Issue - meetings

·         To include presentation from Gloucestershire County Council Officers

Report of the Cabinet Member Development and Safety

Scott Tompkins, Lead Commissioner of the Highways Authority gave a presentation to Members, this included an update on the feedback to date on the scheme, an overview of the traffic flow monitoring and an update on the phase 4 monitoring. He further advised Members of the proposed revisions to the trial and the predicted timeline for the next steps. Rupert Cox, Managing Director of Stagecoach West also gave a short presentation on the impacts of the Cheltenham transport plan on the bus services and ran through the significant positive impacts of the scheme. The presentation is appended to the minutes for reference.

The following responses were offered to Members questions:

·           Cheltenham is well contained in comparison to other towns and cities with census data suggesting around 70% of journeys taken in Cheltenham are less than 2km. This is in contrast to neighbouring Gloucester which has a lot of out commuting.

·           Transport modelling conducted at the outset of the scheme highlighted that the majority of journeys around Boots corner were through journeys and not people accessing the town centre.

·           The evidence to date shows that in a  number of roads in Cheltenham the traffic levels have fallen since the closure of Boots corner, however, in order to determine whether fewer people were using cars overall they would need to analyse the traffic levels over a longer period of time.

·           Following a query regarding the predicted timescale for the traffic signal improvements on the Tewkesbury/Swindon Road junction, Mr Tompkins advised that the funding had been approved in the last month for the signal work and the feasibility study had already been completed. They, therefore, planned to take it to the design phase in the next year and hoped to deliver the scheme by late 2020.

·           He confirmed that delivery vehicles could only access the area highlighted in red on the map before 10am and after 6pm which is outside of the core hours.

·           The legal requirement for the experimental traffic regulation order is 18 months in length, when that comes to end they have the option to make the elements trialled permanent, abandon them or trial another experimental order.

·           Ideally, GCC would have liked to put the mitigation measures in place before Gold Cup but this would not be physically possible given the timescale, he confirmed that the trail would still be in place during Gold Cup week and so they would still capture the impact on the other roads during this time.

·           Mr Cox advised that they had purchased a number of new vehicles and due to the Euro 6 level of emissions on those vehicles they were seeing great environmental improvements, particularly in the Benhall area. The increased growth would also enable them to make improvements to the bus network.

·           The highways authority were currently looking at the signage and how they direct people in and out of the town. They were also discussing the potential for using VMS signs which would indicate the number of parking spaces available in  ...  view the full minutes text for item 10