Merton has published a draft Air Quality Action Plan for consultation.
We very much agree with the aspiration to improve air quality, and the Plan sets out targets to be achieved by 2031 being annual averages everywhere below 20μg/m3 of NO2 and below 10μg/m3 of PM2.5.
However, targets have to be backed up by policy. Road transport (as acknowledged by the Plan) is the biggest single contributor to air pollution, so there need to be serious measures to curb motor vehicle pollution. There's some natural reduction expected due to "dirtier" vehicles ageing out of the national fleet, but it seems unlikely this on its own will be enough. Traffic reduction is needed across the borough, but currently there are no policies to achieve this.
There haven't been any new school streets in Merton for some years now (other boroughs continue to add them), and no plans we've seen for traffic reduction in residential areas (LTNs etc.) or on major roads.
Bus services are getting worse (Merton has the worst deterioration in bus speeds of any London borough over 10 years, according to London Travelwatch), and this drives car use as people get sick of slow and unreliable bus services. More cars adds to congestion, which harms bus performance further, resulting in a "doom-loop". (The reduced fare revenue also damages TfL finances of course). Merton has done almost nothing on bus priority for years. There's a plan to do something in central Wimbledon to improve bus performance, but we've seen no detail at all beyond that headline.
The plans for the Sutton Tramlink have been shelved.
The bright spot is the increased use of hire bikes. 50% of 18-34-year-olds use them at least once a week. Merton has done a reasonably good job of implementing marked parking bays for hire bikes, and supports both Forest and Lime bikes. (Kingston, Sutton and Richmond currently don't support Lime). The massive success of hire bikes shows there's a large suppressed demand for bike use, but we need the Council to support this by quickly building out a borough-wide network of safe routes.
Take part in Merton's Air Quality Action Plan consultation here:
https://merton-aqap.commonplace.is/en-GB/