On 11/01/2022 21:00, Theo wrote:
> Owen Scarrott <
owen.s...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Was this intended? Or a by-product of poor planning and a lack of
>> connectivity between North/North-West Cambridge and the M11 junction and
>> closure of Storey's Way?
>
> Tim might be able to shed light, since understand he was closer to the
> planning process at the time, but from what he said I think the general
> thought process was something like:
>
> 'We need a connection between Huntingdon Road and Madingley Road'
> 'We're building Eddington which is going to need roads, so that's a good
> opportunity to build one'
> 'We don't want it to have fast traffic, so we'll make it curvy and fit speed
> bumps'
>
> In other words I got the impression it was an intended to do two functions -
> one as connectivity and one as local road for Eddington. And so it's not a
> rat run, traffic is using it as designed.
Depends who you think designed it, and which version of which document
you're looking at (not all of which you'll be able to find, because
drafts aren't always published somewhere easy to find).
The original concept was to have a wiggly slow incomprehensible local
road so that people who lived there could get out either way - so
wouldn't have to decide on which side of a barrier to buy their house,
constraining on which side everyone in the household would have to work
or go to school forever more - but it would be too much of a pain to use
as a rat run, even if you could find it. The obvious through road had to
be there for decent bus transport but was to have a bus gate so that it
couldn't be used as a rat run.
Every now and then the county council tried to sneak in changes to turn
the wiggly connection into a more useful rat run. We on the joint
committee had, several times IIRC, to remind them of the original design
principles and force them to change it back into a local road less
obviously useful as a rat run.
Since then Storey's Way has been closed (and satnav is now on
everybody's phone rather than just something built into high end cars -
not quite sure of the timescale of that though). A prediction of rat
running through Eddington *should* have been an output from the
modelling of the Storey's Way closure, but I wasn't involved then.
>> Any thoughts on the chances it will be recognised and changed, somehow?
>
> What changes would you suggest?
>
> In particular, given Sainsbury's has a big catchment to the north and west,
> if you tried to block it up, how would you do that while still allowing
> people to access Sainsbury's car park from both sides?
The motivation behind having two new medium sized supermarkets in the
north of the city, rather than one large one and a corner shop, was the
hope that at least one of them would be taken by someone other than
Tesco, who we felt had enough shops in the city already leaving quite a
few people with not much of a real choice. A preference for particular
tenants couldn't be written into planning policy though, so this was
just a hope.
--
Tim Ward - 07801 703 600
www.brettward.co.uk