Tuesday 2 November 2010

Cotham Hill Summit Problems

The final question about the showcase bus route proposals is will the removal of a zebra crossing at the bottom of Cotham Hill and a dedicated turning lane help school run parents turning off at Cotham Hill?

Not if this video of a weekday morning is consistent. There's a jam all the way up the hill from Oakfield Road.

Sometimes there is less of a jam, and then parents can safely pull over onto the bike lane without their fear of their children being hit by a cyclist as they drop them off at one of the local schools (St Peter and Paul's RC is the closest), then carry on to the parent's final destination without any detour.

This is safe, provided the cyclists don't interfere. Today you can see that our secretly-instrumented tax-dodger swerved out of the bike lane, into the tax-payer's lane, forcing the car W153KDA to pull out aggressively to avoid being stuck behind them.

2 comments:

Roger H said...

But the point of removing the zebra crossing at the bottom is not to ease the traffic flow up Cotham Hill, it's to ease the traffic flow along Whiteladies Road. It's Whiteladies that's a showcase bus route, not Cotham Hill.

SteveL said...

Yes, but we aren't sure that helping cars turn left up Cotham Hill helps anyone, buses or cars. There's little to be gained turning up this road in a car only to be stuck at the top, and during weekday mornings the vehicles waiting to turn into Cotham Hill aren't the cause of congestion, it's the traffic jam stretching all the way up from the Triangle. Which the showcase plan doesn't even acknowledge, let alone try and address.