Proactive road safety improvements before school starts?
Just a quick thing...
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Nuneaton has a lot of residential development going on, and one of the newest sites is seeing a brand new secondary school being built, set to open its doors for its first cohort of Year Sevens in September this year. All very exciting – except for the nearby main road which remains at its historical 40mph limit. Will the County Council entertain dropping the maximum speed down to 30mph?
The road in question is the northern section of Higham Lane in Nuneaton, between the A5 and St Nicholas Park Drive, where following commencement of building in 2019, there is already a significant amount of new housing. Despite this, the main road kept its 40mph speed limit. There was no decent active travel infrastructure provided with that development (except a short and limited shared use path) so not great for people wanting to cycle, but at least there was very limited need to cross the main road. Now however, the newest developments are all on the opposite side and once completed will feature around 1700 new homes, the aforementioned secondary school, a yet to arrive primary school, and a new link road.
Rather than being a boundary road, Higham Lane now bisects residential estates and as such, its 40mph limit is inappropriate and unsafe.
To my knowledge there has been no suggestion that the speed limit here needs to be brought down. Yet we now have a clear and imminent need for people to cross Higham Lane, to cycle along it, to walk alongside it. Part of the catchment for the secondary school – Higham Lane North Academy (HLNA) – is not just the new housing estate that will eventually surround it, but existing residential areas. Indeed, it is known that pupils from primary schools all over Nuneaton have been offered places at HLNA.
With this in mind, I have recently reported a highways defect noting that with the school opening in September, Higham Lane at 40mph is now a significant safety risk, particularly to anyone – including children – who cycles to school (or elsewhere) and needs to use all or part of Higham Lane, but also to bus users. People travelling by public transport will find that north-bound bus stops do not connect with a pavement alongside the road; just a small amount of hardstanding. Bus users are therefore forced to cross the road at uncontrolled locations close to junctions or even directly opposite.
In that report, I have specifically asked that the speed limit be dropped to 30mph and that perhaps traffic calming measures also be considered. The report has been acknowledged today, Thursday 13 March.
Ideally of course, we’d see good quality cycle infrastructure installed along Higham Lane, but that’s not a realistic expectation at this time given the difficulties in getting just the current planned cycle schemes developed elsewhere in the borough. A speed limit drop should be the first and presumably easiest and cheapest improvement that the County Council could implement as part of a safer systems approach to road safety, with traffic calming measures coming second.
The question is, will Warwickshire act proactively and urgently to start the process of dropping the speed limit and perhaps installing traffic calming measures, preferably in time for the start of the new school year, or will it keep the status quo either for the short-term or indefinitely, waiting for reported incidents before deciding to take action?
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