We must have been driving on different roads Steve because from summer 2008 to early 2014 my office was in Teddington, so certainly going to work I'd nearly always drive south from Busch Corner, either by car, on a bike or occasionally running, and it was never free flowing. Although to be fair, my journeys would always be around 07.15-07.30 ish.Thinking about it coming back home I rarely travelled up from the A316 via Twickenham Road or St. Margarets Road because the traffic alerts on Google Maps would always direct me to stay on the A316 and go over Kew Bridge. But I recall many times when I turned off the roundabout onto Twickenham Road and then got as far as Ivbridge Retail Park and immediately hit a wall of traffic heading north.Doesn't really make sense why our recollections are so different...Sadly I think these days there's two camps when it comes to cars and traffic, one camp thinks that cars should be left to drive on every street, that every new residential unit should have sufficient parking, and basically that the state should adopt a laissez faire attitude, whilst the other camp thinks that the powers that be should do whatever it deter to deter private car use.Going maybe 5-10 years back I'd say I was in the former camp, but now I'm firmly in the latter camp. I'm not remotely anti-car, but there are way too many unnecessary journeys being made by single occupancy vehicles.And in the same way that I'm all for government intervention in seeking to deter population growth (which I know is never going to happen in my lifetime), for similar reasons I'm generally supportive of any attempts to deter over-reliance on the private car for unnecessary journeys.Whether the closure of Church Street achieves that or not is another matter entirely, but as I keep saying, the suggesting that the closure has been such a complete game-changer in terms of traffic flows isn't accurate.
Adam Beamish ● 2823d