THE GUILDFORD SOCIETY
Can On-street Parking be a Traffic Calming Measure?
There are many who believe that Guildford should follow Portsmouth’s example and have 20mph speed limits in many parts of the Town. This would need to be selective but there are certainly places where vehicles speed through residential areas. The view of the authorities generally is that a 20mph limit is no substitute for areas where 30mph limits are frequently exceeded. They advocate Community Speedwatch to discourage speeding in those areas; also, that the police do not have the manpower available to enforce legal 20mph limits. They recommend that traffic calming measures be introduced instead. These often mean the construction of speed humps, tables or chicanes, all of which have to await availability of capital funding and none of which is particularly user friendly.
The Transport Group has come up with an inexpensive scheme which would be suitable for curtailing speeds through residential areas where there is also a demand for on-street parking.
Arrange for a block of diagonally arranged parking spaces on the right hand side of the street with parking front to kerb, allowing a single line of traffic to pass behind it. Then provide a section of street with no parking, to allow traffic to pass in opposite directions. Next, provide a similar block of diagonal parking spaces arranged in the opposite direction on the opposite side of the street.
The result is to create a route with a single line of traffic in each direction with passing places, as illustrated in the diagram. Spaces are arranged on the right hand side so that a vehicle reverses out of a bay into a section of road which allows it the right of way. The benefit of diagonal parking is its compactness and ease of entry and exit for drivers. Safety is much improved compared with in-line parking since the risk of car doors opening into traffic or pedestrians is removed and pedestrians wishing to cross, particularly children, are more easily visible between the vehicles. It could also be argued as being more aesthetically pleasing than a row of parked cars on both sides of the street and there might even be an opportunity to insert soft landscaping in some of the triangles no longer needed for parking. The Group has calculated that, by angling the parking spaces at 35º to the kerb, the width of road used is no more than the 4.8metres which would be occupied by a row of in-line spaces on each side of the street.
The Transport Group would be pleased to receive comments on this idea and thoughts on where it might be applied. We would also welcome comments on any other schemes shown.
(Dec 2010)