Traffic management on main roads in towns and villages

It saddens me to see the ever increasing number of major Urban Traffic Control (UTC) schemes being introduced into our urban areas. I am sure that the intentions are good and the schemes are justified with flow increases and crash reductions there for the assessment and CCTV cameras follow the queues of traffic, and pedestrians have the "benefit" of "safe" crossing facilities at signals. These systems may work well in major centres but they have been extended way beyond their remit encroaching into other areas which could be far better served using a traffic calming approach.

All that these schemes do is to make life easier for the driver and more difficult for pedestrians and cyclists who must survive in the hostile environment created more to suit the motor vehicle. So what is the alternative?

I return to Borehamwood in Hertfordshire. Here a main road in a shopping street has been tamed using the following techniques:

• Single lane dualling
• Mini-/Small roundabouts at any main junction
• Regular speed table provision

It has to be seen to be believed, and the scheme won the 1994 Urban Street Environment award. Here large volumes of vehicles and pedestrians are able to mix with either incurring minimum delay, and cyclists too get a much better deal than usual. Pedestrians in particular are able to slot in and out of the traffic in the slightest gap between vehicles and cyclists easily keep up with the traffic. But why am I so excited about this? Well, the accident reduction potential is enormous; with such low speeds huge reductions can and have been achieved way beyond that which can ever be achieved by UTC and the environment is so much more pleasant with the motor vehicle tamed and all road users able to enjoy it. Remember too that there is not a single traffic signal pole in sight!

So the message here is to look vary carefully at your proposals in main shopping streets and think what can be achieved by these techniques.

But what about buses and emergency vehicles? This is where vertical deflections that differentiate between different track-width vehicles come into their own. The perception at Borehamwood is that the speed tables are too unfriendly to traffic in particular to buses. The answer lies in provision of the H- or S-ramp instead of the rather poorly constructed tables there at present. Here the original designs incorporated 900mm kerbs across the carriageway to support the base of the ramps. This has resulted in poor performance with repair work needed regularly and an impact when tyres meet the kerb which inevitably fails to follow the slightly rutted profile of the carriageway.

Although this is detail it is very important; vertical deflections are precision tools and have to be laid accurately to work as intended. Despite my misgivings about this element of Borehamwood, if you get a chance to see then go; it will be very enlightening. It shows a positive way forward which has on the whole worked.

For the village environment, much the same thing applies. There are so many small villages which are plagued by traffic but which have deliveries, but routes and so on; no vertical deflections are likely to be satisfactory unless they are purpose built to accommodate all these vehicles.