‘Tame’ wide British roads and replace them with boulevards of homes, says thinktank
‘Tame’ wide British roads and replace them with boulevards of homes, says thinktank
Exclusive: Create Streets proposes building on Britain’s ‘road belt’ rather than its green belt amid housing crisis
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12I don't think the idea is to build houses on the wide roads, the idea is to build them beside the wide roads but remove space for private cars and instead repurpose that space for pedestrians and cyclists (in other words, have wide pavements ideally tree lined but instead of 4 wide lanes of cars maybe 2 narrow lanes with most of the space turned over as a public space for people).
6@mackwinston @snacks perhaps one motor lane in the centre, with occasional unloading spaces.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Needlessly wide roads should be torn up and replaced with boulevards of new housing, a thinktank led by the UK government’s most senior urbanism adviser has proposed, in a move likely to delight green belt campaigners but rile the motoring lobby.
Both initiatives have become lightning rods for wider political debates about personal freedom, inequality and, in some cases, conspiracy theories about shadowy forces attempting to control the population.
Steve Gooding, the director of the pro-motoring thinktank the RAC Foundation, said narrowing roads would require planners to decide which traffic they no longer wanted.
“Grand visions need to be backed up by meticulous planning and adequate funding if they are to be turned into a livable reality where our shops are well-stocked, our kids can get to school, and our home deliveries arrive when we expect them,” he said.
He conceded that increasing the number of 20mph zones meant sweeping junctions and large roundabouts designed decades ago for higher speeds could be revisited, but “it remains to be seen whether linking that with housing development unlocks the scale of investment that’s currently beyond the reach of our cash-strapped local councils”.
A scheme involving Rochdale council is exploring removing a turning lane from a four-lane urban highway at St Mary’s Gate in the north of the town, allowing designers to create a corner block, and adding 400 homes.
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