They may claim they are improving connections but we believe that, for people on cycles, these plans for the redevelopment of the Lewisham Centre are incoherent, badly thought through and unnecessarily restrictive. The very people that the Developer should be encouraging to use cycles to access the new shops and services will be deterred from cycling and will resort to motorised transport. Here we are talking about families, the elderly, people using adaptive cycles etc.
The submitted plans wholly fail to deal with the well-established issues of area-wide cycling dislocation caused by the current Lewisham Centre. This is a one-off opportunity to fix these access and people movement issues.
Two essential elements must be changed in this application:
- A formal, fully thought through, design needs to be prepared for Molesworth Street now. We are calling on the Developer, Lewisham Council and Transport for London to work together with community groups like us to produce a design including fully-protected cycle track(s). The submitted plans appear to rely on the sub-standard interim arrangement of cycle lanes currently in place (though suspended during Lewisham High Street construction works). Molesworth Street is a critical part of the proposed Lewisham Spine protected cycle lanes from Deptford to Downham.
- The proposed East-West access routes through the new Lewisham Centre, particularly the Northern and Southern ones, must be designed in a way that they can be fully cyclable. The planning application states that the Northern route will not be cyclable and the southern one will be cyclable ‘subject to a safety audit’. To solve the area-wide dislocation issues these routes must be cycle-enabled to allow local people access to the centre and the means to traverse the area safely on cycles thereby avoiding the intimidiating and hazardous Lewisham Gateway highway junction.
Please find our full response to the Planning Application here