Here is something a little unusual as I am cross-posting a blog post from my City Infinity website, because I think it needs as wide an audience as possible. I hope you enjoy it, regardless of where you read it!
Foreword
This post has a companion written by Robert Weetman. We have been working collaboratively on something which we think needs to be more widely known, but we also thought it might be fun and useful for us to each write about the subject from our own perspectives. Robert’s post is available to read HERE.
The work underpinning and contained within this blog post are © Mark Philpotts/ City Infinity and Robert Weetman.
Introduction
It’s hard for anyone to admit they are wrong about something, and in my experience, highway engineers really don’t like doing so because they think it exposes them to liability. It’s not wholly their fault for thinking this because they are part of a system which is hard to change, especially with a hundred years of motonormativity to contend with; but frankly, it is pretty difficult to be successfully sued for poor highway design.
When I started writing The Ranty Highwayman blog well over a decade ago, it was the end point of me realising that something was wrong with how our streets and designed and managed. Probably both consciously and unconsciously, this set me on a course which has changed my professional outlook and career path, sometimes because I wanted to and sometimes because I had to.
Now my work as an independent consultant has led to an amazing collaboration with Robert Weetman. We successfully bid for a piece of work with Manchester City Council (MCC) to help them think about how side road junctions could be made better for pedestrians through design. This work developed the idea of “pedestrian-friendly design” or just “pedestrian-friendliness” and from this, a framework approach emerged.
This blog post is an introduction to a subject that we have been grappling with the past several months, and hopefully, you’ll come away inspired and challenged. What seems simple conceptually needed an awful lot of work to think through, and it remains very much new and evolving practice. But that’s exciting.
It is also worth stating that whenever I mention the word “pedestrian”, the idea of walking and wheeling is very much at the forefront. In undertaking our work, the input and insight from a group of Disabled people was vital in testing where we were headed. I hope you never look at a side road junction in the same way again, because I cannot.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark
Well not Denmark exactly, because they often do quite well with their side road junctions, although care is always needed with trying to import ideas from other countries with different rules, culture and design approaches.
The UK national practice on the other hand is so rotten that many people barely notice how bad it has got, and if I am honest, I was one of those people until recently because my usual practice with side roads tended to concentrate on tight junctions, maybe speed tables and of course decent dropped kerbs. It has only been since working on this project that I have seen the issues as being far deeper.
MCC recognised that the design of side road junctions in the UK is not supporting the interests of people walking, wheeling and cycling, so through the Manchester Active Travel Strategy and Investment Plan (MATSIP), a commitment was given to improve practice, although the “how” remains a work in progress.
As we got started at the beginning of 2025, Robert and I realised that there was this thing nagging us in the background which meant that the design of side road junctions often failed from the pedestrian-perspective. Given this, we really do think the MCC team have been brave in commissioning this work because it has meant confronting the status quo. This is a challenge to someone like me who thought they had a good grasp of the subject.
Regionally, Greater Manchester has developed the Streets for All approach (SfA). While there is excellent SfA design guidance, it doesn’t get under the skin of side road junction design to the level of detail that is needed, but that’s not a criticism as we don’t think anyone has gone this far in looking at the issues as we have.
It is also worth mentioning that in the last few years, there has been lots of attention on designing for cycling. In some cases, there have been concerted campaigns against street design features which protect people cycling, but where there might be trade-offs with the pedestrian experience.
Let me tell you something right now, compared with side road junction design, these issues are way down the list of things that worry me. Having said that, we have taken the view that pedestrian-friendly design is, and should be compatible with cycling, but that’s for another day.
What is a side road?
This might be obvious, but it’s important to understand what we are talking about. Put simply, this is where two roads meet as a T-junction or crossroads. This is by far the vast majority of UK junction layouts compared with junctions controlled with roundabouts, traffic signals and with closely associated zebra crossings (including the current experiments on side road zebras without Belisha beacons).
Signals, roundabouts and zebra crossings have their place in the overall traffic system, but they are a trade-off with conditions designed to give more priority to motor traffic; what we have come to refer to as “flow focussed design” (as in motor traffic).
For side road junctions, most of the time, there will be give way markings that show which roads have priority. Unsurprisingly, these are known as “priority junctions”, a traffic engineering term that not even all traffic engineers understand.
Sometimes there aren’t any markings and so there is no priority. We have called these “no-priority junctions”, because there was no pre-existing term available. Very occasionally we might have a junction with a stop line and sign which we still include, but they are rare. We’ve also have continuous footways and minor accesses to think about, and which fall into our overall approach. Although not part of our project, we also think that simplified zebra crossings will work within our approach, if and when they are approved for use across the UK.
If you spend any time walking around your neighbourhood or even using online mapping, you will very quickly see all sorts of different design approaches. Sometimes there might be a level of local consistency (possibly within distinct housing developments), but there will be an awful lot of inconsistency as well as things being consistently awful for pedestrians.
As well as obvious issues such as crossing distance and the ease (and speed) at which drivers can turn in and out of a side road, there are more subtle issues around the layout of dropped kerbs (and their absence), the use of speed tables, coloured surfacing and every other odd thing that someone thought was useful at the time, but which has now been collectively forgotten. This means that in many cases, the design will exclude some people or at best, make life difficult them. There also just seems to be random experiments all over the place where it’s hard to unravel the logic.
The Highway Code
I very rarely read the Highway Code, unless it is to argue with someone about a particular rule and on that basis, I doubt many people read it either. However, we do have rules H2 and 170 which were part of an update in January 2022, and which added another layer to the complexity of how roads and streets are meant to be used.
The update was essentially that pedestrians crossing a side road should be afforded priority by drivers and cyclists turning into and out of it; and where cyclists are passing a side road on the main road, they should be afforded the same priority by turning drivers.
Traffic engineers are familiar with talking about vehicular priority (motor and cycle traffic), but the Highway Code has rules also talks about priority being given to pedestrians and cyclists, so I appreciate it can be confusing, but it is worth explaining the distinction.
The change to the Highway Code is welcome from a designer’s perspective as it gives licence to support the needs of pedestrians and cyclists within the hierarchy of users. However, it doesn’t automatically mean that people will adhere to rules that they probably haven’t read up on since they passed a driving test, and in fact, anyone who doesn’t drive are perhaps even less likely to have read those rules.
UK road legislation has developed to almost mean that driving might is right and so we’re trying to steer people through this. In the strictest sense, we’ve taken priority in terms of vehicular priority which possibly feels a little motonormative. We’ve had to tackle it in this way because of the motorised baggage that design and legislation carries.
Defining pedestrian-friendly design
We’ve boiled all of this down to three scenarios that start to help explain our approach which actually creates a spectrum:
- What are the conditions under which drivers are LIKELY to obey the Highway Code rules H2/ 170?
- What are the conditions under which drivers are UNLIKELY to obey the Highway Code rules H2/ 170?
- What are the conditions under which drivers are UNABLE to obey the Highway Code rules H2/ 170?
I’ve said earlier that the Highway Code tells drivers (and cyclists) that they should be giving way to those crossing a side road when turning. We think compliance with this is influenced by a range of issues and conditions that can be influenced both locally through design and at the network level.
For example, a quiet T-junction in a residential street with very little traffic provides the conditions under which a driver might be likely to give way to a crossing pedestrian, although there are still design considerations around achieving this.
Compare this with a side road that meets a busy high-speed dual carriageway where a driver cannot safely stop on the main road to give priority to someone crossing because there is a very real chance of them being hit by another driver from behind. In other words, the traffic conditions in terms of speed and volume are very important in influencing pedestrian friendliness.
The conditions where a driver is unlikely to obey the rules sit in the central area of our spectrum. For example, we might have a side road meeting busy high street where it’s actually quite easy for a driver leaving the side road to give way to a pedestrian, but where a right turning driver might have their attention mainly on finding a gap in oncoming traffic, rather on someone crossing. This also has implications for people cycling in a lane next to oncoming flows for obvious reasons.
Drivers do have a duty of care of course, but we argue that where the road layout and traffic conditions are complex, the level of quality for pedestrians is lower. This is summarised in our simple, but powerful diagram:
© Mark Philpotts/ City Infinity and Robert Weetman.
As you can see, we have split this into “pedestrian-friendly” design and “standard” design. The standard design section of the diagram considers the spectrum between “compromise design” and “flow focussed design”. In other words, once we start to move away from the conditions that mean turning drivers are likely to allow people to cross, we start to see layouts which are much more familiar on our streets and which contain compromises.
The issue with “standard design” is the degree to which pedestrians are excluded. For example, there could be a situation where there’s a significant volume of left turning motor traffic from a main road into a side road that there is no way a parent would let their child cross alone and thus the child is an excluded pedestrian, even if they are otherwise independent. We could also have a situation where the junction is actually very quiet, but an absence of dropped kerbs to cross it excludes wheelchair and mobility scooter users.
This is not to say that standard designs should never be used and we have spent a great deal of time thinking about that as well because we are talking about the long term here. It takes time, effort and investment to get meaningful change; and this does lead to trade-offs and an iterative approach.
For example, adding dropped kerbs and tactile paving to an entire residential estate might assist more people with accessing their local shops than spending the equivalent money on on tighter junctions with raised tables at a handful of side roads on a main road which already had dropped kerbs with tactile paving. We are not saying we need perfection from day one, but we are saying that it needs thinking through each time we want to tackle a side road junction.
Better by design
The idea that drivers will keep to date with the rules of the road is a fantasy; as is thinking that any sets of rules will lead to better safety and accessibility for pedestrians. Education has a place, but this is often aimed at the most vulnerable on our streets and not those with the greatest capacity to cause harm.
Enforcement also has a place, but it really needs to be targeted at the worst behaviour and on the roads and streets which are harder to redesign. We argue that design is by a long way the most important element in the system and that’s where efforts must be made if we are in any way serious about delivering Vision Zero.
Our approach recognises that Rome cannot be (re)built in a day and so an incremental approach is absolutely fine if it is being contained within an overall framework. In some cases, the conditions for pedestrian-friendliness will be in place and we can go to town. In most cases we won’t be there yet and so the design of the highway network remains incredibly important in influencing how pedestrian-friendly a local junction could become..
The implication here of course is that in order to maximise pedestrian friendliness, we need to think about the factors which affect conditions for pedestrians and which include:
- Background vehicle speed
- Through traffic volume
- Turning speed
- Turning vehicle size
- Turning levels and complexity of traffic movement
- Visibility character and crossing distance
- Presence/absence of physical barriers to pedestrian movement
Taking this a step further, we realised that the development of low-speed, low traffic neighbourhoods is crucial for delivery. We also realised that where these neighbourhoods meet main roads, we might need to accept that priority junctions are not always appropriate and a different type of management is required.
If the motor traffic conditions are conducive or are being redesigned to be conducive, then we can look at the details. We have developed a comprehensive set of features, but the most essential for a pedestrian-friendly marked-priority junction are:
- Detectable kerbs away from dropped kerbs.
- The provision of flush dropped kerbs (or a raised side road entry treatment)
- The correct layout of blister tactile paving, laid at 90 degrees to the pedestrian route.
- Appropriate ramp gradients for dropped kerbs which slope in the direction of travel.
- Adequate space at the top of dropped kerbs to allow people to move around the corner without being exposed to the slope.
- A constrained maximum-turning radius.
- A minimum crossing distance.
- Physical prevention of parking close to the junction.
- Standard placement of give way or stop markings in accordance with the requirements traffic signs regulations.
© Mark Philpotts/ City Infinity and Robert Weetman.
This does all lead us to junction layouts which start to look like the one above, which is just one way of achieving our aim. There will be local considerations of course, and there are other things which can enhance provision. In fact, we think that several design features used together amplify effectiveness and so the more we can do the better. The areas shown in blue also suggest that we might be able to add other features, but that’s for exploration another time.
Conclusion
The first stage of instigating change is acknowledging there’s a problem, but perhaps more importantly, it’s also recognising one’s own practice and knowledge requires updating. This was the case for me with this project and as well as now knowing what is actually rotten about UK practice, I can now articulate this as a designer and this will enable me to advocate a better approach.
Theory is one thing. We think we are onto something important here and so this blog post will turn into a series as we want our ideas to spread more widely because things actually need to change on the streets; and that includes network planning which I’ll cover in another post.
About our work for Manchester City Council
Mark and Robert have been helping MCC think about how side road junctions could be made better through design. The council wanted to build on the aspirations contained within the Manchester Active Travel Strategy in a practical and achievable way, as well as responding comprehensively to the design approach proposed in the Greater Manchester Streets for All Design Guide.
Past UK practice has created a legacy of side road junctions which largely don’t support the interests of people walking, wheeling and cycling. We believe MCC is leading the way by commissioning work that asked us to consider the problem, how it might be addressed in the short term, and how it might be resolved in the long term.
The views expressed here are those of the authors and not Manchester City Council.
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