SteveM wrote: ↑Tue Apr 09, 2024 10:50To which I respond, 'Healthy Streets' m-lord,
https://www.healthystreets.com/ where directness for peds and cycles aces other considerations, and certainly bridges and subways fail on that measure.
I don't see how that follows. A bridge or subway of the kind often provided in the UK in the twentieth century would fail, certainly, because it would involve a level change via ramps or steps, often multiple switchbacks or spirals during the change in height, and then a narrow crossing that would be either exposed and windswept or dangerously dark and secluded, all while motor traffic flowed through unimpeded.
This is not Healthy Streets compliant and is not, I think, what either Jackal or I were suggesting.
But that does not mean that a bridge or subway is automatically bad and wrong. It absolutely does not mean that a bridge or subway is automatically worse than taking a route that makes multiple signalised crossings of sliproads, side roads and roundabout approaches, which is a dreadful way to get people around on foot or on bike. To me
that is saying "car is king" because it makes all other road users skirt around the cars and wait for permission to cross vehicle flows.
A properly designed route for NMUs can involve bridges and subways to provide a direct, pleasant route that prioritises those modes of transport and eliminates steps, ramps and signals.
This is a reasonably new example near Cambridge that is fairly modest - it could be wider, for a start - but it provides a direct route across the A14 without requiring NMUs to use any part of the neighbouring junction, and is a shorter way between the places either side, point to point, than going via the interchange.
To put that in more concrete terms relating to this junction, HCC's design for M27 J10 has the main pedestrian and cycle route between Fareham and the new development crossing the westbound M27 exit sliproad on the level, at a set of lights, and sharing the new bridge over the motorway. Further north, where the route crosses Broadway, that street will be carrying most of the traffic to and from the M27 so will be dominated by motor traffic movements. If you kept the interchange on the site of the present J10, you could have the whole new bridge for pedestrians and cycles, without having to give way to motorised traffic at all, and with no changes in level beyond those already in the design. Broadway, meanwhile, would not form a route to or from the M27 and so would only be carrying local traffic. That is surely better - and more compliant with the concept of Healthy Streets - than intentionally building, at the outset and from scratch, a main pedestrian and cycle route that is entangled with motor traffic passing through a motorway interchange.
