Conclusion

The Plan starts with some good words, but If the council is serious about its aims, it needs to be much more specific about how it intends to meet its goals.

Here’s what’s needed to make the plan a success.

Main infrastructure
  1. Define the main cycling routes that will be created into the town centre, bus station and train station, and specify exactly how they will be implemented.  These need to support both the new developments and existing housing. 
  2. Define the main walking routes into the town centre, bus station and train station and specify the improvements that will be made to pavements, junctions and crossings to complete them. These need to support both the new developments and existing housing. 
  3. Define the bus service improvements that will be made to serve the new developments and provide better access for existing residents.  Services on key routes must run until late in the evening, not stop at 8pm as many do currently.
Schools

The school run is the worst rush hour of the day.  Traffic around schools is highly damaging to children’s lungs, and many UK authorities have taken decisive action to reduce this, ensuring that children learn good habits for life that to reduce obesity and ill-health. 

We need to:

  1. Start a prioritised program of school streets, where the street is closed to motor traffic at pick-up and drop-off times, controlled with cameras (as implemented by many other authorities). 
  2. Engage with parents and headteachers to discover the infrastructure changes that are needed for more children to be able to safely walk, wheel or cycle to each school, and get these changes made.
Cycle parking
  1. Create a cycle parking policy for all new developments (see the Oxford Policy for reference – there may also be better ones).
  2. Include a policy to build cycle parking at all local shops.
  3. Include a cycle parking for all supermarkets, to be situated close to the entrance.  It’s extremely concerning that we have a major supermarket in Kingsthorpe with no cycle parking at all.
Junctions and crossings
  1. Start a prioritised program of pedestrian improvements to every road junction, so that the junction is at least as easy to cross on foot as it is by car.  For example, if a car can go through the junction after stopping just once, then someone walking should be able to do this too.
  2. Start a prioritised program to make all our junctions safe enough for a 10-year-old to use on foot or by bike.
  3. Establish a prioritised program to make junctions on side streets narrower to ensure a safer crossing. 
  4. Adjust signalised crossings to give more priority to pedestrians.
  5. Establish a prioritised program to install raised areas at all crossings and junctions, so that cars change levels, not pedestrians – this makes crossings much more usable for people using wheelchairs or pushing buggies.
  6. Repair and update directional signage.
Pavements
  1. Start a prioritised program of pavement resurfacing to make them safe and convenient for wheelchair users, mobility scooters and pedestrians.
  2. Improve street lighting on key routes to enable everyone to use pavements safely after dark.
  3. On both footways and cycleways, remove all barriers that do not comply with accessibility legislation, so that people using wheelchairs, mobility scooters, or adapted bike/trikes have equal rights to use the routes, and to ensure that parents can transport children to school on cargo bikes, or in bike trailers.
  4. For all existing shared-use pavements, change the priority so that cars give way at junctions, instead of the path users (in line with government guidelines LTN1/20)
  5. Ban pavement parking and parking at junctions, and enforce these bans.
  6. Identify the pavements where pedestrians are most at risk from cycles and scooter, and specify segregated cycling/scooting infrastructure for these locations.
Roads
  1. In line with UN and WHO recommendations, implement 20mph limits on all residential streets. In addition to making streets safer, this has been proven to encourage more people to walk and cycle.
  2. Create more bus lanes and bus priority routes.
  3. Allow 2-way cycling on all one-way streets, unless there are very exceptional circumstances.
  4. Plan a program of building safe cycle routes to schools.  On busy roads, keep bikes segregated from both pedestrian and motor traffic, so that a 10-year-old can safely cycle to school, and pavements become free of bikes and scooters.
Maintenance

If we genuinely want to prioritise walking and cycling, we need a completely new maintenance system (for overgrowth, sweeping, etc) that is currently not fit for purpose:

  1. There is currently a very unhelpful split between a “Highways Contract” and an “Other” contract (we don’t know what this is called).  To the end user, this split is meaningless and causes endless delays.
  2. There are areas of walking/cycle routes that are not part of any contract.  Any attempt to get even basic hedge-cutting done in these sections takes many months.
  3. We need a digital map of all the routes on the contract.  Veolia have a physical folder of hundreds of A4 maps each of which shows one or two roads and paths.  To discover which contract (if any) a particular path is on, it’s necessary first to find the correct page.  Maintenance workers are told to keep strictly to the specified areas on the map.  This sometimes means only cutting the grass on half of a street.
  4. The contract is coming up for renewal in 2025, and we need to change to a contract that is not “self-monitoring”.  WNC needs to carefully monitor the work, and the contractor needs to be penalised if SLAs are not met. (Note – the City of London does not use self-monitoring contracts because they lead to a very low standard.)
Management

We need to appoint an active travel commissioner with for Northampton who has the authority to oversee everything to do with active travel.  They would need a significant team.  Their tasks would include:

  1. Coordinating with ATE to ensure standards are met on new development proposals before planning permission is granted.
  2. Monitoring all developments to ensure that every detail has been properly implemented.
  3. Continuous monitoring of routes to check for incorrect signage, poor surface, overgrowth.
  4. Collecting feedback from active travel and public transport users, to identify necessary improvements.
  5. Set up a new reporting system that is reliable and responsive and well publicised, so that path users are motivated to log issues (the current system is none of the above, so it is underused).  This isn’t just about the technology – it’s about the organisation.
  6. Negotiate and monitor the maintenance contract.

Failure to implement the above will result in Northampton being even more dominated by cars, and falling even further behind neighbouring urban authorities.