A mission objective of the rECOnnect Dengie project is to improve the active travel infrastructure on the Dengie and get a safe network of routes connecting all the settlements. As I’ve noted previously, there are lots of good words about achieving this sort of thing in the strategy documents produced from the national level down to the parish – but what happens next? How does it happen?
This in the first in a series of posts where I’ll look at where there are opportunities on the Dengie to connect up existing routes and how we might turn document objectives into objective fact. I’m starting close to home in Burnham-on-Crouch.
The Burnham-on-Crouch Neighbourhood Development Plan [pdf](2017) expressed a clear desire for better active travel infrastructure:
‘5.3 Make Burnham-on-Crouch a More Pedestrian and Cycle Friendly Place to Live
The Town should have a friendlier environment for cycling and walking. Its main and secondary roads are dominated by vehicles. New pedestrian and cycle routes should be provided that link the town centre with existing and new neighbourhoods, schools and recreation areas via quieter roads.’
It substantiates this objective with policies including:
One of the first new neighbourhoods created after the NDP is the Grangewood Park estate which was built on agricultural land allocated for new housing as Site S2 (j) in the Maldon District Local Development Plan [pdf]. A site with a long southern boundary to the town’s Secondary School, the Ormiston Rivers Academy.
The masterplan [pdf] presented by developers Charles Church in their planning application included a new off-road foot/cycle path running through the green space on the estate and providing a connection from Southminster Road in the east to Green Lane in the north.
Their document notes that the Maldon LDP includes:
‘T2 Transport Infrastructure in New Developments The layout of new developments should provide for safe access to and from the highway including… links to adjacent or nearby foot/cycle path network’
and that it states that amongst the criteria any proposed development must satisfy is:
‘Safe pedestrian and cycle linkages are provided from the development to the town centre, other public service facilities and the existing urban area’.
(The Residential Travel Plan [pdf] supplied in the developer’s application noted that ‘[t]here are no dedicated cycle facilities in the vicinity of the development site’)
Later the planning application notes that ‘[t]he Burnham Neighbourhood Plan shows proposed cycle links that the Town would like to see progressed; within this diagram a possible link is shown into the site subject to this application. The provision of this link would rely on third party land and therefore cannot be provided by Charles Church, however the scheme has been developed to facilitate future connectivity.’
It’s unclear exactly what this is referring to, as the Burnham NDP includes text references to possible cycle routes but no maps showing these. The diagram with ‘a possible link’ is perhaps the green dotted line ‘new pedestrian route’ shown in the NDP’s ‘Figure 12’ (copied above) connecting the site to Maldon Road in the south, and running along the western boundary of Ormiston Rivers’s playing fields. This would have been a convenient addition to Burnham’s walk/wheel/cycle routes but it never materialised and it illustrates succinctly a key unaddressed problem in getting better active travel infrastructure.
i.e A government strategy proposes active travel infrastructure as an essential part of new developments, a developer provides infrastructure within the development – but the value of such infrastructure is largely produced by a larger connectivity that neither government nor developer is providing.
The National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) make enough noises about pedestrian and cycle routes that applications for new housing tend to include vague promises about including them. On the ground this tends to result in intra-estate pathways that have genuine utility but terminate at the estates’ boundaries with no clear sense of how onward travel on foot, mobility device or bicycle might proceed.
True to their promise, the developers of Grangewood Park delivered the walk/cycle path on their masterplan and the estate includes what is, currently, the best example of active travel infrastructure in the town with an off-road path that connects Southminster Road with Green Lane – but what happens when you get to Southminster Road or Green Lane? What contribution does it make to a safe, active travel network?
At Southminster Road (B1021) the pathway ends 160 metres north of the entrance to Ormiston Rivers school. A child on a bicycle coming through Grangewood Park must now leave the off-road cycle path, cross a lane of northbound traffic leaving town on the B1021, and join the southbound lane – before turning across the path of northbound traffic again to complete their journey to school. Opposite the Grangewood junction there’s a road sign with the red triangle warning of a school ahead and, beneath it, one of those advisory-only ’20’s Plenty’ signs – but the B1021 has a 30mph speed limit at this point and has limited direct access along this section, a form that tends to encourage vehicle speeds in excess of the legal limit. The common experience of cyclists, of all ages, using this road is driver impatience and an aggressive eagerness to pass.
Meanwhile, pedestrians leaving the off-road path at Southminster Road find there is no footway providing an onward walking route north or south. There is a narrow pavement on the east side of Southminster Road but there is no controlled crossing to reach it (a small traffic island provides some pedestrian refuge).
Once the road is crossed, a pedestrian can proceed south on pavement into Burnham. If it’s a child walking to the school they can pass the school entrance on the other side of the road and carry on further south around a bend to cross the road at a zebra crossing, then walk north again up the opposite pavement to reach the school entrance – a distance of 450m. Will they do that though? Of course not!, once they are opposite the school entrance our cyclist used – 160m down, they’ll do what she did and cross the road there. The curve of the road means that drivers travelling south will be blind to a child crossing the road there until they are quite close. The Highway Code calculates the stopping distance of an average car at 30mph in dry conditions to be 23 metres.
‘But there’s no alternative!’ I hear you cry, ‘you just have to make do with what you’ve got’.
‘I know this estate is right next to the secondary school and we agreed in the neighbourhood plan to “plan, build and highlight clearly signposted, direct and safe cycle and pedestrian routes into the Town from new and existing neighbourhoods, between all schools and the town centre” and we agreed that we would “improve the pedestrian and cycle journeys to/from each of the schools” – but really what else could we have done?
Let me tell you!
Grangewood Park shares a border with Ormiston Rivers school, their frontage to Southminster Road is contiguous. The foot/cycle path could have gone over Grangewood Park Avenue and continued south over amenity land to the boundary of the school and through the small woodland which separates it from the paved area of the school grounds.
All the land involved either belongs to the developer or to Essex County Council. The developer was on-board with facilitating connectivity, the Town and District Councils wanted connectivity, Essex County Council/Essex Highways wants kids to cycle to school. It should have happened… and it still can!
The current residents of the three houses on Grangewood Park estate facing Southminster Road might prefer the current area of mown grass and small flower bed, but they’d benefit from a walk/cycle/wheel route through it. Improving active travel routes is beneficial for everyone, not just children.
This missing link would facilitate footway access from Burnham’s riverside, urban centre and railway station through to Green Lane by reducing the number of necessary road crossings. It would complete a safe cycle route from the Grangewood Park estate to Ormiston school.
EXTRA CREDIT: The pavement going south from Ormiston School has an area of verge and is wide enough to allow a shared foot/cycle way to the junction with Maldon Road (B1010). Across the B1010 junction, in the northbound lane, there is also Burnham’s oldest piece of cycling infrastructure – a painted cycle lane that begins just south of it and finishes quickly north of it – it’s of spurious utility but nevertheless could easily merge into a cycleway on the west of Southminster Road and gain a connectivity it has never had before!
What happens at the other end of the Grangewood Park estate foot/cycle path though? Can we get anywhere from there? Look out for Stitching the Path: Connecting Disjointed Walk & Cycle Routes 2 – where I will address these very questions!
Dengie Bioregion 