the cheesecake man wrote: ↑Thu Jun 13, 2019 19:52I'm baffled too but members with much greater knowledge than me of Birmingham, road design and disability seem to be expressing concerns. I expect the event to be at the city centre end with the entrance along the carriageway but nobody knows.
There are only two accesses onto the motorway at the city centre end.
The first is
the sliproad from the A38. This one doesn't look too bad – there's a pavement right by it – but the problem is that the lane drop here, between the pavement and the motorway access, is the main diversion route for when the A38(M) is closed, heavily used even when it isn't, and will likely be completely solid with traffic, and there's no easy way round it from the city centre. If you close that road too to give pedestrians a path through, you'd have to dump all the traffic onto the B4114, leading to all the traffic trying to get through
this stretch of D1. Somehow I doubt this diversion route would be approved (unless the intention really was to close Birmingham to traffic almost entirely).
The other is
the sliproad to Dartmouth Circus. Not exactly the greatest of locations for pedestrian access, and again, the A5127 is going to be full of traffic if the A38(M) is closed. This might be a more viable location, because there are other reasonable routes between the A4540 and M6, but it's still not really the sort of access that you'd want to have to use, and it requires walking along the road for a sufficient distance that you likely couldn't make it work with, e.g., a temporary pedestrian crossing.
I think the best approach is probably to close the leftmost lane of the eastbound carriageway of the B4132 between the A5127 and A38(M). That gives a flat access for pedestrians to the B4132 using
this pedestrian crossing, and can then be used to enter the motorway
here at the intermediate junction. One potential problem is that this gives access to the elevated section rather than the section in cutting, which could potentially be a health and safety issue; another is that it would necessarily require closing the entire motorway, because the immediate vicinity of the slip road entrance is part of every possible movement that uses the A38(M). (That said, I think closing the entire motorway is likely the best option anyway). One big advantage of this method is that it only requires a lane closure, not a road closure, and on a fairly minor road by comparison with the other options. Another is that the slip road seems to be less steep compared with some, as the motorway is changing elevation in the opposite direction to the sliproad at the time. (The sliproads on the A38(M) probably have a design speed of 50mph, because the motorway does, and thus I'd expect them to be steeper than they are on rural 70mph motorways.)
