The £4.4m revamp plans for Heartsease roundabout have been criticised <i>(Image: Antony Kelly)</i> The £4.4m revamp of a notorious roundabout will "fall well short" of making the crash blackspot safer, warn cycling campaigners.
Norwich Cycling Campaign has criticised the proposed changes to the city’s Heartsease roundabout, which were unveiled by Norfolk County Council last week .
The group say the scheme is a missed opportunity and that the authority should have pushed ahead with plans to create Norwich’s first Dutch-style roundabout – with a segregated cycle path and priority for pedestrians and cyclists over drivers.
The roundabout is one of the trickiest to negotiate in the city and it is difficult for pedestrians to cross at the busy junction, where Plumstead Road intersects with St William’s Way, Heartsease Lane and Harvey Lane. Over the past decade, almost 70pc of recorded crashes at the roundabout in which people were hurt involved cyclists or pedestrians.
Proposed changes include: The road layout on both the roundabout and its approaches will be turned into single lanes.
New zebra crossings on all ‘arms’ of the roundabout, including one to replace an existing signal crossing on the northern end of Harvey Lane.
New shared-use paths for cyclists and pedestrians around all arms of the roundabout, with other new footpaths and cycleways. But plans for the junction to become a Dutch-style roundabout were scrapped.Council officers said traffic modelling showed that would have caused "unacceptable delays" for drivers, but Norwich Cycling Campaign say that is a missed opportunity. […]
Continue reading the original article at: www.eveningnews24.co.uk