🚲 How to make streets nice again: Walthamstow to Leyton by bike without traffic

You can cycle from Walthamstow in north east London to Leyton up the road entirely on quiet streets and protected cycle lanes.

The route is 4.5km long (2.8 miles) and makes use of various LTNs around Waltham Forest as well as protected cycle lanes on Lea Bridge Road and Hoe Street, as well as other modal filters and quiet streets in the area.

If you find this video useful or you just enjoy watching it please remember to subscribe to the channel and hit the bell icon so you’re alerted to new videos, as I try to post new ones like it every week.

And if you like what the channel is doing and want to support it, you can also contribute to the London Cycle Routes Patreon below. It really helps keep the channel going:

http://patreon.com/londoncycleroutes

You can see a digital map of the route and download a GPS/GPX file to use on whatever device or app you want here:

https://www.komoot.com/tour/2600690848?share_token=aF9niG66Go6pJO4EyziO8IaUGsxErLBzF9liK8DKR4SIkyoHrv&ref=wtd

And you can find a viewer-created and maintained map of all the London Cycle Routes videos here:

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1h9Hxm57fPvZmcuSXajM_Wu0G0s6f_bs&ll=51.505213496092054%2C-0.1285238120117249&z=12

I also highly recommend the Safe Cycle London map for route planning, which is compiled by @SafeCycleLDN on twitter:

https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1XlpvN9R-Wg7qZHyezO8y-eVlftr4e0WX&hl=en&ll=51.516975804561255%2C-0.21828576419061996&z=12

Hello and welcome back to London Cycle Routts. Today I’ll be showing you how to cycle from Waltham Stow in northeast London to Leighton just down the road. This ride takes a little over 15 minutes and you can do the whole thing on quiet streets and protected cycle lanes while passing some brilliant new public spaces along the way. By public transport, the same journey takes more like half an hour and requires you to go by bus. So, cycling is a great option for making this local trip. If you find this video useful or you just enjoy watching it, then please don’t forget to subscribe to the channel as I try to post new videos just like it every week. I’d also like to say a huge thank you to everyone who supports the channel on Patreon. if you’d like to contribute too, then you can find a link in the description below the video. All right, let’s get going. So, we’re starting on Forest Road by the Bell Junction in the middle of Walam Stow. And the first thing we’re going to do is turn around and head up Howard Road. I say up because Howard Road is a pretty steep hill, though it’s a manageable one and it’s relatively short as well. There’s no through traffic on these first streets that we’re on, so you’re unlikely to run into many cars. And thankfully, when we do run into one here, the driver is really polite and waits to let us past, which is a nice surprise. We are looking to turn off right in a moment down a little alleyway called Aubry Way. And I’m a big fan of how this has been done. Even though it’s really quite a small place, the council has found space for greenery, trees, a rustic surface, and a nice little informal cycle path, which makes this area a bit more permeable by bike and is a useful cut through for us today. Really nice touches like that, I think, let you know that you’re in the London burough of Waltham Forest, which does a really great job with this kind of thing. We use this parallel zebra crossing to get over Church Hill. And we find ourselves in the Waltham Stow Village low neighborhood, which has really been the template for a lot of similar schemes across the city to reduce traffic since it was installed about a decade ago. Now, there are a lot of modal filters and road closures around here, which means that traffic levels are low on the back streets that we’re currently using. But in a moment, we’re actually going to take an even more direct route on the main road and check out some of the relatively new protected cycle lanes that the council has put in on Ho Street in the last few months. Now, bits of these lanes have been complete for a while, but they actually now, as of earlier this year, run all the way down from Walthamto Central Victoria Line Station, where we are now, to Leebridge Road, which is a big route across the burough in itself. You can see that these are with flow protected lanes. So, we’ve got a curb here protecting us from the general traffic. And in the opposite direction, we’d ride on the other side of the street. There is a dangerously driven van here. Unfortunately, demonstrating that these lanes don’t completely eliminate all interactions with traffic, but for the most part, they do make it so that this quite busy main road, Host Street, becomes perfectly nice to ride down for people of any ability really. One nice thing about this host street scheme is that it’s not just cycle lanes. The council has also used the opportunity of digging up the streets to add a little bit of greenery in where there’s space. And you can see the planting beds here just brightening up the road a little bit. They don’t just look nice, but they also help with the drainage and flood resilience in the area, which is a genuine issue in this city and will increasingly be so as the climate changes. The other great thing about this scheme is that it connects to existing cycle lanes and existing parts of London’s cycle network. So we’re coming up here to Leebridge Road which goes all the way down to Hackne and then you can take route beyond to, you know, central London, South London. And the way that this junction works is really quite good. I think you wait for a green light here, but then it’s a simultaneous green on all the arms for bikes and pedestrians. So, we made a two-stage turn there. Um, and we were able to go right fully protected without interacting with any traffic or with pedestrians in fact. And we were able to make that turn in that manner because pedestrians and cycles got a separate light phase from the rest of traffic, which I think has got to be the best way to do junctions like that. If you think about it, it’s a similar principle to protected cycle lanes in that you’re separating vulnerable road users from motor traffic, but you’re doing it in time rather than in space, and that keeps everyone safe. The reason it doesn’t happen more often is because it requires junction capacity to be reallocated to people on bikes or people on foot, and traffic authorities, TfL, aren’t always willing to do that. But I hope that that changes cuz it really is the best way of doing junctions like that. I think now we’ve kind of been living the dream in this video so far. We started off in a low traffic neighborhood where we were able to cycle on the carriageway because traffic levels were so low. When we wanted to go on the main road, there were protected cycle lanes there to make it comfortable and safe for us to do so. And now we’re back in another LTN. This one’s called Leighton Village West on the carriageway with very low levels of traffic. And honestly, to me, that is how cycling in a city should be. I think wherever you ride, traffic levels should either be low or there should be a separated path or lane provided. I do think that this part of Waltham Forest is a really good example of what that can look like in practice. If you’re interested in seeing more routes that make use of London’s growing network of quiet streets and protected lanes, then do hit subscribe on the channel on YouTube as I post new videos every week like this. And if you want to browse the videos I’ve already done, then you could do worse than checking out the map of all the videos linked in the description below the video, which plots all the different routes that I’ve done on a Google map and is a great way to browse those different routes. Thank you to viewer Isaac who keeps that up to date and to viewer John who also set it up originally. Now, we talked about the benefits of these street changes for people riding bikes, but I really think that they go much deeper than that. There’s a fantastic example of that around the corner in a moment on Francis Road. Now, this video was filmed on a regular weekend morning. Nothing special was going on, but you’ll see in a moment that the area in front of the shops on Francis Road feels like a real community space with people of all ages just hanging out, using the seating, patronizing the businesses, playing or just really doing whatever they want. It really is just here a pretty idilic scene. And I’d be surprised, very surprised, if anybody preferred the before version, which was car parking and traffic. Now, this scene was achieved by putting in a road closure, which we just passed through, or a modal filter, as it’s also called, in front of the shops. This is a trick that was pioneered in Waltham Forest about 10 years ago. There were actually protests in Walthamto when they did the same thing on Orford Road where you can find a similar scene today and nobody would change it back now. But it’s an approach that’s also making its way to other parts of London. One of the most successful has got to be Dulich Square in Soduk, which used to be a pretty nasty road junction and is now a lovely village square. Um, I also love Fentamon Road in Oval, part of Lambbeath, which has created a mini sort of seating and town square and garden, too. And there are plenty of other examples going in all the time all across the city. And those have all gone in in the last few years, and they’re now a tried and tested way of creating a little town square and reclaiming streets from traffic and parked cars. And yeah, the approach of reducing traffic also makes the area better for cycling, which is important for the purpose of this channel. But frankly, as I said, I think the benefits go far beyond that. Thank you so much for watching that today. I hope it was interesting. And if you’ve not found your way down to this little bit of London before, that it was eye opening to and maybe gave you some ideas of bits of your local community that could potentially be improved. If you enjoy the video, then please do leave a like on YouTube as it boosts it in the algorithm and helps other people find it. It really does make a difference. And if you really like the channel, then also hit subscribe because I publish new videos every week showing cycle routes on quiet streets and protected lanes. And thank you once again to everyone who supports the channel on Patreon. If you’d like to contribute, too. You can find a link in the description below the video where you can throw money at me. Thanks so much, and I’ll see some of you in the comments. Looking forward to hearing what you have to say about this one. Have you guys been up to these streets? What do you think of them? Um, yeah, let me know. And I’ll see the rest of you next week. Goodbye.