Ban cars from Richmond Park at weekends, urges petition

For a longtime I have felt the solution is to make Richmond park One-Way for all

With a dedicated cycle lane...3 bike width...and a car lane.

If you are using the park as a cut through in a car...it adds about 8 mins to your journey either richmond to kingston...or Kingston to richmond.......depending on wether it was one-way clockwise or anti

If you are a cyclist...you may prefer to cycle a particular direction
but the decend and ascend are very similar both ways

No need to overtake cyclists

No need for silly bans on a particular group

It may discourage traffic using it as a short cut rather than a leisure destination

Pointless petition, hence hardly any signatures. It's a public park, you can't ban a section of the population from using it

Yes, as suggested above it would only be worth doing if there was also investment in the walking areas so people/dogs/prams/biddies/camera-toting-tourists/joggers/toddlers stayed off the road.

Keeping the cars only to the carparks is surely a good idea though and has been talked about as long as I can remember.

What about all of the non cyclists that use the park?

Why not make the whole park one way, outer lane, clockwise for cars, inner lane counterclockwise for bikes. It would separate cars from bikes, reduce the amount of cars wanting to use the park as a rat run to commute, whilst still keeping it as a park for everyone.

Simplest thing to do would be to have a charge at each gate to get in, like every national trust place.

Banning cars would be no good for most of us, it would become like like a giant sustrans path with pushchairs and extendible dogs lead across the entire road.

I think a better idea would be to just have a one way system - this would discourage the commuters using the park as a shortcut but still leave it open to recreational visitors. It would (hopefully) also reduce the close overtaking caused by cars trying to pass bikes against oncoming traffic.

I'm all for banning through-traffic from the park during busy periods especially at w/e. I try not to ride RP during these times as it's generally an unpleasant experience. First there are now too many cyclists (unless you get there very early), but the traffic adds an unnecessary element of danger which puts me right off. I've seen too many cyclists hit the deck because of dangerous/inconsiderate driving (and riding). Let the general park users get the to car parks from whatever gate they've come through and that's it. Cars banned from there onwards.

It would be a great step to ban through traffic in the Park (which makes up 90% of car traffic in the park according to surveys).

Richmond gate could be left open as an entrance exit to inner car parks and Penbrook Lodge. Kingston, Roehampton and Sheen gates all have car parks beside them, so cars could be restricted to just accessing that nearest car park form those gates.
This way people with restricted mobility could still access Pen Ponds and Penbrook Lodge.
I would bet the average speed of cars in the park would fall (currently 25mph accoo Parks Police) with less people rat running.

Still better than having all the roads through the park clogged with cars, even if the roundabouts will still be used by motorized traffic, also would stop the roads being used as a cut through (which surely defeats the purpose of the park as a recreational facility)

Cars will still access the car parks from the nearest gate, so all the roundabouts will still be busy in both directions. It's an idea with very little merit.

There are plenty of roads closed to cars and safe cycle paths in Richmond Park for safe cycling. I'm in favour of preventing through traffic, but banning cars is pretty short sighted. How will all the other users of RP get there and where would they park? Families that have no interest in cycling would no longer be able to use it.