MINUTES OF THE COMMUNITY COUNCIL MEETING – GUEST SPEAKERS –SBC Officers re. Whalebridge and 20mph - HELD ON 07 DECEMBER 2011

Gwillam Lloyd
Came to a BSACC meeting in March time about Whalebridge and took away the concerns about the additional traffic that might be generated in the Broadgreen Area and the importance of changing the traffic management in the area. Since then there had been meetings with the Police and Councillors and traffic surveys and they had secured some funding which hopefully will be able to help introduce changes to the speed limits in the area, they think to 20mph, but to do so, they needed residents thoughts about how it could work and the areas the speed limits needed to cover, but they think within the budget restraints, 20mph could be achieved. There were a number of options on how to slow the traffic, although at least one of the options would alter the number of parking spaces, which probably wouldn’t be acceptable.

Bob….
As well as signage, a number of options to reduce speed were shown to the meeting, but Manchester Road would not be reduced to 20mph, as it was needed to carry more traffic.
They wanted to get residents and community representatives interested in helping to decide the changes, within the budget, and what they felt were the best traffic calming options. SBC would be carrying out further consultations with the community.

Mark Walker
Would it be helpful to do what they did in the Eastcott Area, where they did a review of parking arrangements, where they tried to get one person in each street, to engage with their neighbours and capture the issues and feed them back into the process so they could plot out the ideas and come up with an overall scheme. This would allow SBC to reach as many people as they could and come up with a scheme that could be looked at, at a future drop in session.

Questions and observations –
Parking spaces cannot be lost.
Mark Walker – In Eastcott they looked at the double yellow lines and if they were all needed, and through consultations with the community, many were tweaked and 30 to 40 new spaces were found, with local residents help this could be done in Broadgreen.

Before implementing any 20 mph schemes or new parking spaces, could all the roads not be re-surfaced? Gwillam Lloyd – There are 850 km’s of roads in Swindon, many are very old but there was not enough money in the budget to maintain them properly, but they would be prepared to go back and look at the problem. Councillors had discussed lots of the roads in bad condition but re-surfacing was not always the best use of the budget.

Some of the gulley drain covers were missing or blocked what could be done about it? Gwillam – All the roads were now inspected for safety but before 2007 not much money was spent on this problem.
Cllr. Wright – People could put in a request if they had problems with a drain, but the bore of the drains not being big enough caused some of the problems, which was the responsibility of Thames Water.

Could rat-runs be blocked up?
Gwillam – He would be happy to identify the last time this was looked at and take up the issue if necessary.

Now that the new junction had opened at Whalebridge, there were hold ups at the Halford’s roundabout in Fleming Way caused by cars wanting to go up Princes Street from Corporation Street.
Gwillam – At the moment it seemed that the traffic on this roundabout was a matter of displacement from the old roundabout, but there was probably no extra traffic. When the work was completed there would be traffic surveys to look at this. The idea of the scheme was to encourage traffic to use the Great Western Way rather than going through the town centre, and because of the consequence of possible extra traffic using the Broadgreen Area, this was the significant reason that there was a need to improve the public realm and have 20pmh, in Broadgreen.