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by Paul Scully | Jan 19, 2009 | Carshalton Central, News |
It’s not often that you see Colston Avenue as clear as this these days. The photo on the right was taken on Saturday lunchtime and shows how different the road is when commuters are not filling the road. Usually cars have to crawl through the middle with drivers surging ahead to fill gaps when one appears. The pinch points become punch points, stretching a hundred yards rather than the short width of the chicane.
Whisper it quietly, but we might have got a resolution. As I reported back in December, the results from the Controlled Parking Zone came back and were quite clearly against but Colston Avenue has not been forgotten. Officers have worked on a plan to remove the vast majority of parking on the road, leaving just the pavement parking and a small number of bays on the road. This will free up the road space to help the flow of cars. The pinch points will remain to ensure that the increased flow does not translate to excessive speed. Consideration has been given to adding signs to prioritise one direction over the other. However, there is a danger that this gives drivers a false sense of security, making them over-confident and lunging for the opening ahead of oncoming vehicles. Traffic flow will be monitored before further consideration is given to this change.
There are two further projects that affect Colston Avenue. A scheme to make walking to school safer for pupils at Camden Junior School has already resulted in a “tactile paving” crossing near the West Street Junction and as part of a wider scheme with the catchy title of STEPS Zone 19, a zebra crossing has been approved to be built on Westmead Corner and Colston Avenue will have a 20mph speed limit.
Colston Avenue has always been something of a pet project of mine. The original traffic calming scheme was pushed through as a political decision by a previous councillor for the area and Leader of the Council against the advice of officers. I’m only too pleased to sign off on a scheme that should correct this long-standing and costly mistake. Residents have asked me to deal with this as a priority for some six years now and I am glad to be able to go back to them with an answer. Having said that, not everyone will get what they want. Some wanted parking permits, others wanted the pinch points removed entirely. At least we have got something that should help. Let’s see how it goes and come back to it if there are any further issues.
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by Paul Scully | Jan 17, 2009 | Carshalton Central, News |
I had four consecutive meetings at the Council offices yesterday about a variety of traffic schemes proposed for Carshalton. The results were positive.
Residential roads across the Borough are divided up into areas known as Strategic Traffic & Environmental Problem Studies or STEPS zones for short. STEPS zone 19 includes Salisbury, Blakehall and Carshalton Park Road and the roads around the perimeter of Carshalton Park. It reaches across to Manor Road in Wallington.
All residents received a letter from the Council asking if they considered their road to be a rat-run, whether it should be made into a 20mph zone and if any traffic calming should be considered. 20% of residents replied with a mixed bag of replies. In order to make sense of them, the area was broken down into four bite-size chunks.
Residents around Blakehall Road were split, with Carshalton Park Road identified as the biggest rat-run. However, neither the level of responses or the accident data merited the need for speed bumps etc. I did insist that attention was given to sightlines on the junctions. There are a lot of children that go up to Stanley Park Infants and Juniors along that route. The corner of Blakehall and Salisbury is dreadful with vans and cars blocking the view for turning traffic and the corners near Glebe Road are similar. There are several occasions when traffic is forced into the path of oncoming traffic. I know that parking is getting more difficult in that area having seen more cars in twenty years that I have lived here, but I would be supportive of yellow lines on the corners to ease this problem.
Residents around the Park did not generally see their road as a cut through and so it was easy to decide to leave well alone. The other two smaller areas are not in my ward and were less clear cut. Residents in Grosvenor Avenue and Grosvenor Road were keener on slowing the traffic that speeds up the straight road, though there have been no accidents along Grosvenor Avenue and only one on the kink in Grosvenor Road. Accidents have occured as one might expect, at the junction with Park Lane. The area in Wallington has not been resolved yet as the ward councillors are meeting with officers this week.
Update: View the results broken down by road here.
by Paul Scully | Jan 13, 2009 | News |
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by Paul Scully | Jan 11, 2009 | News |
For sometime people have been bemoaning the fact that Sutton High Street struggles to compete with the size of Croydon and the more upmarket Kingston and Epsom for shopping. With little direction for so many years, major retailers saw little benefit in coming to Sutton.
Before Christmas, I thought that it was a sign of the times that a Pound shop could be undercut by a “99p” shop. The pictures opposite show the two stores proudly sitting as bookends at the top and bottom of the High Street respectively.
Now, however, a Pound shop in Poole has closed down due to the competition from a 99p store that recently opened opposite. There are plenty of vacant shops in Sutton. Anyone fancy opening a lucrative 98p store? I’ll nip down to the bank and get a few bags of 2p pieces for change.
by Paul Scully | Jan 7, 2009 | News |
How many near-misses must there have been along the roads of London over the last month or two with the advent of these roadside billboards?
It screams out the bait as if Brian Blessed had been the copywriter but the product that it is marketing is hidden in the lurid colours and the sheer size of the provocative text of the question.
According to the Sunday Telegraph, they have been removed voluntarily by the firm behind the advertising campaign after the Advertising Standards Authority dithered following a string of complaints. I don’t consider myself prudish but the posters that were on Beddington Lane and Carshalton Road were ugly and just daft, playing on a base schoolboy sense of titillation. As do most people, I get enough spam in my inbox about sex, viagra and plenty of other things, I really don’t need it while I’m away from my emails for a while relaxing in the traffic on the red route. I could say that it gets up my nose, but since this product is a nasal spray that it is claimed cures impotency, I’ll rely on a judgemental shake of the head.
Anyway, the people who I feel sorry for are those who live opposite the posters who must have to look out of their bedroom windows everyday before they go to bed and when they get up to have the same question being posed of them. I’m not sure if Brian Blessed has considered retraining as an Agony Aunt.
It’s not often that you see Colston Avenue as clear as this these days. The photo on the right was taken on Saturday lunchtime and shows how different the road is when commuters are not filling the road. Usually cars have to crawl through the middle with drivers surging ahead to fill gaps when one appears. The pinch points become punch points, stretching a hundred yards rather than the short width of the chicane.
