Cheadle and Gatley Lib Dems are moving
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by Lib Dem team on 30 March, 2012
The Kingsway junction is never going to meet modern standards. It’s one of the busiest junctions in Greater Manchester, built 50 years ago when there was, to say the least, not quite so much traffic on the roads.
To bring it up to modern standards, you’d have to knock down at least 17 houses (don’t worry – no-one’s proposing that!). To really build the junction that you’d want to for the volume of traffic that passes through it, you’d probably want to knock down about 40 houses (no, we’re not suggesting that either).
We’ve been working on incremental improvements to the junction. The left filter lane from Gatley isn’t perfect, but it does make a real difference. Changing the timing of the lights – hopefully in June, when the slip-road work is complete – will make a real difference to anyone turning right from Cheadle or Gatley onto Kingsway.
The next improvement we’re working on is for northbound traffic. We want to cut down the long queues that stretch back to Cheadle Royal – or beyond – from the junction, and we’re hopeful that it can now be done.
The idea is to equalise the queues in the three lanes. At the moment, the nearside lane (to Gatley, M60 West and M60 East) has by far the longest queues. The middle and outside lanes have shorter queues. That means we don’t get as many vehicles through the junction as we could do – the nearside lane is still slogging through when the other lanes are empty. It also means that people dodge into the other lanes, then cut across when they get past the junction to get onto the motorway.
The plan is to change the lane layout, with the left hand lane being just for Gatley and the M60 Westbound, the middle lane for the M60 Eastbound or Manchester and the outside lane just for Manchester.
That will help get the queue lengths more even, which will mean a shorter nearside queue and less lane-dodging.
The plans are still in development at the moment, so watch this space!
8 Comments
Iain, I can remember attending a meeting on the junction some years ago when the ‘nuclear option’ was to build an underpass under Gatley Rd to facilitate continuous traffic. This was to cost a staggering £250,000! Oh to have the benefit of hindsight!!
I guess the real hindsight would have been to build the junction to modern standards 50 years ago! As you say, if only.
The proposal might help abit overall but having the left lane just for Gatley and the M60 westbound I think will be a problem.
The majority of traffic currently appears to be taking the M60 westbound, and the small amount of left turning traffic into Gatley causes very slow progress now in the left lane, that’s why people go in the middle lane and cut in after the lights to get onto the M60 westbound.
Very little traffic appears to go on the M60 eastbound but this would have a much better traffic flow than the M60 westbound flow due to not having the Gatley left turners problem.
This proposal sounds like it will make it far worse for this left lane if strict lane enforcement is employed (which sounds like its going to be the case).
I think an extra lane near the lights just for Gatley left turners would be a considerable help – a bit like the left turn into Kingsway when coming from Gatley has helped somewhat.
If we had a dedicated turn left southbound to Cheadle, then we would only need two lanes onward and flow wouldn’t be slowed by the turning traffic This could perhaps provide the room for a fourth lane northbound as suggested above.
If so much traffic uses this stretch purely to access the m60 westbound, would it make sense when the airport link road is finished near Stanley green to make that the priority route for m60 westbound traffic, thus getting the traffic off the local roads quicker?
Even easier would be to close the westbound slip road onto the motorway. This will divert most westbound traffic from the south onto the new extension to the Airport which with a push can be hurried through much sooner!
The new extension to the airport won’t be completed until around 2015/6 I believe. Also, diverting traffic that way would just add to the congestion on the M56 into the city.
The odd thing is that the first 2-3 houses on the corner of Kingsway have been empty for years.
The current target is to complete the A555 relief road by 2017 – that’s a challenging target to go through the consultation, planning permission, land purchase and get the road built but we think it’s possible.
When the new road is built and traffic flows have settled down, we will of course want to take a new look at all the main roads and see what further changes would be sensible to make.