This week's post comes after a very unusual thing to see in the UK; a direct action protest on a big road. The road in question is the A127 Southend Arterial Road and the protest follows the death of 13 year Joseph Sheridan earlier in the week.
Joseph died after being hit by a driver who has been arrested on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving. If you witnessed anything, please contact Essex Police. None of the news reports I have read actually say what might have happened, but the protesters are calling for a footbridge. In London, we have had direct action in the aftermath of people killed while cycling, but this has tended to have been with some notice and organisation (notably by Stop Killing Cyclists). This protest seems a little more impromptu and saw a group block the road with vehicles for several hours.
It might be wrong to assume that Joseph was hit trying to cross the road and so I don't think it appropriate to comment on the case further, the police need to be left to do their work for now; what I think is worth commenting on is that this area has history and the A127 is a masterclass in how to create community severance.
The A127 is an east-west route which starts at Gallows Corner in the London Borough of Havering and ends in Southend-on-Sea after passing through South-Essex, including skirting north of Basildon and thus creating a barrier between the sprawling town and various settlements such as Noak Bridge and Crays Hill and the town of Wickford further north. The collision took place in a location where there is a retail park on the south side of the A127 and no crossing facilities whatsoever. From what I have read, there have been pedestrians hit (some killed) over the years. Current "road safety" efforts amount to some sporadic high fencing on the central reservation and signs suggesting people don't cross in the location which is subject to the National speed limit.
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| This is not providing for pedestrian desire lines. The alternative is miles of walking detour and it is nonsense to expect people to obey the signs. (Image from Google) |
I have had a quick look at Crashmap and from a pedestrian point of view, there are some recorded casualties, but not many; of course, casualties are not a measure of risk or severance, but they are unfortunately used to sift interventions in a world governed by budget cuts and prioritisation. Compared with the countless crashes just involving motor vehicles, it is no wonder that work for pedestrians takes the back seat under our current system.
The A127 traces its origin to the 1920s when it (along with the A12 Eastern Avenue) was built as a strategic route between Wanstead and Southend. By the 1930s it had been dualled along its length. It was a trunk road for decades (and so under Secretary of State control) before being "de-trunked" in the late 1990s. For the section passing Basildon, Essex County Council is the highway authority responsible for the road. Basildon is a "new town" and so arrived well after the trunk road which gave good road connections to East-London.
Today, the road is heavily congested at peak times (and it is always very busy off peak). In fact the whole area is congested at peak times and this is down to the fact that the car is the mode of choice for many in "Mondeo Man" country, further pressured by a great deal of house-building and commercial development in the town. Anyway, I digress. I used to to drive this stretch of road twice a day on my commute 20 years ago and the road layout hasn't changed in all of this time, so the community severance here is nothing new. So, what are the answers? Well other than telling people it is not safe to cross here, the answer will lie in changing the infrastructure.
The protesters are calling for a footbridge. This is fine if the ramps are gentle and can be provided on the desire line. I doubt this will work because footbridges over roads such as this end up with zig-zag ramps because of highway space constraints, leaving a structure than many will ignore as it doesn't serve their desire line. The answer here is either raise the road up on a bridge to give clear space for walking (and cycling of course) underneath or to drop the road into a trench and build "bridges" over it. The A127 has form for this further east at "Rayleigh Weir" where many years ago the A127 was "grade separated" by dropping it down with slip roads up to a roundabout at surface level it being carried over two bridges over the trench.
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| The A127 at Rayleigh Weir where it drops into a trench with the old surface level being a roundabout carried on bridges. (Image from Google) |
The same could be done in many locations near Basildon with the bridges carrying dedicated walking and cycling routes. Nothing is needed for cars because there are big junctions which allow one to drive from north to south if required. I realise that this type of treatment would represent a significant investment, but we always seem to manage to do it for big roads carrying long-distance traffic, why can't we invest in the communities who have been blighted by severance for decades? The way in which we keep investing so much in building new strategic road capacity is making me increasingly angry when we have situations like this going on now on former (and current) trunk roads which have split people apart for so long; especially where the solutions are not technically difficult. Perhaps direct action is the answer to get people to stop and take notice?
Ironically an answer to some of the problems with dual carriageways these days in the UK, many of them at least, the A14 for example, ,is to make them official motorways. Built a hard shoulder, grade separate or remove the remaining junctions, ensure that wildlife, cyclists and pedestrians and local traffic have enough grade separated crossings on the desire lines, and also worth doing is adding a guardrail in the middle of the road where this hasn't been done yet, on many more road, and then make them full motorways, and perhaps metricate and offer 120 km/h and 130 km/h speed limits, with the latter being the default for motorways.
ReplyDeleteAViewFromTheCyclePath and BicycleDutch both have good examples of both bridges and underpasses that are socially safe, direct, on the desire lines and not a challenge to go up or down, and cater well for cyclists. And if there was something like 30-45% rate of cycling for most journeys with walking taking another 5-20% of the journeys, and upgraded railways (8-16 car trains, 160 km/h-350 km/h speeds, reduced at grade crossings and signal and boom gate protection for the remainders and no at grade crossings above 130 km/h, reduced at grade crossings in general, and automatic signal enforcement with accessible stations with great bicycle parking at each station), taking a large chunk of the traffic away from the cars and their roads and making it something else.
And rural roads need to be considered. Many communities are just a few kilometres apart in the UK. With metric speed limits this becomes easier to consider, but 60 km/h rural ordinary access road and links between smaller towns and villages and from those to cities, 80 km/h main distributor road limits, IE links between main cities and the links between larger towns, regional roads, and 100 km/h expressways with at least 1 lane per direction, as much as possible a divide between the 2 directions, a considerable amount of grade separation, ideally all junctions being grade separated, bypassing towns, villages and cities with very little local access, if any at all, and 100-130 km/h motorways that combined with expressways that link the counties together, like the A roads.
Oh, and make "the built up area" speed limits better defined. The Dutch have a simple sign to indicate this. It is a rectangle with the name of the built up area in words in blue. In the UK, a good equivilent of this would be using a city skyline in a white rectangle at the entrance and exit of the community. The name of the community could be included too. Like this: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_faEyN3bqJL8/SsZVAF1qJuI/AAAAAAAAAFU/l4mm6QOAKzc/s400/BuiltUpAreaAndEndOfBuiltUpArea.PNG. Residential areas are 30 km/h zones by default. Each town would be advised to have a pedestrianized main shopping centre, with cycling allowed and deliveries happening at specific times of the day, with the rest of the city centre being a 30 km/h zone.
DeleteA new rule in the design manuals and possibly regulations is that no road is to have a speed limit in excess of 30 km/h in urban areas and 60 km/h in rural areas without having a bicycle path or a cycle lane in exceptional situations next to it unless it has no destinations on it that would be useful to cyclists nor does it create a direct route that be attractive to cyclists, and in addition, no road may have mixed cycling above 2500 PCU/day in urban 30 km/h zones and no more than 2000 PCU in rural 60 km/h zones.
You would be able to identify roads with various speed limits easily from now on. 30 km/h zones would have few, if any, official markings, junctions would often be raised and usually have no assigned priority, often with a brick paved surface. 50 km/h roads (a metricated 30 mph road) would have bicycle paths next to it for the most part, sometimes a cycle lane, they would normally have a centre line, normally they would not be 4 lane roads though that sometimes might happen, and junctions are typically roundabout or traffic light controlled. 60 km/h roads in rural areas would usually have either no markings and be about a car's width or 2 wide, or they might be the higher volume kind with separate bicycle paths and a dashed white line on the edge of the road but no centre line. 80 km/h roads would normally have a centre line or a median, would normally have a dashed white line on the edges, would not have a hard shoulder, and normally have at grade junctions with traffic lights, give ways signs or roundabouts and often have bicycle paths next to them. If they are a cycle route then they would have to have a cycle path. 100 km/h expressways would normally have hard shoulders, will have a centre line, will have a solid edge line, will have a divide between the two directions or a green strip in between the 2 white dashed or solid lines and be identified with a sign, like the Dutch autowegen. Motorways would have the motorway sign, 2 lanes per direction separated by a median, a hard shoulder and no at grade crossings and between 80 and 130 km/h speed limits.
You ought to have a read of the history of the M32 in Bristol. New urban motorway which cut districts in half in the early seventies. Pedestrian casualties and fatalities where people don't want to go through the scary pedestrian underpasses or over the footbridges.
ReplyDeleteI meant the kind of through roads that go around towns and cities not through them.
DeleteYes, I have heard a bit about the M32 - we keep doing similar - look at Glasgow!
DeleteJoseph Sheridan went to my school, we all miss him ðŸ˜
ReplyDeleteIt's important to remember that behind the numbers, there are people involved. I hope some good can come from this and Essex CC finally provides better crossings of this awful road.
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