Shouldn't safer walking and cycling and cleaner air be for all areas though?The large area of social housing around Dukes Meadows and the park itself have no measures to reduce car, coach and lorry traffic.The recent works to install parking bay sup on the Riverside Promenade encourages car traffic. Yellow lining the existing tarmac bays behind the band stand for coaches encourages coach traffic right into the park.To argue that creating formal bays is good because it is "regularising" a situation in which cars were parking on the grass anyway, is sophistry.The ugly mess of orange barriers in front of Cavendish School on Edensor Road drives cars to the road at the back of the school, Alexandra Gardens, which has no traffic / parking controls so is double parked and congested morning and evening.No parking controls are proposed mid week for Dukes Meadows, so all the new parking bays will be used for commuter parking and lorries, vans and coaches will use it to park up.All these vehicles will cross Staveley and Alexandra Gardens to go to park in the Meadows.As restrictions are introduced elsewhere, the area in and around Dukes Meadows, which have no protection are increasingly used as a free car park.At weekends, when charges are proposed, they are low 50p an hour and unlimited time wise, unusual in a park. The park will be used as ancillary parking for events in the clubs, which occupy an area three times the size of the public area of the park, but have very little parking. Nothing has been done to encourage visitors to the club not to drive, by making the spaces in the park short term, say two hours. Dukes Meadows and the estates around it are different to the rest of Chiswick in that they are identified as areas of relative deprivation in an otherwise affluent area. How do you describe a situation in which a relatively poorer area is being subjected to increasing levels of car, lorry and coach traffic, whilst great lengths are gone to t protect more affluent areas from traffic? The vocal lobby group that is active in defending measures in the affluent parts of Chiswick is silent on the situation in a around the Meadows.
Kathleen Healy ● 873d