Progressive thinking from an unlikely source

Were I to ask you who you think is pushing the envelope as regards the design of urban streets, I somehow doubt that the Department for Transport would be at or near the top of your list. But it should be, you know. You might not previously have credited any collection of civil servants with being uninhibited free-thinkers working at the edge but this lot have a long-established rep­utation for innovation, not least with regard to their acronym de guerre. Now appearing as the DfT, former incarnations include DETR, DTLR, DTp, DoT and the classic MOT.

In the really olden days they even called themselves the Ministry of War Transport and in that guise foolishly set the pattern for decades of dispiriting highway design. They did this by commanding, in 1946’s Design and Layout of Roads in Built-up Areas, that, 'Traffic segrega­tion, which may be defined as separation of traffic in the interests of safety and free flow, should be the keynote of modern road design.'

That was a colossal blunder to which I have referred before and from which it might be thought there could be no recovery. But it would appear that (however much you might want to) you simply can’t keep a good civil servant down. It may have taken half a century and more but the Department has, in my view, bounced back. Your view, of course, may be that I’m off my rocker.

So what’s my evidence that the Department, or at least its Roads, Regional and Local Transport Group, should now be regarded as the good guys? For Exhibit A, please turn with me to section 3.6 of Local Transport Note (LTN) 1/04, which is available on the DfT’s website and is all about Policy Planning and Design for Walking and Cycling. What struck me as new and even liberating when I first read this were the con­tents of Table 3.6 (the pedestrian portion of which is reproduced here). This fleshes out the basic notion that, when you’re considering measures to improve conditions for pedestrians and cyclists, you should do so through reference to a 'hierarchy of provision'. That’s to say, think of actions at the top of the list first and only con­sider actions further down if the ones further up prove impossible to achieve.

So: what’s the first thing to do when you’re trying to make a busy street safer for pedestri­ans? Signalise problem junctions and allow pedestrians across each arm in two, three or four stages? Install more guard-railing? Build a footbridge? No: remove some of the traffic and, if that’s too difficult, slow it down. And whose idea is this? Transport 2000’s? Living Streets’? The Friends of the Earth’s? No: the Department for Transport’s!

Sceptics might, of course, choose to point out that LTN 1/04 remains a draft for consultation and may have been given a thorough kicking by numerous old-school respondents. They may also ask me to consider what I think would happen, in the real world, if they were to put in a bid to the DfT for a pedestrian improvement scheme that headlined slashing the traffic capacity of an important street.

In which case, I’d better move on to Exhibit B: the DfT-sponsored Mixed Priority Routes (MPR) project. This encompasses the redesign of ten main streets in towns and cities around England, the focus being on innovation in designing for safety and an attractive pedestrian environment. All schemes address failing main street environments where the diversion of sig­nificant volumes of traffic away from the street is, as so often, not a practicable option. But although they therefore had to pass on the measure at the top of LTN 1/04’s list of priori­ties, they only dropped down to the ones immediately below and focused on traffic speed reduction and the judicious reallocation of road space.

Of course, being recent schemes (indeed some are yet to be completed), it’s not possible to say with certainty whether the MPR projects have been successful in delivering busy streets that are safe, attractive, walkable and inclusive. But at least the DfT is defiantly demonstrating that it’s kicked ‘segregation’ as a design philoso­phy into the very long grass.

Exhibit C is the Manual for Streets (MfS – the replacement for Design Bulletin 32), the consul­tation draft of which has been published. Although I’m still wading through it, I notice that the authors have laid waste to the previous guidance on y-distances, adherence to which has been responsible for visibility splays that have, for far too long, done the urban fabric of many towns and cities a bit of no good at all. The MfS proposes, for example, that the stop­ping sight distance (SSD – the basis for y-distances) for a 50kph (31mph) design speed is slashed from 70 metres to 43 metres. A near 40% reduction – just like that! With juicy bits like this and the recommendation that road safety audits should be replaced by more broadly-based quality audits, the draft MfS is my pick for this summer’s top holiday read.