I’ll be writing about this in more detail when I have a final report, so please treat this as interim information.

Pam King, Mark Hunter and I have been working to find ways to improve the Kingsway junction, in particular for people turning right from Cheadle & Gatley onto Kingsway.

The junction is one of the busiest in Greater Manchester – a typical rush hour morning sees more than 7,000 vehicles pass through in just one hour.  The junction is controlled by two bodies: Manchester Urban Traffic Control and the Highways Agency.  The Council doesn’t have control over either of them, so we aim to influence.

The left-turn filter from Gatley has significantly improved the junction from the Gatley side.  I can well remember a queue right through Gatley back to West End and beyond was the norm every single morning and evening before the extra lane went in.  Now the queues on the Gatley side are typically shorter and clear more quickly.

There were four more options that seemed plausible and affordable that we’ve been looking at, so here’s a summary of where each is up to.

1. Dedicated right turn filters

We were keen that the option of having a dedicated right-turn filter was properly looked at.  Whilst it might change (see 4 below) the current situation is that the right turn filter has been rejected by Manchester UTC and the Highways Agency.

Their reasons are:

• if there’s a filter from just one side or the other, the side without a filter gets much longer queues than now.
• if there’s a filter from both sides simultaneously, it would have to be at the expense of traffic turning left and going straight ahead from Cheadle & Gatley (since there’s so much traffic going north-south on Kingsway that even a small extra delay would result in much longer queues).  That would mean longer queues for cars going straight ahead from Cheadle & Gatley and may block the right-turners.
• The junction is physically very small (because of its age) and there are safety concerns about having the dedicated right filter from both sides at the same time.

 2. Reduce the traffic light cycle time from three minutes to two minutes

At peak times the time it takes for a complete cycle of the traffic lights round the junction is three minutes.  The suggestion was to reduce this to two minutes.

Without a dedicated right turn filter, around 3-4 cars are able to turn right in each cycle (when the Gatley/Cheadle lights turn red and before the Kingsway lights turn green).  If the cycles were shorter, more cars would be able to turn right.  Initial computer modelling of the junction suggested this would make quite a big difference.

We’ve now had a report based on further, more detailed, computer modelling and the news seems to be less good.

Switching the cycle time to two minutes will shorten queues on the Cheadle/Gatley roads in the morning rush-hour but will lead to longer queues on Kingsway and the M60, and the average journey time would be increased.  In the evening rush-hour it would make no difference to queues on Kingsway and would shorten the Cheadle queue, but the modelling suggests the queue on the Gatley side would actually get quite a bit longer.

We’ll be looking into this in more detail, but at the moment it looks like the cycle time will stay at three minutes (but, again, see item 4 below).

 3. Re-organise the northbound lanes approaching the junction

If you approach the junction on Kingsway from the south (going past Cheadle Royal), you’ll notice that the three lanes typically have very different quantities of traffic in them.

The left hand lane is the busiest, with the middle lane being lighter and the right hand lane having the least traffic – often with a queue of less than half the length of the left hand lane.

The reason is down to where they go.  The left hand lane is the one to be in for Gatley, the South Park Road estate, the M60 Westbound and the M60 Eastbound.  The other two lanes are for Manchester (though people often use them for the motorway and then pull across after clearing the junction.

The idea is to even out the usage of the lanes, get more vehicles through the junction on each cycle and cut the queues.  So, for example, the left lane might be changed to be for Gatley, with the middle lane for the M60 and the right hand lane for Manchester.

 4. Additional lights to control the flow of traffic from the M60 onto Kingsway

Of all the proposals here, this is the one that’s actually scheduled to happen with money in a budget to pay for it (or so we’ve been told).

As you come off the M60 to join Kingsway southbound, you currently get squeezed down to one lane (this is for safety reasons, following a bad accident some years ago).  That lane of traffic from the motorway then has to merge with the Kingsway traffic just as it approached the lights.  In rush hour that can easily result in 15 or 20 minutes sitting on the slip road.

The plan is to put a set of “flip-flop” lights where the slip road meets Kingsway and make the slip road a proper two-lane road again.  At peak hours, traffic from the slip-road would alternate with traffic coming out of Manchester and I’m told this will make a significant difference in speeding things up from the north.

What next?

One of the main barriers to the dedicated right filter and the reduced cycle time schemes is that they result in longer queues north and south on Kingsway.  If the flip-flop lights reduced queues to the north and the re-designed lanes reduced queues to the south, there would be more chances that one of those schemes to make life easier for those turning right onto Kingsway from Cheadle or Gatley would get through.

When I’ve got the final version of the report on reducing the cycle time, I’ll publish it here and you can take a look and comment on it.  Rest assured that Pam, Mark and myself are keeping a close eye on developments and applying pressure where we can to get further improvements to the junction.