100 signatures reached
To: Hackney Council
Stop the Road Closures around Walford Rd
This campaign has ended.
The Cabinet will be voting on whether these closures should go ahead at the end of April. We, the parents, families and friends of Grasmere school are calling on Hackney Council and the cabinet to scrap these road closure plans and consider other ways of addressing the rat-running problems that don’t risk harm to the pupils of these schools.
Why is this important?
Each of these schools already has high levels of pollution, which is known to increase the risk of children developing life-threatening respiratory illness. Children are especially vulnerable to the impacts of pollution, and it's very worrying that the impact report acknowledges at least two schools have or will have pollution levels that exceed the EU annual legal limit for pollution.
The authors of the report actually make it clear that their modelling (an estimate of what would happen to pollution if the closures go ahead) has massively underestimated the likely impact the increased traffic will have on these schools – it underestimates the actual levels of pollution (which has been measured at the council for over a year using diffusion tubes) at local schools by as much as 15%. Monitoring gives a more accurate picture than modelling, which is just an estimate.
Without the closures, air quality at these schools would have been improving because the bus fleet is getting cleaner, but the closures will cancel out those improvements and actually worsen school air quality.
