Everyone will know by now via local consultations organised by St Pauls Unlimited Community Partnership that Drummond Road will be opened up to through traffic and we can now confirm that will happen in approximately October or November this year following today’s discussions with Bristol City Council.
It has come as somewhat of a surprise, however, that Drummond Road will be opened up to two-way traffic between Ashley Road and City Road when most residents understood that there would be a one-way traffic scheme in place. Local residents are concerned that Drummond Road is simply too narrow to accommodate two-way traffic with, often, insufficient room available for even one-way traffic, especially emergency vehicles as large as a rigid chassis fire tender. History shows that fire tenders can be both denied access due to width restrictions as well as unable to leave swiftly when called elsewhere for emergency responses.
Additionally, residents are concerned that available car parking spaces are taken up by employees of local businesses. So far, there is no indication that a Resident’s Parking Scheme will be set in place nor corner parking restrictions to alleviate these issues. Each of these considerations will require additional funding as well as local consultation before they can be brought about, yet they remain on the resident’s agenda to resolve.
To put funding considerations into perspective, the “Ist stage” BCC is committed to will cost approximately £130,000, just to open the road up to through traffic. A large part of that is attributable to legal process expenses. Should a one-way traffic flow scheme be preferred, the additional cost is merely £5-10,000 maximum with basic signage, hardly significant. In fact this additional sum equates to roughly just over 10% of the available cost allocation which one is tempted to think is well within the bounds of any sensible contingency budget anyway. As the road is so obviously unsuitable for two-way traffic, one is bound to ask why such a perfunctory scheme is planned in the first place?
There being no economies of scale in BCC having to return on site to remedy such a myopic quick fix, as will surely be the case, one can but conjecture as to whether BCC are almost resentful at having to spend any money at all and the extent to which we are being seen as anything other than of nuisance value to be ameliorated only by meagre measures and vacuous spin?
Asides from traffic and parking considerations, local residents are accounting for the loss of safe street play opportunities for their children. Sadly, it is hard to imagine how that can be reconciled with the over-riding benefits of opening the road, thus designing out much street crime, in itself, not in the interests of children anyway.
To some extent, that can be ameliorated by recently announced BCC schemes to enable local residents to apply for their roads to be closed several times a year so that children can play freely. With a small amount of local organisation, such days could prove to be very popular. Drummond Road Improvements is looking into this prospect more deeply as we write and will update site users when more details are known.
