The City of London Corporation, local authority of the Square Mile, is to close off the whole of the famous yet famously inhospitable Bank junction to all motor vehicles except buses, starting late next year. Chairman of Planning and Transportation Michael Welbank describes this complex of Mammon’s crossroads as “dysfunctional, dangerous, dirty, congested and polluting” and “completely inappropriate to form the heart of a modern city.” If it works, the plan could set a standard for the rest of London to follow.

Stopping cars, lorries, motorcycles and taxis using the six roads that connect to the junction will be an interim measure pending a long term redesign solution to the problems Welbank lists. That may or may not involve re-opening in five years’ time some of the mesh of narrow roads that converge on the Royal Exchange, Mansion House and the Threadneedle Street dame to the full range of vehicles that pass through them now. But the headline objectives are clearly stated: to improve the safety, efficiency and all round congeniality of the place.

The short-term move is largely a response to concerns about road safety, so sadly brought into the public eye by the death of a cyclist at the junction in June following a collision with a tipper truck. The aim is also to make the streets there more friendly to pedestrians in a part of London where an awful lot of people walk. The City says that approximately 18,000 pedestrians an hour traverse some part of the junction during the morning peak, along with 4,500 people aboard 220 buses, 1,600 people in 1,430 motor vehicles, and 1,600 cyclists - up from just 700 in 2010.

It’s a heavily-populated spot, and it isn’t going to get any emptier. Bank Underground station, which is to have a major capacity upgrade, has recently moved up from fourth to third on the list of the busiest on the network. About 100,000 people use it in the 7:00 till 10:00 morning peak, with droves of them disgorged under the gaze of the mounted Wellington.



Take the mass of motor vehicles off the roads and a lot more space is created for those travelling by foot and pedal power, who between them account for the great majority of those killed and seriously injured in the area. The rest were driving powered two-wheelers: motorbikes, and so on. On average there are about 25 casualties a year on or around the junction. In the five years to November 2014, there were two fatalities - one a cyclist, the other a pedestrian.



Users of buses, the most efficient transport mode in terms of moving numbers of people around, will gain too with journey times through the junctions made a bit shorter. And, crucially, the City’s traffic modelling, conducted in conjunction with Transport for London whose money they’ll need for delivering the final scheme, predicts that car journeys through the Square Mile as whole will get easier too as congestion in the surrounding road network is actually lessened.

Who is happy? Who will be cross? Some cycling campaigners might object to buses still being allowed - nothing satisfies the hard-liners. But the London Cycling Campaign has welcomed the news. Square Mile walkers will surely be enthused: over the more than two years the City’s planners have been working on the scheme they’ve generated extraordinary maps of “informal crossing” movements, with masses of people making their way from Cornhill to Princes Street or pouring across Queen Victoria Street and Poultry at points yards from the signalised crossings - such rugged individualists make up about one third of the total.



Taxi drivers and other motorists might be unconvinced that the arrangements will work for them, notwithstanding the City’s saying it will improve drop-off and pick-up facilities for black cabs in the junction’s vicinity and being at pains to say that they will go to great lengths to smooth the transition. But loafing on the junction’s pavements the other day underlined for me how spoiled its streetscape is by relentless road traffic, when the junction could be a place to linger and admire the handsome buildings there in relative tranquility.



Part of the attraction of the City’s thinking, which is expected to secure formal approval from its Streets and Walkways committee on 30 November, is that it seeks to promote and equitably reconcile the needs of walkers, bike-riders and bus-passengers - the three modes of street transport London should encourage - within a vision of Bank junction as a place where people want to be, rather than one they simply want get through as fast as possible.



Steeped in the practicalities of street space management since the coming of the ring of steel, the authority is proud of its recent record, having reorganised the Holborn Circus accident blackspot - Prince Albert and all - stood up for the interests of pedestrians, embarked on transforming Aldagte and introduced dozens of two-way cycling streets. The roads around its Guildhall HQ have become serene. A year or so from now, we’ll start to learn if Bank junction can be changed in the same way.

