Transcript

Good morning and welcome to Cabinet Member for Highways Transports and Economic Growth Decisions on Tuesday 23 April at 1230. I'm Matt Furness, I am the Cabinet Member for the decisions today. Just quickly, whizzing through the agenda, item 1, declaration of interest, I have no interest to declare. 2, we don't have any members or public questions, so we go straight to item 3, the petition to mark disabled parking space and four parking spaces for maximum use of 30 minutes outside of 18 to 20 Buckland Road and we have the lead petitioner here, Julie. You have three minutes. Over to you. Thank you. Thank you, Matt. Yes, I'm Julie Hutchinson, I've worked to the local store, post office with new 25 years now, so I've gradually watched how the situation with parking has slowly worsened over the years, mainly because of people putting driveways in and reducing the parking of the road. But we're at a situation now where I think something needs to be done, we have rather a lot of elderly people that use the shop and the post office, not all are disabled, but they still struggle to walk too far. So I do think the main purpose of this was to get the disabled parking bay and it's in many parking spaces we possibly can, but I think it's going to be three, possibly four, not quite where I did the actual size and so I'm not an expert on that. We do have quite a lot of problems where people parking their car, getting picked up and taking to work so the car is sitting outside. We have a lot of people that decide that they can park because there's no marks that can just park across these parking spaces and this is just causing a lot of issues for not just the elderly, but all of our customers that are using the post office and the shop and as I say we have a lot of elderly people. A lot of them only come into the shop for a 10 minute chat, so it's that social thing. We are, I suppose at the heart of the village and it's quite a private shop at the moment in the post office, so we just need to have better access. The problem is also not helped by the fact that the road is quite small. It's quite thin and the part where across the other side is also very small. So that really at the moment is no longer used because if you've got a push chair it's not wide enough. The council about three years, four years ago put in some posts along the pathway which is reduced it even more so I think that was to stop parking. Unfortunately people are just parking in between the posts now. So that's now in the road even more. So if there was an ambulance for a fire brigade that needs to get through they certainly couldn't. Absolutely. Especially on Saturday and Sunday when the football is on because we've got the field in the park. We also have a school just up the road, on our road just literally 10 houses away. So obviously that we have the problem when the school runs, people parking across people's driveways. We have also the added issue of our deliveries. We're in a post office, we have obviously the postman, but the delivery of the money and picking up the money and these vans need to be close to the shop for safety as well as anything else. And these are what happen in this. They're parking as close to the shops as they can but across the people's driveways which is upsetting a lot of the residents. So all of these issues add up together. We're never going to solve the whole problem but if we can do what we can to resolve some of the problems that the shop is viable for these customers and to help not only keep the shop going in the village vibe but make it easier accessible for these to do find it hard. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you for that. Just to check, how do you see in the response before the meeting, the formal response? No. Okay. That was fine. So I'll just come to Ricky first. Ricky, is there anything you wanted to add just based on the speaker's comments there? No, I mean I quite understand them. We do have some proposals to put in some, actually some parking restrictions on the opposite side of the road to try and stop the vehicles parking partly on the footway. I know the posts are a bit further down near the church hall or the scout hall, I can't remember. But along that pathway where cars do go up onto the park, we have got some proposals we've just advertised recently to bring in some restrictions there. And we have also obviously been in touch a little bit via Joss. We're planning on putting in an advisory disabled base as soon as we can. I know you've had comments about where that's going to go. And also whether we can extend the parking base once they do go ahead, which will be a while away because they have to be done formally either side of the shop. There's a very slight overlap at the edges there. But unfortunately, it's not actually the bit that leads around behind at the shop, isn't that wide? And there are obviously people's driveways next to that. So there's not that much room to stretch it. Parking bays are normally disabled bays have to be a minimum of 6.6 metres long. Standard parking bays, we would normally do them at least five metres long. They used to be shorter, but cars have just grown and grown and got so much bigger over the years that that makes it more difficult. I had wondered as well whether there's possibly some scope for putting some as you're looking at the shop from the front to the right and beyond the first couple of houses, there's possibly room to put a bay in there. So it's close enough to the shop, but that would be as the same part of the formal bays. But we'll see what we can do in terms of getting as many in as possible. It will be pushing it to get four bays and the disabled bays there, but we'll get as many in as we can. Excellent. Thank you, Ricky. So I'm just going to make sure you get a copy of the response, but yes, we're looking to get the advisory disabled bay in as soon as possible. And then the other proposals that you've asked for are all going to be folded in to the annual parking review, as Ricky's mentioned. Is it possible to just ask some now? Yes, of course. So just part of the proposal, what I was thinking is that I decided the shop, we have got driveways, which they cannot be used, so it is always a space, and we're willing to give those up to create more space. And what I was proposing was that if we use half of each of those driveways, move the disabled parking down towards number 16. So not only can they drive in and out without being blocked in, we've also got the half of the driveway, which is easier for them if they have to get a wheelchair out and boot, they haven't got used to step, it's just slide up, or any walking aid frame, it's just easier than that step up. That way it also stops anybody because the majority of people are respectfully enough not to park in a blue badge space, that would stop people parking over the gentleman's driveway, who gets really quite aggressive and annoyed, which is understandable. That then is using up that space that is now lost at the moment, reducing how much of the front we're taking, so we've got the space there, that gives us more space to the street and use part of the other one. And also, where you've got it at the moment, or temporary going to put it, for somebody to get into that space, they're going to have to reverse it, especially if somebody's parked the other side, which nine times out of ten it is, because it's narrow, reversing it is going to be very difficult for them, whereas at the end, because that driveway is there, they can literally go in and out. What I'm going to suggest, in addition to the formal written response, whether Ricky or one of your team, maybe I have a site visit with you, so you can just walk it and explain what we can and cannot do. I think that would be quite helpful, because it's not easy to visualise sitting at the room here, but at least then, the team can actually explain to you what is even our gift, what we can do, particularly around people's driveways, which, as you can imagine, are quite important. I think I've got your contact details already, so I will get in touch after this meeting, and we can then, certainly before we do the formal bays and everything, we will definitely make sure we get maximising and getting them in the best place possible. Brilliant. Thank you. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you. Thank you, Ricky. Just moving on to item number four, petition for traffic carring measures on Crawley Ridge. Again, in the agenda, we have the published response, but we have the lead petitioner Sue Knight here today on line. Sue, three minutes over to you if there's anything you'd like to add in addition to the formal response that's set out in the agenda. Sorry, Sue Knight, you're muted, potentially. We can't hear you. No, sorry, we can't hear you. Okay, we'll wait. I'll go to Trevor Hogg then in the meantime, Trevor, if that's okay. I would have come to you anyway, but is there anything you'd like to say on this petition? Yeah, fine. Thank you very much, Matt, for your quote and the time on this. Yeah, and obviously we had 147 residents sign up for it. They are residents along Crawley Ridge itself for the main part. So there's a high degree of acceptance of whatever we do down there in order to reduce speeds. And you have to recognise that it is used as a wrap run whenever the morning traffic builds up to the point where it's at the entrance to Crawley Ridge and tend to get vehicles then coming down there for a short period of the day at quite high speeds because they are using it to bypass traffic on the A325. So it is a bit of a concern, particularly because it coincides more or less exactly with school drop off time and children walking into the school entrance along Crawley Ridge, which itself has fairly narrow footpaths. So a bit of a concern, shall we say. And yeah, we do really want to see something to bring down vehicles speeds there as probably being the best thing that we could possibly do. So that's where I put it. I know has been some other safety-related work nearby in Jibit Lane. We are already looking at bringing the speeds down on the A30 from 50 to 40 because quite a number of the children come from the old Dean area and then walk down Jibit Lane onto Crawley Ridge itself and to the school. So if we can bring the traffic speeds down and keep the whole thing synchronized, then it will have a generally good effect on safety. It's also worth noting that there have been quite a few non-injury accidents down there as well, which obviously don't get reported in the same way. So there is concern, as I say, about driving behaviour as well. Hopefully, Sue can talk now. Can you hear me now? We can hear you. Excellent. Fantastic. Thank you. It sounds as if Trevor was doing a good job anyway. But yes, just so I am the head teacher at the junior school. I'm representing also the infant school, the local neighbourhood watch and quite a group of local residences as well. And as Trevor said, Crawley Ridge is one of the oldest roads in, not the oldest, but one of the older roads in Cambelles. There is only a pavement on one side. The two schools are next to each other and sit in the middle. The other end is a church. And at the other end is, as Trevor said, an ideal picking up spot for the secondary school pupils. So there are four reasons for young people to be in the area. On maps, it looks a lovely long straight road that's going to help you bypass the big reference we're drowned about. It's very popular with delivery fans and for some reason, I don't understand skip lorries. And I noticed from the response that the speed management team have discovered an average speed of 28 miles an hour, which is fabulous. But when it's a skip lorry, doing 28 miles an hour down a line of continuously parked cars, that's actually quite a risk. Drivers sometimes expect to school if they've looked at their set-and-offs properly. What they don't realise is that the school day here starts at 7.30 in the morning with the breakfast club and finishes at 6. And actually we have a constant round of trips and visitors, children going out to appointments. So sometimes they slow down a little because they're forced to by park cars that's the key drop off and pick up times. But actually all day there is risk to young people. The school has done what it can in terms of trying to stagger to start some particularly between the two schools. We've done a lot of work on walking to school, scooters, Trevor has funded some work for us on that as well. But the primary way for our families to get to school is by car. And sometimes very unhelpfully they drive here by car and then unload bicycles and scooters. So the pavements are then really congested with the bicycles and scooters that come out of the car boot and as well as the fact that we've got a lot of young families in pushchairs. So children do tend to step off the pavement at regular intervals. We've also got cyclists who have just cycled up a really steep hill because Crawley Ridge is a ridge. And then at the top they're a bit wobbly. Cars have put their foot down to get up the ridge. And last week I stood outside and watched a car and a bicycle have a very, very new miss. Conversely going back down the steep hill, cars pick up speed just as they find all the secondary school pupils probably in the road who of course are looking at their phones. So there are a lot of potential risks in one small area. I see from the response that the main objection to the scheme being made a priority is that nobody's been hurt. And it would be really lovely to think that we acted before somebody was hurt rather than waiting for me to be here because there's been a serious accident which would enough to be involved with a child. Against before I'd been taken. I'm grateful for Trevor putting us forward as one of his priorities. I really hope today that we can take some action before somebody is hurt or killed, not wait till that sad scenario. Thank you. Thank you Miss Knight. Ricky, was there anything you wanted to add on this one as well? There's not very much, it's not particularly my area. I mean I do know that I've seen the response about the types of accidents and it's very often that I've heard that said before that we want to try and prevent something, I mean do something before the reason accident. I know that I did notice in the response so that there are some plans I think for Trevor part of your you're looking at getting some more work done as some speed restrictions and things or what you might call them, speed limiting measures put in as soon as you are able. I've actually proposed it as my county wide ITS nomination, but of course that's something of the lottery. Yeah, but I mean it is a difficult one because there is so much pressure on, I mean it's one of those things, most schools would like to have speed restrictions and speed limits outside them and it is a very difficult decision as to where they can be put in. The other thing I would point out is that only part of the footpath has been addressed with repairs down Crawley Ridge. The other half of it is in horizon for future years but frankly it's in quite poor condition and could do with being dealt with sooner rather than later. So what I'll do then soon Trevor is I will have a chat with the team as you can see we're going to seek to enforce the zigzag school lines as part of the petition response. The budget for the road safety outside schools because we put additional money into that is as you can imagine fully committed, we do have quite a few schools across the county but we will see I will see with the team whether there is something else that we can do there and bring something forward potentially with unless you've already spent it all Trevor your 120,000s that you get for local improvements there might be something that we can bring forward hopefully sooner than the ITS which I accept it can be a lottery but if it's a good candidate it's usually at the top of that list for private monetization. You've already spent the cash okay so we'll see what we can do if there is anything additional we'll communicate it to both of you and we'll make sure that you're kept up to date particularly around the yellow line installation for the zigzags and I will also see if we can have some regular enforcement once they go in so that we can really just remind parents and visitors not to park in that area. Yeah in relation to that Matt the yellow lines are already there the problem is the TRO wasn't correctly drafted so it's got to be redone though that's right yes but we can get some enforcement. Yeah that's very much we're about to formally advertise quite soon the that new proposal so that's very much in the pipeline. That's great thank you that is the last item of business on the agenda today so therefore it's 1251 I closed the meeting thank you. Thank you. [BLANK_AUDIO]