Warwickshire County Council has released its latest iteration of design for redeveloping an important road junction in Nuneaton, linking Leicester Road, Newtown Road, and Vicarage Street into one large gyratory. Here, I take a look at those plans from an active travel perspective (walking, wheeling, and cycling) to see what we have and where the plans fall down.
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00:00 Introduction and context
03:05 Bond Street and Regent Street by the Station
09:11 Separated Main Road Cycling (Newtown Road)
16:07 Separated Cycling and Shared Space (Back Street to Vicarage Street)
18:28 Leicester Road Railway Bridge and a Network Gap
25:22 Grade Separation Over the Roundabout?
27:01 Final Thoughts
29:55 Close
6 Comments
Car-brain planning continues unabated.
Unless it's mandated in Law, the focus will be on cars lorries buses. In an ideal world, all such routes will begin with active travel, then attempt to route the traffic around it, even if that means a single lane, one way system at 20mph.
This plan creates many risk points of conflict between everyone, particularly the most vulnerable. As you repeatedly state, there's no way through seamlessly for active travellers. It's stop and start and one minute this model, then another model, then another.
It reflects the deep bias in this country which is innately unhealthy and contemptuous to active travel.
None of the cycling lanes actually go through (without you having to use a pedestrian crossing)! Yet another "We provided cycling lanes here (…until either the space or the funds ran out; and wherever that happens to be we just dump you into other lanes, in a way that no nation would do for cars and many wouldn't even do for pedestrians)" plan.
On Back Street: The detail that really reveals the priorities of the project. are the bollards between the Back Street /Leicester Road and the roundabout approach; they should have been on the roundabout side of the sidewalk. With the sidewalk open to the Back Street curve, any conflicts between cyclists and pedestrians could be resolved by evading onto those access-only driving lanes, with pretty low risk. (Nobody will ever evade onto Vicarage Street, because there's either cars queuing there or driving there). But not having the barriers next to Back Street would also allow cyclists to shortcut from the shared space into Back Street (onto a low-use car-only access road, big big boo boo).
I agree that the driving surfaces need to move further apart, but I wouldn't move the roundabout approach lanes to the east, I'd move the "Back Street curve" to the west.
Leicester Road: Why does it even have to be 4 lanes? I get why you need 2 lanes coming south-west to the roundabout; so that vehicles can queue for the different directions effectively. But at the north-eastern end of the Leicester Road bridge, there isn't even technically a junction for motor vehicles. They all turn left and the next actual junction is even further north. You can get back to 2 driving lanes for queuing at that junction after that left turn. And when are you ever going to have so few vehicles going right around the roundabout into Vicarage Street (which is the ring road) that a significant amount of cars going east on Newton Road can use the right lane to go onto Leicester Road?
And the one point that you mentioned that I didn't even see: Why do cars get a central reservation to keep them safe from each other (on top of 4 lanes of which they'd really only need 3) while everyone else is absolutely squeezed in and not being kept safe from cars (and bicycles).
12:19 –12:50 Why are you complaining about space "being lost"? Isn't that just the price of protection? If there's an object between your handlebars and the cars, in order to give the cars something that they'd hit before hitting your handlebars, then there's inevitably also something that your handlebars are hitting before you're hitting the cars.
For example, if the railing is 5cm thick tubes, plus cyclists and motorists on either side wanting to stay at least 20cm from the obstacle, then in your words that would be 45cm of "space taken away from the cycling lane". But I'd want cars to stay at a minimum 45cm away from my handlebars anyways (and without railings the law even mandates 150cm, which I obviously also prefer). Having a physical barrier (as long as it's high enough to catch you from falling into the car lane when your wheels slide out or whatever) is always better than that imaginary 150cm "force field of hope" that too many drivers don't even see.
If you think that a 3m cycling path is too narrow with barriers, then it would be too narrow by even more without the barriers. Or in other words, the problem isn't really the barriers, it would be that even in the best case scenario (with barriers!), 3m is too narrow. Which I don't think I quite agree with.