The Britannia Village development will be directly affected if the Silvertown Tunnel is built, adding traffic to the adjacent A1020 road
Transport for London’s proposed Silvertown Tunnel will hurt communities on the north side of the river Thames – despite what some politicians in the area would have you believe.
It’ll bring more traffic to Silvertown and the Royal Docks, while it’ll encourage Kent commuters to drive to Canary Wharf and the City, adding to congestion through Limehouse and Wapping.
On top of this, it won’t do a thing to solve the poisonous traffic jams on the Blackwall Tunnel northern approach through Bow and Poplar, spewing out pollution past homes and schools.
It’s not just the boroughs of Newham and Tower Hamlets that are threatened by the Silvertown Tunnel; Hackney Council has voiced its concerns about the effects the tunnel would have on its own residents.
Can you help us fight this toxic tunnel? We held an open meeting south of the river last month, now it’s the turn of the north side of the Thames.
We’ll be at Britannia Village Hall, 65 Evelyn Road, London E16 1TU, from 8pm on Tuesday 18 November. It’s a short walk from West Silvertown DLR station and the 474 bus. The Britannia Village development in Silvertown will be one of the areas most affected by the new tunnel, with traffic planned to pour out onto the A1020 which runs past it.
We’ll explain what we’ve done so far, what we’ll be doing in the future, and how you can help us. So we know how many people are coming along, it’d be great if you could register through this link.
Whether you’re from Newham, Tower Hamlets, Hackney, or from south of the Thames, it’d be great to see you. Got any questions? Drop us a line on info@silvertowntunnel.co.uk.
On October 16th, 2013 the “No to Silvertown Tunnel” campaign held a public meeting at The Forum in Greenwich to announce the results of our NO2 air pollution monitoring experiment. The following post features transcripts, slides and video from that meeting.
Chris Taylor: Many thanks to everybody for bearing with us so far. I hope you’ve still got your questions stored up.
First of all, we’d like to introduce Andrew Wood from Clean Air UK, the Network for Clean Air. He has given our campaign valuable support and guidance.
Andrew Wood, Clean Air UK – Network for Clean Air
Thank you, and good evening.
My name is Andrew Wood, and I work with Network for Clean Air. We network people and communities for better air quality and less air pollution. Last year we organised a conference: ‘Cities for Clean Air: London 2012’ – immediately prior to the London Olympics, and this year we organised a programme of citizen science – both in London and elsewhere.
There were three groups that were part of the London programme: No to Silvertown Tunnel (Greenwich) – which you heard about earlier, Stop City Airport in Newham, and Friends of the Earth who surveyed the area around Gallions Reach in Newham. For the London programme we provided: over £1,000 worth of materials and equipment, staff time, information, co-ordination and assistance in whatever way was necessary for the three projects to complete successfully – which they all have. A couple of weeks ago, the results for Newham were presented at City Hall; this evening we heard the results for Greenwich.
The Greenwich citizen science project is particularly inspiring because it genuinely engaged the community. There were 13 volunteers – 10 from Greenwich, 2 from Bexley and one from Lewisham. This is very good indicator of an active and vibrant civil society – exactly what is needed to stop the proposed Silvertown Tunnel. It wouldn’t be the first time a traffic crossing of the Thames was turned around. The Thames Gateway Bridge was canceled by Boris Johnson after a strong public campaign and defeat at public inquiry. Other road schemes have been stopped by residents – for example, the Salisbury Bypass.
Clearly, the Silvertown Tunnel is more than a local road scheme – it’s already designated a national infrastructure project, and it would expand the present crossing from 4 to 8 lanes – a motorway. That will bring traffic blight to Greenwich and neighboring boroughs. It thelonger term it could see a motorway corridor spanning the capital – which would be a complete disaster for London.
There are a whole set of measures which are needed at a regional level to tackle traffic: congestion charging, a workplace parking levy for example or similar demand management measures as they’re known. We also need to put in place infrastructure for a healthy city. We need to engineer health into London. That means for example, a dedicated cycle and pedestrian bridge spanning the Thames at Greenwich. What provision is there, at the moment for cycling? None. We need to make space for cycling. That retains the things which make Greenwich special, and promotes levels exercise – as part of our everyday lives – which are needed to maintain a healthy population.
I would urge you, if you live in Greenwich, Newham ,Lewisham, Tower Hamlets or elsewhere, to join with No to Silvertown Tunnel and articulate your voices – because that way, you will be heard and this motorway crossing will be stopped.
“No to Silvertown Tunnel” would like to thank Andrew Wood and the Network for Clean Air for taking the time to come to Greenwich this evening, and for the invaluable support he has given our citizen science monitoring project.
Our seventh, and final, post will feature the remainder of the meeting with the public Q&A session.
On October 16th, 2013 the “No to Silvertown Tunnel” campaign held a public meeting at The Forum in Greenwich to announce the results of our NO2 air pollution monitoring experiment. The following post features transcripts, slides and video from that meeting.
Chris Taylor: So, you’ve heard a little bit about what we’ve done, a little bit about the pollutants in the atmosphere, about the effects of increased traffic and even, counter-intuitively, how the tunnel is likely to attract even more traffic, and now we’re going to talk about the campaigning aspect, and how we can start to move things forward for ourselves.
I’d like to introduce Siân Berry. Siân’s a sustainable transport campaigner at the Campaign for Better Transport and has been running the campaign ‘Roads to Nowhere’. She was also the Green candidate for Mayor, previously, and has been successful in contributing to defeating the previous Thames Gateway project. So over to you, Siân, thank you.
Siân Berry, Campaign for Better Transport
Hi, thanks for having me.
As introduced, I’m a campaigner, and I work for a group called the Campaign for Better Transport. We were called Transport 2000 when we were involved in campaigning in this area before. My job is basically to look after people who are local campaigners who want to try and stop new roads being built in their areas. I also work on other roads campaigns around the country, and just to talk a little bit more about what Simon and Ian were talking about:
Simon [Birkett] talks about there being powerful laws against breaches of air quality limits, and there really, really are. We know that at a national level, the government is getting very very worried about some of its road building plans being challenged by people who have found places that are just below the limits that are going to be pushed over the limits by new road building plans.
I spent most of this morning talking to local radio and papers and TV in the east of England, because the A14 scheme, which aims to put a giant new road between Cambridge and Huntingdon will deliver traffic directly into two Air Quality Management Areas (LAQM) that are hovering on the border. Nothing like the figures that you already have here in London, but the government and the Highways Agency are worried about the challenge that we’re putting up to that road, because of these very strong laws on air quality. So I think the things we’ve seen here today: the awful air quality you already live in, the fact that this road will put loads more traffic into your area – just dump it into this existing soup of air pollution – is a really strong aspect of what can campaign on.
I’m here partly because my organisation – and when it was called Transport 2000 – was involved in the campaign against the Thames Gateway Bridge. This was proposed for the Gallions Reach site – as John said – since the Dark Ages! But the last time was in the early 2000s, mid 2000s. I’ve been going through our files in the office this, and I’ve got a document that dated back to 2002 on our computers, so presumably we had some before we had computers as well.
So this is the last incarnation of that bridge, and what’s unique about that is a number of things, but mainly that when it came up to go through the planning system the campaigners were given a gift by the promoter of the scheme, the Mayor of London. Not out of the goodness of his heart, but because there were Green Assembly Members there on the Assembly who had a casting vote on his budget. And he wasn’t going to give up on putting the Thames Gateway Bridge into his future budget, and they basically said, “well, if you’re going to do that, can we have tens of thousands of pounds, please, to put towards people objecting to roads so that they can get expert help?”
And that was absolutely decisive.
I heard from Jenny Bates here from Friends of the Earth, who was involved in that, earlier on, that the barristers and QCs on the other side, the barristers working for TfL, were actually very pleased to have people on the other side who were equally knowledgeable and equally able to argue.
The inspector himself – I’m assuming it was a man – said that it was helpful to receive the evidence of the expert witnesses, and that it was novel to see that it came from funds for the promoters. So all of those expert witnesses managed to pick the biggest holes ever in the case for the Thames Gateway Bridge.
So just going back to the previous slide, these were some of the factors concerning the bridge that were actually given within TfL’s own documents. 94% of the benefits would go to car drivers, and only 6% to public transport users. This is despite the fact that, in the areas that were supposed to be regenerated and helped by the scheme – which is what they were claiming – only a quarter to a third of them were car owners. It would increase traffic across a very wide area, lots of boroughs would be affected by extra traffic. Traffic would more than double – as John [Elliot]’s studies show. On many roads, the next junction along would just jam up. So we’ve got the same type of thing going on, and that’s just in terms of TfL’s own assessments.
The objectors gave evidence for about a year, I think, between 2005 and 2006. And eventually in 2007 the inspector wrote his report and they got to see what he thought. And according to my summaries that I’ve got from the campaigners that were working on it at the time, he roundly condemned the scheme. And there’s lots of really good quotes in his report. We’ve produced a summary of the best bits.
But there’s some brilliant examples of exactly the things that we’ve been talking about: the road would cause increased congestion, there’d be loads more traffic, the benefits are not used to relieve the problems you currently have, it would encourage people to make longer journeys, there’s more trips generated by the scheme, it wouldn’t improve safety, it would reduce travel by cycling and walking, public transport would be less well used with the scheme than without it. And those are trends that are just completely alien to London in the last twenty years.
The Thames Gateway Bridge would have set things backwards.
Air quality, well, it was an important issue there, but it’s more important now; we have stronger laws, we have more people campaigning on air quality. But even at the time, he drew this point to the Secretary of State’s attention, that air quality would be worse.
“In an area in which air quality has historically been low…[he] did not regard that as acceptable.”
And we know more now than we did then about the effects of air quality and air pollution, so again, then it was a decisive thing.
There were a lot of economic benefits claimed at the time – you always get this, and we’re going to get it again on the Silvertown tunnel: the city needs growth and therefore needs more traffic. This was thoroughly examined during the enquiry. It’s difficult to make a case against because often they don’t give concrete reasons to back up the case they’re making for. But in the end, the inspector didn’t consider their case to be strong enough or reliable enough to outweigh the disbenefits of the scheme. So even on their own terms, even if you strongly believe that new traffic would create growth, it just doesn’t work out – the inspector thought that was not a good reason.
So basically, what happened then? Five thousand people objected to the scheme as a result of the various campaigners who were funded and who were working long before they were funded, in fact, to raise awareness of the thing. The inspector’s report kind of sat on the shelf for a little while, if I’m not mistaken, and the Secretary of State, TfL wondered what to do about this fact. Eventually the government announced it was going to re-open the enquiry, but then the election intervened – in which I was involved, I was the Green candidate. I didn’t have to think very hard about this, about what was my policy – my policy was to cancel the Thames Gateway Bridge. Boris’s policy was to cancel the Thames Gateway Bridge as well, thanks to heavy lobbying from campaigners so when the election happened in May 2008, he did cancel it.
But before that, while they were waiting for the inspector’s report, campaigners also managed to get funds together to commission a set of consultants to look at alternatives. And that’s well worth a look at because these are alternatives that mostly haven’t happened since 2008 and are really good things to promote.
When you’re going through a consultation, promoting alternatives, trying to ensure that TfL has looked at those alternatives properly can be really decisive in going through the planning process, so I’d highly recommend having a look at it. It did some calculations on benefits and different things, and it did come up with a cable car. Now those of you who complain about the current cable car – it was looking at the actual location of Gallions Reach, as a place that arguably could do with more crossings to get people across, not cars, and that was what was proposed. The one that’s there now is possibly not in the right place – in the middle of a crash zone – and hardly anyone uses it, so don’t blame my colleagues and the consultants for that!
They compared it to a large road scheme, and above the road scheme came all these other sustainable transport options. A ferry, a bridge for walking, cycling and buses: the picture at the bottom there is of a bridge that does this in Vienna, crossing about the same amount of river, and it started off as a bus-only, walking and cycling, and I think you can see on it, just about there, there’s actually been a metro line extension put on it. So it’s provided really good links much much cheaper than a road bridge because of the different weights and things. They also proposed the same thing, a light rail bridge, with walking and cycling alongside, and because it’s quite a long way, they also assessed the costs and benefits of a travelator across the bridge. So I think we’d all prefer to have a nice walking, cycling and travelator bridge against a new tunnel or a new bridge at that point.
And third, ahead of building anything at all, was improve transport policies, better public transport in general and traffic management. So the demand management measures that John talked about earlier: park and ride, congestion charge, that sort of thing, are all far better value and far more effective than building new roads.
So hopefully that cheers you up a bit that this thing can be defeated. It has to go through quite a few more stages of planning. It’s been designated a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project. You get a sort of halfway house with that, you don’t get a full public enquiry. There won’t necessarily be that courtroom yearlong thing. The Nationally Significant Infrastructure planning process is supposed to be finished within six months, but before it starts, the idea is that the promoter has to get out of the way all the consultation, and do the consultation really properly.
The local councils get to sign off that the consultation’s been done properly, local people get to campaign and raise awareness and get their objections in early. You can do quite a lot of back-and-forth challenging them for their business cases and things beforehand. If they don’t do all of that, and haven’t done the consultation properly, the examiners are trained to treat that as a bad thing.
I’ve been through a couple of road things under this new process – it is quite new. The first examination last year was quite shoddily done, and it was given approval – it was the Heysham M6 Link up in Lancashire – and we did take it to the High Court to object to the processes that went through, and the High Court did rule that it was pretty inadequate, the way they’d done it, but wasn’t prepared to go as far as overturning the approval. But some of the comments about how improperly it was done were very useful.
The next one that’s going through the same process is in George Osborne’s constituency, in Cheshire, it’s called the A556. For that we’ve identified exactly the air quality problem, with the air quality being slightly below and going slightly above. Their own assessment of it accepts this, it says ‘we must acknowledge that this potential breach is occurring’ so we’ve raised that very strongly with the inspector there, so we’ll see how we do with that, it’s kind of a test case. You have the very strongest case for raising these issues here I think.
To cheer us all up, here’s a picture of all the campaigners – this is more or less the same panel from a meeting at City Hall a couple of weeks ago: we’ve got Simon [Birkett], Ian [Mudway], John [Elliott], Jenny Bates from Friends of the Earth, Darren Johnson of the Greens, and Alan [Haughton] from the Stop City Airport campaign, we’ve got the Network for Clean Air, Friends of the Earth: fantastic experience with exactly this area.
Also, we have other experts on hand – there’s Campaign for Better Transport – as I said, I’m here to help with campaigning. And all these organisations – these national and London transport organisations – joined us in a joint response to last year’s consultation, and we’re all firmly against it as well, and will be helping to campaign against it.
So I think with the ideas we’ve got, with the laws that there are, with the resources that we can get together – I mean, we’re not going to be given £50,000 by Boris, but we can raise money through grant organisations, through fund-raising – and I think we can get a comparable set of experts together to challenge this and beat it again.
This is: “New roads equal new traffic” you must always remember that – it doesn’t equal […] it just equals new traffic. And this is Alan and me crashing the launch of the Bridge the Gap campaign with a giant banner, so we can handle things like that as well!
I’m @Roads2Nowhere – I’ve been tweeting from that account this evening – there’s links to documents there that I’ve recommended.
So I hope you’ll be interested to check it out, that you’ll follow the campaign, that you’ll make sure you join in with our events, and if we all work together we can I think defeat this one, because it’s one of the worst ideas I’ve ever seen. Thank you very much!.
“No to Silvertown Tunnel” would like to thank Siân Berry for taking the time to come to Greenwich and discuss some of the issues around new river crossings with us.
Subsequent posts will feature the remainder of the meeting and presentations from Andrew Wood, along with the public Q&A session.
On October 16th, 2013 the “No to Silvertown Tunnel” campaign held a public meeting at The Forum in Greenwich to announce the results of our NO2 air pollution monitoring experiment. The following post features transcripts, slides and video from that meeting.
Chris Taylor, No to Silvertown Tunnel
Well, good evening everybody. I’m very, very pleased and surprised to see so many faces here tonight.
Hello, and welcome to this public meeting arranged by the No to Silvertown campaign. Many, many thanks to all of you for taking the time to be here this evening.
As you may be aware, the proposed Silvertown Tunnel is intended to be built not very far from here. As a group, we are already concerned about the air quality in the area, and so we are worried about the potential impacts such a tunnel may have.
We’re going to first talk about our experiences monitoring air pollution around the borough of Greenwich, and then we have guest speakers to give short talks about their areas of expertise, and to discuss the effects a new tunnel would have on our local community, if it were to be built.
First we will hear from Stewart Christie and Darryl Chamberlain about the work we do as the No to Silvertown Tunnel campaign, and our citizen science project, and then we will hear from Ian Mudway, lecturer in Respiratory Toxicology at Kings, Simon Birkett, founding director of the Clean Air in London campaign, John Elliot, an independent Transport Consultant, and Sian Berry, transport campaigner at the Campaign for Better Transport who also leads the campaign Roads to Nowhere.
I am sure you are going to have many, many questions as this is something that people have many different views upon, however we hope the presentations will cover the majority of the questions you may have. So we would ask that if you could try to hold on to any questions, any ideas, any thoughts, until the end and we are going to have a nice, big Q&A session for a while, open to everybody.
Also, you should see a card on your seat which has all of the contact details for No to Silvertown Tunnel. Please have a look at the website, you can see it scrolling behind me with all of the data and information we have gathered.
Finally, you may have seen some clipboards being handed around. If you would like to hear more about the project, please leave your contact details. Also, there is a box, and we would really, really love it if people who had skills, time, or ideas to contribute, or to tick to say they are interested in becoming more involved in our campaign.
So, thank you very, very much for turning up tonight. I’ll hand over to Darryl and Stewart to give us a presentation on our citizen science project and the No to Silvertown campaign.
Darryl Chamberlain, No to Silvertown Tunnel
Hello. I’m Darryl Chamberlain, one of the people who started this campaign. Firstly, I’d like to thank you for giving up part of your evening. It’s really appreciated.
A quick word first on what the Silvertown Tunnel actually is. It’s a proposal that has been around in various shapes and forms for quite some time. The current plan is to link the Greenwich Peninsula with the Royal Docks. There will be a road tunnel coming off the A102 at Tunnel Avenue and it will go under the cable car, and emerge at the Lower Lea Crossing roundabout, just over the water in Silvertown. If it gets built you will be able to drive through it. You won’t be able to walk. You won’t be able to cycle.
The Silvertown Crossing proposal
TfL’s consultation last year was packed with leading questions. It was, more or less, would you like to solve all of the traffic problems in your area? One of the questions was, “How many times do you cross the river by road?” That has nothing to do with whether or not I want more traffic coming down the motorway that goes through my community.
You would have hoped that our Council would have supported our community. You would have hoped that our MP would have supported our community. In fact, what actually happened, was this.
Greenwich Council’s “Bridge the Gap” campaign launch
That’s the leader of Greenwich Council, the local MP, some business leaders, and other people they got together to support their campaign to build this thing. Greenwich publishes a weekly newspaper which featured this campaign in eight successive issues. There was no real room for open, honest debate.
I was talking with Adam Bienkov about this in December, when TfL launched this consultation, and we thought the council should be told where to stick this campaign. Nobody else locally was actually campaigning against Silvertown – people were maybe scared of the power of Kent drivers. We don’t know.
So, we launched a petition which went into the consultation. We had 373 signatures by the time the consulation closed, and we managed to get quite a bit of attention in the local media, for which we were very grateful.
The “No to Silvertown” petition at change.org
We also asked the local residents to ask questions at a local Council meeting, and in 28 questions Greenwich Council could not offer a single shred of evidence to justify its support for Silvertown. I put a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to Greenwich about this and ten months on they are still refusing to offer up their evidence. In fact, Greenwich said it is just going to leave Boris Johnson to come up with the answers instead. I actually asked Boris myself at the State of London debate this year and he didn’t come up with anyting either. He just blustered.
So, after all this, what next?
We were approached by Andrew Wood from the organisation Network for Clean Air. He had organised funding for some pollution tubes. What are these pollution tubes? Here’s one…
NO2 diffusion tube
They measure ambient concentrations of Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) in the air. So, all we needed were some volunteers, some cable ties and some stools to stand on. The idea was that we would leave these on lamposts, a couple of metres up so they wouldn’t get nicked – we did put one outside here and it did get nicked – and then we would leave them up for four weeks.
Spotted Darryl up a lamppost in Eltham today. Still trying to work out why. New fitness regime or some other mystery mission.?
Here are some young, fit and healthy volunteers putting the tubes up. The volunteers who put those tubes up are sat around the hall now, so thank you very much for taking part.
13 volunteers placed 56 NO2 diffusion tubes around Greenwich borough
After four weeks we took them down, sent them back to the lab, and then got the results back. Basically like your old holiday snaps. So we did this, thirteen of us on a sunny Sunday afternoon in June. We chose forty locations along the A102 and A2, which form the approach to the tunnel, and also along the A206, which runs trough Greenwich and Charlton. One other thing I should say about the tubes is that it was part of a bigger funding package for other campaigns north of the river, about Silvertown, and for the Gallions Reach bridge as well. Some tubes were also put up around East Ham, Beckton and North Woolwich but this meeting is about Greenwich, and about Silvertown.
So, we put 56 tubes up and four weeks later we took 53 tubes down. We then got these results from the lab.
These won’t make much sense to you, and they didn’t make much sense to any of us either, so Stewart created this map.
No to Silvertown Tunnel NO2 air pollution monitoring results – June 2013
Stewart Christie, No to Silvertown Tunnel
Thank you.
Many of you may have seen an earlier version of this map which we have changed slightly in the last 24 hours. As you may know, 40 micrograms per cubic metre (40 µg/m3) is the EU limit for NO2 pollution. The circles you see in green here are the areas that are below 30µg/m3. Those in orange are the ones that are below 40µg/m3. Now, below 40µg/m3 is still an issue for public health which I think will be touched upon later on in this session.
The red circles that you can see are the areas that are between 40µg/m3 and 60µg/m3 – that’s 50% above the Eu maximum. Those in black are the ones that are above 50% of the legal maximum, 50% above the legal limit.
As you can see, we were slightly surprised by the results. The locations we put these tubes in weren’t actually on the A102 or the A2 itself, because that isn’t actually publicly accessible. So, we targeted side roads and we targeted areas that are around the main route itself.
No to Silvertown Tunnel NO2 air pollution monitoring results – June 2013 – Peninsula and Woolwich Flyover
Now, as you can see from the map, around the top where there would be new approaches, we got some pretty high red results. But, around the centre here along the Woolwich Flyover, we actually have some very high ones – 71s, 69s – and, interestingly, along the A205 itself, along the bottom road.
No to Silvertown Tunnel NO2 air pollution monitoring results – June 2013 – Eltham
As well as that, we had some high readings further back, down by Eltham. As you probably know, around here, the road narrows and there are less carriageways than up top. There are many tailbacks down the bottom here in Eltham and we think this is one of the reasons there were such high readings.
At the same time that we were doing our monitoring experiment we discovered that Greenwich had been doing their own monitoring experiment since 2005. I put an FoI request in to the Council and, after a bit of hassle, I did get their results.
We have our own results from [June] 2013 and, on this next slide, you can see the results of Greenwich’s monitoring, for the entire borough, for the previous month. You can see that the red spots, and the black spots, correlate with our own findings.
Greenwich Council NO2 air pollution monitoring results – May 2013
Now, some of you may be thinking, “well, these results aren’t too high, they aren’t too bad”. You have to bear in mind that NO2 levels change according to the month of the year, the season. This result from Greenwich, for 2012, shows Banchory Road and you can see that there is a dip in the spring and summer months. The Greenwich map I have just shown you is from May, ours was from June, and you can see that seasonally it is a bit less.
So, from Greenwich’s data, I have mapped out for tonight the results from December 2012. As you can see, it’s slightly different.
Greenwich Council NO2 air pollution monitoring results – December 2012
There are far more black readings, there are far more red readings, there are only a few below the legal maximum. If we compare you can see the difference. In fact, there is only one green spot, one result below 30µg/m3.
Interestingly, some of Greenwich’s results have “background” areas. There is a background area here that is Shrewsbury House in Shooters Hill, which has no main roads beside it, and has a figure that is approaching the maximum. It goes to show that the traffic levels across the borough do affect areas that you wouldn’t expect.
Greenwich Council NO2 air pollution monitoring results – December 2012 – Shooters Hill
All of the data is available at our website, which I hope you’ve had a look at already, and if you haven’t, please have a look. You can download anything, you can look at your own area, you can look at the results going back to 2005.
I hope that explains why we are so concerned about our own readings.
Subsequent posts will feature the remainder of the meeting and presentations from Dr. Ian Mudway, Simon Birkett, John Elliot and Sian Berry.
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