Kingston Council’s proposal to redesign Eden Street with broader pavements, dedicated cycle lanes and one-way bus routes gained widespread support from residents and workers of the busy thoroughfare.
Employees of local businesses welcomed the council’s plans for Eden Street. Sam Reed, a cashier at Banquet Records, said: “If it helps the shops pull in more money and keeps brick-and-mortar businesses afloat, then I’m all for it, even if that means a little more traffic.”
The wider footpaths proposal, which aims to reduce congested pavements and collisions with vehicles on roads, also found favour with locals who use the street.
Jahavelle Taylor, who commutes to college in Kingston, said that despite not liking the construction, it was necessary to improve the safety of the street. She said: “Sometimes I have trouble with running into cyclists as they tend to drive so fast that I might end up being injured.”
Cyclists agreed that sharing the carriageway with a large volume of traffic makes it extremely dangerous to cycle on Eden Street.
Lakshmi Sunita Nair, a student at Kingston University, said “I have to ride between the buses, which is often dangerous.”
She added: “The situation on Eden Street is quite bad as there aren’t enough safety measures…so I think it’s necessary for these changes to be made.”
The changes come just a few months after an incident on Eden Street in May, where a bus driver was arrested for injuring a pedestrian.
Over the last five years, there have been 971 collisions in the borough, five of which resulted in fatality, raising safety concerns about travel in the area.
These developments align with the goals of the Mayor of London’s ‘Vision Zero’ initiative which aims to reduce serious injuries or deaths caused on London’s roads by 2041.
