Cheadle and Gatley Lib Dems are moving
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by Lib Dem team on 22 July, 2014
Improvements are being made over the summer to the area around Cheadle Royal: to the roundabout itself, Wilmslow Road and the A34 up to Broadway.
They come from the expansion of Sainsbury’s at Cheadle Royal back in 2011. The first chunk of money went on the Schools Hill improvements – slowing down traffic as it came off the roundabout and approaching the pedestrian crossing. The funding for all these works comes from Sainsbury’s as part of their “Section 106” agreement linked to their store expansion.
This is the rest of that. The rules on what it can be spent on are fairly strict – the Council can’t just use the money for anything.
The improvements are aimed to help drivers, cyclists and pedestrians – details below. Regular readers may spot that the cycle improvements are designed to link into the wider cycle schemes, providing end-to-end routes around Stockport and into Manchester that avoid busy roads.
8 Comments
Iain, the major problem for pedestrians is that having negotiated the roundabout via various means, you are then dumped in front of the petrol station with no pavement for pedestrians. Appreciate this is on Sainsburys land, but might be worth pointing out to them that a regularly used walking route is spoilt right at the end by a shortfall in thinking.,
Get a few clear signs to show the cyclists where the cycle lanes actually are. Hopefully they may then get used. This especially applies to the lane in front of Cheadle Royal Hospital.
Hi Iain
I agree with Alan as I regularly walk from Bruntwood park to saints burgs and john Lewis with a pushchair and feel vulnerable as I have to cross through a busy petrol station. There is a path ‘in theory’ but not one well designed for pedestrians.
I guess it may be too late for the council to make any changes but maybe a request could be put to sainsburys (and John Lewis?) to make improvements?
Thanks
This funding is to improve public areas – you make a good point with pedestrian access but it isn’t something this could be used for and would be an issue for the owners of the site.
I guess they would point pedestrians to the access on Wilmslow Road, though that’s an extra 80m to walk if you’re coming from the roundabout.
Will the pillars from the road signs that currently obstruct the cycle path (what will be the shared path) on Wilmslow road be moved as part of this exercise?
Also, its currently impossible to get a bike/trailer combination into Bruntwood park without unhitching and abandoning the trailer, wheeling the bike through, abandoning the bike, going back for the trailer and then rehitching the bike…
Alex – I certainly hope the road sign will be sorted: I’ve been told so several times.
The trailer issue might be trickier – there can be a problem with motorbikes and quad bikes coming onto parks and doing huge amounts of damage and it’s difficult to come up with a solution which allows bike trailers to pass unhindered while still stopping the bikers.
For what its worth the barricades between Foxlands Road and the shared path that then goes under the tunnel by Kingsway are passable with some effort, so even those style of barricades can be done better.
I can only assume the motorbikes are an issue after dark, since the other entrances are all wide enough to get cars through… How much extra would it really cost to have one more gate to lock after dark, given there are already 3 to do and one of those is probably only 200m away? That’s a rhetorical question.
I agree that where barrier have been put in over the years, there will be some that allow slightly larger vehicles through than others.
No, motorbikes aren’t just an issue after dark – where they cause problems it’s at any time (but I guess away from park staff). The barriers would have been put in place some decades ago, and I don’t know what the exact thinking behind the decisions made back then would have been.