Marylebone must now be the most polluted residential area in Europe, hemmed in by Oxford Street’s stream of diesel buses and bisected by Marylebone Road’s river of traffic avoiding the congestion charge.
Both of these hazards result from mistakes which should have been corrected long ago, but the easiest one to correct quickly is Marylebone Road’s undeserved A-road status as the A501. This would stop sat-navs diverting traffic through Marylebone on the mistaken assumption that, although a longer route, it’s a faster road.
Westminster Council believes that ‘the major source of NOX emissions is from domestic and commercial combustion.’ This is true for Westminster as a whole but is unlikely to apply to Oxford Street or Marylebone Road because on those streets measured NO2 (Nitrogen Dioxide, a poisonous gas generated by diesel engines) drops to a quarter of its daytime level at night.
Modernising the antiquated routing of buses along Oxford Street definitely belongs in the ‘very difficult’ box, but the heavy commercial and private traffic using Marylebone Road is another matter. A lot of this traffic uses satellite navigation in cities because of the complexity of gyratories and one-ways. The routing software sends traffic from east London to Birmingham via the Marylebone Road even though there is another route nearly ten per cent shorter and notionally only 3 minutes longer than the preferred route. Three minutes is false precision when there is no allowance for congestion. The shorter route is via Holloway Road, which has a fraction of the peak hour NOX of the longer ‘preferred’ route through Marylebone.
Solution: change the A501 designation of the Marylebone Road to a B number (e.g. B501), to signal to the regularly-updated sat-nav routing software that this is not the fastest road between Britain’s two biggest cities. A-numbers are regularly changed to B-numbers when they are bypassed by new and faster A-roads or motorways. Sat-navs avoid B-roads when choosing the notionally fastest route.
Baker Street and Gloucester Place form the A41. It would also make sense to change their designations to B-numbers, causing sat-nav systems to route through-traffic not destined for Marylebone on less-polluted roads in and out of London. This is consistent with Westminster Council’s Baker Street 2-way scheme. With Marylebone Road, however, there is no need to wait for a Council traffic scheme before re-designating it as a B-road.
I have made this suggestion to local stakeholders who have passed the suggestion to Transport for London (TfL), the Mayor’s transport planning body. TfL may be implementing it, or it may be sitting in the in-tray of someone who doesn’t realise that 9400 Londoners die each year as a result of air pollution. That’s one out of every five deaths in London, each one losing an average of 12 years of life.
Westminster City Council: can you please impress on TfL the immediate opportunity to save lives in Marylebone?