Hammersmith Bridge — what an opportunity
Hammersmith Bridge is closed to motor traffic. And will be so indefinitely.
Which I think is mostly a good thing. If you’re a bus user, then it looks like you’ve got a long detour, and I don’t think that’s a good thing,
Hammersmith Bridge normally supports (haha) 20,000 vehicles a day, many of them quite heavy — like buses, vans up to a certain size, and the frequent SUV. And the last estimate I saw was that making the bridge suitable for this volume and weight of machinery would take up to 2 years, and cost more than £30m.
I think we need to grab this opportunity with both hands, so here are just a few ideas — mostly shamelessly stolen from Twitter — of what we could be doing right now:
- Working group of engineers, TfL, borough officers to plan how to support the replacement buses
- Ask local schools to tell parents about the closure
- Find out if we can get some temporary Santander cycle stands nearby at each end of the bridge
- Detailed analysis of air quality impacts in the area, and in areas where we think the traffic displaces to
- Data gathering with local businesses to understand the impact of lower motor traffic volumes
- Immediate trial of some form of bike taxi service to support the most vulnerable users who still need to get around. (Maybe see if we could set up a local “Cycling Without Age” chapter?)
- Ask a London Assembly member to sponsor a meeting of affected and interested groups as soon as possible, to look at how we can make sure this remains an opportunity, rather than an expensive sore
Schools will be back next week, so that will give a better indication of impact. But before that, it would be great to see people getting together to make this the new walking and cycling bridge that millions of Londoners want.
Watch this lovely snippet of people just enjoying the bridge!
