into a two lane highway, the destruction of a second, longer, magnificently picturesque woodland walkway will follow.

2.       What Barnet coyly refers to as “wider strategic movements on the highway network” is council-speak for  building a new East-West highway from the new 2500 homes on the site of the Mill Hill East Area Action Plan (AAP) to the A1 to provide access to the North Circular and M1.

3.       As things stand Sanders Lane seems to be the Council’s preferred option to develop these “wider strategic movements.”  Why would they end at the junction of Sanders Lane and Devonshire Road?  We are talking here of a lane  just 500 yards or so.

4.       And of course it won’t end with Sanders Lane.  Because the logical extension of concreting Sanders Lane is to continue along Ashley Walk to the A1, leaving a one and a half mile concrete scar in place of two of Mill Hill’s few remaining rural idylls.

5.       Both Sanders Lane and Ashley Lane offer a rare and uplifting escape for countless members of our community from the stresses of urban life; both teem with wildlife; both make Mill Hill special.  Neither  need be sacrificed to meet Mill Hill’s future transport needs.

6.       But the Council does need to come clean about what exactly it intends instead of proceeding step by stealthy step.

7.       The Council deny that their plans for Sanders Lane are part of the AAP due to go to Public Inquiry later this year.  This is manifestly not the case. The evidence shows the two are inextricably linked. None of the maps published by Barnet Council as part of its “consultation” exercise held at Frith Manor Primary school last year included even this first stealthy step.  Though not readily accessible, the only map that did show it, could be found on the Council’s website - that is, for the few of us who knew where to look.  

 8.       This falls well short of the “highest standard of transparency, integrity and accountability” which the Council claims to have set itself.  For a proposal with such profound implications for the environment and quality of life, the onus was on the Council to alert the Community to this, not to leave it to the Community to discover it by chance.  The Council should have leafleted all residents affected by this proposal in advance of the AAP “consultation” at Frith Manor  to allow sufficient time to prepare objections. As it is many of us have only just heard learned of the Council’s intentions. Why has the Council not been more up front? It begs the : what has the Council got to hide?

9.       Is the answer, perhaps, that the Council is determined to build this highway but anticipating the widespread opposition that it will inevitably provoke, has sneakily resorted to a piecemeal process which increasingly stack the cards in its favour with each stealthy step? 

10.   If not, why at paragraph 5.8.14 of the AAP has the Council used such clear and unambiguous language: “The route is not required as part of the AAP but in the longer term will be reopened to improve borough wide –East-West movement?”  If the use of the world ‘will’ was a mistake, let the Council say so without equivocation.

11.   Consider the facts:  the first stealthy step was the Council’s published plan to align with Sanders Lane, the new East-West highway cutting through the site of the AAP itself, despite the community’s clearly expressed preference for this to be further north. The latter option is by far the most logical and least disruptive because its exit onto Bittacy Hill would be more closely aligned with an existing East-West link to Devonshire Road, namely Engel Park. This the Council’s own consultants, Peter Brett Associates, have assessed as having the “environmental capacity to accommodate the predicted increase in traffic” generated by the new development.

12.    If the Council succeeds in getting the Planning Inspector’s approval for their plans to align the AAP’s East –West highway with Sanders Lane, it will be the prelude to their second stealthy step:  what is now claimed to be merely “under consideration “will be turned, literally, into a concrete proposal. Sanders Lane, they will argue, is now the natural and inevitable link to Devonshire Road, so the highway must be built.  

13.   A 2^nd public inquiry will follow. No doubt in the build up, the Council will deny they have any firm proposal to link Devonshire Road  with the AI by concreting over Ashley Lane, that separates Hendon Golf Course from Hendon cemetery.  It just so happens that the Sanders Lane exit to Devonshire Road is exactly at the entrance of Ashley Walk which leads to Ashley Lane. Only when the Council have won approval for concreting over Sanders Lane will this third and final stealthy step be announced.

14.   Save Sanders Lane and BASRA urge Barnet Council to assure the community that these three stealthy steps are furthest from their minds when they speak of the “wider strategic movements on the highway network.”   So, no more coded language, please Barnet. Plain English is the way to keep faith with your aspiration to be a model of transparency and accountability. Just tells us exactly what part does Ashley Walk play in your future thinking; and if it doesn’t, why do you still want to concrete over Sanders Lane when your own consultants have acknowledged that Engel Park - the existing connection from Bittacy to Devonshire Road - can cope with the extra traffic generated by the AAP?

15.   Barnet Council burbles on about “sustainability” . But everybody knows that the exponential growth of car journeys [especially in London] is unsustainable and every traffic engineer knows that the way to fuel that growth is by building more and more roads, especially roads which are not absolutely necessary.

16.   To quote Professor Phil Godwin,  who advised the present government on its first Transport White Paper, it was back in 1925 that, according to a traffic engineer called Bressey, the opening of a new section on the Great West Road demonstrated “the remarkable manner in which new roads generate new traffic.” 

17.   This, of course, was soon forgotten, remembered again in the 1960s, forgotten again, then  remembered again in 1994 when SACTRA [the Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment] published a report on what it called 'induced' traffic.

18.   As Godwin explains the average traffic flow on 151 improved roads was 10.4% higher than forecasts which omitted estimates of induced traffic, and  16.4% higher than forecast on 85 alternative routes that improvements had been intended to relieve. In a dozen more detailed case studies the measured increase in traffic ranged from 9% to 44% in the short run, and 20% to 178% in the longer run.  “The conclusion was ‘an average road improvement, for which traffic growth due to all other factors is forecast correctly, will see an additional [i.e. induced] 10% of base traffic in the short term and 20% in the long term’" says Godwin.

19.   Or to put it another way, if this act of vandalism in Mill Hill takes place, in another twenty years, there will demands for yet another concrete scar across another stretch of Mill’s shrinking green landscape.

20.   We all know there is only one solution to carmageddon, to sustainable living, to better quality of life, especially for our children: and that is to make a real effort to keep congestion at bay by getting into the habit of alternative methods of transport: more cycling, more walking, more car sharing, more public transport [especially buses – which seem  underused in Barnet], much better coordinted roadworks, more working at home, at least for those fortunate enough to have that option.

21.    Let Barnet Council be brave and bold enough to lead the way and make it clear to everyone in Mill Hill: the AAP is an opportunity to try and change our habits of a lifetime instead of indulging an addiction with yet another road to nowhere.