Relentless pressure, threats, and apologies
Four years inside Haringey's street transformation
Mike Hakata left Haringey Council last month after leading delivery of one of the largest near-simultaneous rollouts of Low Traffic Neighbourhood zones in London, and 36 school streets, covering 44 schools.
In his resignation letter he said the sacrifice the job entailed, as head of Climate Action, Environment and Transport, “only makes sense when you have the full mandate and conditions to deliver the change you believe in. When those conditions shift, you owe it to the people who’ve supported you - family, residents, community groups and campaigners - to be honest about whether the equation still balances”
Long a darling of cycle campaigners, beloved for his human approach to politics, Hakata’s exit is mourned by those who hoped progress for walking and cycling in this north London borough would continue. The LTNs he oversaw cover an area of 55,000 residents, and the school streets 17,000 students. I met him in a cafe about a kilometre outside Haringey’s border, in Waltham Forest two weeks later, to talk about what happened.
“It’s not false modesty to say the work was always a partnership”, he begins - with both campaigners and his council colleagues. He’ll circle back to this idea, generally answering a question after a good deal of exposition. “It’s the first time I’ve really spoken about this since leaving, and I’m still trying to articulate what happened”.
Hakata came to politics less than a decade ago. “You’ve got a lot of power as a local councillor”, he says. “While national politics is constrained to voting on legislation, in local politics you can bring about tangible changes in your community.”
And while he’d long cared about the environment and social justice, he hadn’t linked those values with his means of transport. Aged six, his dad had put him on an adult bike, pushed, and told him to get on with learning. It was a case of grasp it or fall off. By the time he was a teen he would fly across the Marble Arch junction between moving cars, with the fearlessness of youth.
Hakata was assigned the cabinet role of Climate Action, Environment and Transport in 2021. Soon after, he met with residents in St Ann’s ward who wanted a school street and Low Traffic Neighbourhood. It seemed a good idea. “Then someone gave me a copy of Peter Walker’s book, Bike Nation, and it was such an eye-opener”.
Campaigners, including Carla Francome, helped make the next steps possible, he recalls: “Carla is a phenomenon”. Councillors, apparently, were scared of her. “She’s a great storyteller but she’s also so likable”. He believes it was harder, therefore for detractors in local politics to criticise her, publicly. Francome, along with Haringey Cycling Campaign, pushed councillors like Hakata to deliver on active travel.
Hakata came to see LTNs as primarily benefiting pedestrians, so “people can leave their homes, including those who use a wheelchair”, without feeling intimidated by rat-running drivers. The below speech, by resident Salli Booth, is testament to that need.
All or nothing
The three large LTNs, in Bounds Green, St Ann’s, and Bruce Grove & West Green, were originally intended to be rolled out one by one, but he recalls, “this was at the peak of the backlash around the Covid-era measures”.
He felt they would get one chance at it, that the resulting outcry could feasibly quash future schemes. Hakata took the position that all three LTNs should be rolled out together.
“I remember the officers all looking at me, like, ‘has he lost his senses?’”.
Traffic modelling predicted chaos from the triple rollout - a 25% traffic increase on some boundary roads - by failing to account for ‘traffic evaporation’, the increasingly well-documented phenomenon where people change behaviour when the environment changes. The expectation the LTNs would discourage short car trips, and cut traffic, required a leap of faith by Hakata, and the support of his councillor colleagues.
Two LTNs were rolled out in August and one in November 2022. The first few days and weeks were predictably chaotic: with 2.5 square miles of street removed overnight as through routes for drivers, the boundary roads quickly snarled up.
Hakata says: “I remember walking to the first council meeting after the LTNs went in. I came out of my flat, there’s one street near me that’s effectively a dead end. There was queuing traffic on it - there’s never queuing traffic there. Walking to the council meeting, every street was like that, full of waiting traffic.”
“By the 6:30pm start time the meeting was only half full because half of the councillors drove, and they were stuck in traffic too.”
“I had to go in and face my colleagues who were saying, ‘Mike, what have you done?’”
The coming days were no better. “I got a lot of emails from residents in one of the LTNs, saying ‘this is hell, you need to come down and bear witness to this’. My schedule is very full anyway, there was barely a minute in the day at the best of times. I said, ‘you’ll have to get in the queue’.”
He took the approach that if someone was shouting and pointing fingers at him he would approach them and listen. He remembers showing up to meetings organised by scheme opponents. “Afterwards they would thank me for my time, saying ‘you didn’t listen to us, but thank you for coming’.” He said “I had listened, it’s just that their arguments often made no sense”.
The calm after the storm
The schemes bedded in. Four weeks later those LTN residents emailed again, this time, as he recalls it, saying: ‘Just hold off on that visit for now, we’ll wait and see how things go for a bit’. People were doing what the modelling hadn’t accounted for: they were driving less in the area, and residents found new ways of navigating their neighbourhood.
Hakata adds: “Some time after that I got an apology from those residents, saying ‘this is the best thing that’s ever happened to this street. We used to be woken up at 5am, 6am, every day by HGVs rumbling down the street, and now we have peace and quiet’.”
All the while local campaigners were out and about supporting the measures. Carla Francome told me: “Mike was really a breath of fresh air. He was the first politician I felt actually listened, or replied to emails. I never got a response before, and felt powerless about local politics.”
“That’s when I started campaigning.”
Francome says prior to the LTNs neighbours were “terrorised” by “drivers [who] would race down our narrow residential street just to get to the end, where they had to stop anyway”. She says it felt unsafe to walk there, not least for older residents or those who used wheelchairs, who reported near misses and not being able to get across the street in time.
“At least two parked cars were written off by speeding drivers in the middle of the night,” she says.
That all changed in August 2022 when the LTN enveloped her street. “That was a huge thing, and Mike persuaded cabinet members to go for it. Now my daughter and neighbours’ children can cycle around the streets, so that’s been huge.”
Her five-year-old daughter said: “I’ve been waiting so long for this mummy.”
Francome remembers neighbours talking positively about the trial, once u-turning drivers realised their street was no longer a short-cut. Suddenly residents felt safer crossing the street and letting their children cycle.
“For a few months I was pretty scared”
Francome is a gregarious character and her social media posts at the time were unequivocal in their support for the changes. To some people she became a lightning rod for the changes. She describes herself as “naive” for supporting the scheme so vocally on social media, making her a “hate figure locally”.
She says: “As the weeks went on, I got anonymous messages on Twitter from people who said they hated me. One wrote that they wanted to run me over. Someone called me a c*nt in the street, near where I lived, and one business owner grabbed my shoulders and swore at me in front of my daughter. For a few months I was pretty scared walking around – I used to put a hood up and a cap on.”
“I think I didn’t handle it brilliantly, I learned a lot of lessons. If you’re someone who values your local community you don’t want to fall out with them.”
“I like these people and I wanted their businesses to do well. I used to do a lot of positive comms for the local businesses and visited them a lot. I think they felt it was a betrayal, me supporting the scheme”.
She insists while her intentions were good, it might have been easier for her if there was a wider public support group for the LTN, rather than individuals people could attack.
“At the start people on Facebook would say how nice it was, then others would jump on and say they hated it, then the ones who liked it were quiet.” This, she believes, created a landscape of ‘pluralistic ignorance’, giving the false impression most people were opposed to the scheme. People she passed in the street would say, ‘isn’t this lovely’, without the traffic.
The long view
The data validated the council’s leap of faith. There was an up to 66% reduction in traffic on the internal roads, with up to a 4.5% increase on boundary roads - a net reduction Hakata calls “phenomenal”. Air pollution remained stable across the sites, with 80,000 fewer vehicles per day and collisions within the LTNs cut by 34%.
In December 2024, at a meeting, the council decided to make the LTNs permanent. Police and security were on standby, in case of trouble. In the end a few supportive campaigners turned out.
Hakata points to a government report that found most residents felt LTNs had no impact, or they weren’t sure about that impact. Generally more people were supportive than opposed, and many didn’t even realise they lived in one. This seemed true in Haringey, despite pockets of outrage. “There’s 25% of people who are staunchly against it, 25% who strongly support it, and everyone else is like, ‘so what?’,” says Hakata.
In the meantime Haringey Council started delivering school streets. “When I started in post, the plan was to deliver three school streets in the borough per year, and there were no plans for the ones on the main roads.” Pressed by Hakata, the council ramped up to 15 per year, with “no school left behind”. The main road sites, where traffic couldn’t be restricted at rush hour, would see measures like extra trees, air filtration systems and green walls.
The more typical school streets Hakata describes as effectively time-limited LTNs. Some of the school heads, he says, thanked him personally after implementation, for the transformation.
He says: “The school street officers were astonishing. They were among the most hard-working, committed officers I’ve ever met.”
Pink Panther meets Green Lanes
When Hakata set his sights on main road cycleways, however, things started to break down. When I mention a long-proposed cycle lane on Green Lanes, he compares his internal response to Inspector Clueso’s nervous twitch when the Pink Panther’s name is brought up.
Green Lanes is an almost nine-mile artery running just south of Enfield to Stoke Newington. The stretch from Manor Park to Turnpike Lane is lined with bustling shops, tube stops, a bus station, homes, parks and car parking all along. Mark Philpotts, aka Ranty Highwayman’s recent observations are worth a read.
Hakata was told the head of Green Lanes Traders would never support the cycle lane. He remembers meeting with him at a cafe’s streetside tables, “breathing in fumes”, and hearing the words: “look at it, the street is thriving!”. Hakata pointed out drivers weren’t stopping, they were simply “filling our brains with particulate matter” as they passed. “I said to him, ‘imagine this street full of people, instead. People walking, people stopping, buying things, spending money.’” If not entirely convinced the man was, surprisingly, open to the idea. Tentative support.
Hakata had stopped talking to people about data by this point, believing people instead needed to see what change looked like. He produced A3 posters showing a pedestrianised Times Square in New York, and streets in Barcelona and Paris. If other cities, particularly in America, could do it and thrive, went the argument, London could too.
Then the LTNs went in.
When the traffic worsened on Green Lanes, which formed one of the boundary roads, Hakata describes being summoned to a meeting above the Salisbury Pub, full to the rafters with angry business owners. He says the head of Green Lane Traders jabbed a finger at him, unleashing expletives with the sentiment the group would never support it now. The idea of car traffic equating to prosperity had apparently gone.
However, like other main roads, journey times along Green Lanes returned to pre-LTN traffic levels. This time Hakata got a phone call from the Traders apologising. “It’s never been better”, he heard the man say. Shortly afterwards, he stepped aside for personal reasons, taking with him any promise of support.
Meanwhile, the political wind had changed. Trump was elected for a second time and in Westminster Boris Johnson was out, followed by Prime Ministers who were either ambivalent or actively hostile to active travel and air quality policies, not least in London.
“Relentless pressure” takes its toll
Closer to home, Hakata felt the backing from colleagues evaporating. He’s keen to point out the genuine difficulty of navigating change with constituents, and the toll that takes on councillors. They faced “intense and sustained backlash – angry residents, packed meetings, relentless pressure”.
“That experience understandably created real anxiety about taking on further major schemes. When it came to the next phase – cycle lanes and other infrastructure – I found myself unable to build the coalition needed to move forward.”
He likened the delivery of this agenda to pushing a boulder up a hill, and in the end “the boulders were getting bigger and bigger”.
The final straw was a proposed route on Tottenham Lane, which would, he believes, have been relatively easy to deliver. There were some flats on one side and a railway line on the other - no shop fronts with parking outside, no driveways to contend with - but the subtext of conversations with some colleagues was that this would not be supported.
People get into politics to change things, Hakata says. “When it gets to the point you aren’t able to make that change, it no longer feels worth the sacrifice.”
“For the first time in years, when my six year old daughter asked last week if we could do something together I didn’t have to tell her, ‘not today, daddy has work to do, let’s try and carve some time out on Sunday’. I just said yes.”
Francome understood Hakata’s work ethic, too: “The difficulty with a councillor like Mike is he can never do enough. I know he works so hard, until 11 most nights,” she said, when we spoke about it back in 2024.
Hakata also felt the positive relationship he had with campaigners meant they wouldn’t shout at him when plans stalled. He’d become a buffer between the council and them, and while keen not to apportion blame, nonetheless the waning demands took the pressure off to deliver.
Hakata mentioned in his resignation letter plans that were drawn up for cross-borough cycle lanes. Enough, he believes, to meet the mayor’s target of 70% of the population living within 400m of a route, if you also counted the LTNs. That was deliberate - he wanted it on record.
For now the future of cycling and walking improvements in Haringey, as with some other boroughs, is an unknown. Transformative programmes need political leadership and the ability of those inside a council to listen to angry residents who are scared of change, without translating that to overall opposition to cycling and walking schemes.
Some new neighbours of Francome’s reportedly cite the quiet streets as reason for choosing the area. A group of neighbours enjoyed tea and cake with them on the street, like they would during the pandemic, when restrictions had allowed.
Francome tells me she still thinks about how nice it is living in the LTN, although she appreciates it in a quieter way. “Just this morning, I saw a dad cycling to school with his child, on the road, in the LTN, and I thought ‘that, there, is Mike’s legacy’”.
Haringey Council were contacted for comment.