Anders Hanson

Sheffield City Council excels in coming up with new complicated road layouts or ways of creating added congestion on Sheffield’s already clogged up roads.

To be fair to the council, Sheffield’s road network has always been a nightmare and there is only so much that can be done. Sheffield will never have an outer ring road as to build it you’d have to cut a huge swathe through the Peak District. Sheffield is also one of the UK’s hilliest cities which must make it difficult to engineer roads that don’t end up winding their way around hills or that descend steeply in to valleys and then back up the other side again. As a result of this, most main roads go from the outside in to the centre of the city and with the only convenient way of getting around the western side of the city (where I live) involving a number of roads that must be at least 1 in 4 gradients.

All of this however doesn’t excuse the fact that Sheffield will finally complete its inner ring road next year when most cities have had one for at least a decade, that Sheffield’s city centre is almost entirely made up of one-way streets or banned turns at junctions, trying to find a parking space in the city centre has always been incredibly difficult, that all the major road roundabouts in the city involve you having to pull out in to the smallest of gaps in the traffic or you’d never move or that Sheffield has one of the slowest average speeds at rush-hour of any city in the UK. Plus there is of course my long-standing gripe about the ludicrious idea that someone had back in the 1990s that it was sensible to put a tram line along a dual-carriageway that forms one of the few bits of outer-ring road that we have.

Despite all of this, Sheffield City Council seems to be in the process of embarking on another programme that will make the city’s traffic problems worse. The latest is to build out the pavement at every bus stop so that instead of going in to the side of the road when it stops, the bus now has to sit in the road holding up all the traffic. They are now banning parking on parts of main roads where there is enough room for both parking and for two lanes of traffic to get past. They are also seemingly adding in extra traffic lights wherever possible.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely not anti public transport. I use the bus every day to get to and from work. But I simply do not believe that by making car use harder will drive everyone on to the bus or tram. All it will succeed in doing is making people more angry about the city’s road layout and cause more road rage.

A website I have begun to visit quite a bit in the last six months is Sheffield Forum. This website is a place where Sheffielders can argue, discuss or ask questions on all sorts of things. At the moment a debate is raging on more changes to roads in my part of the city. You can visit the debate by following the link below, but by reproducing my comment here it might give a flavour of where I stand on it:

I’m convinced that many of the ridiculous road layouts we’re getting now are as a result of fashions amongst highways engineers. I can see it now. The “experts” at universities or trade bodies come up with a wonderful new solution that will make buses flow more easily. They persuade civil servants and council officers that these solutions will be the answer to everything and they then become the official guidance. The council officers then persuade the councillors to back these plans in council meetings because it’s the only option on the table. Councillors accept the plans as they are sold to them as good for the environment and public transport and because the council officers are the professional experts after all.

These things go in phases. In the 60s and 70s people wanted major dual carriageways cutting through the city centre so everyone could use their car and because it looked modern. Now they want to block up roads with build-outs and bus stops so everyone will be forced to use a bus and because it looks environmentally friendly. What they always forget is human nature. They failed in the 60s because people actually want city centres that are walkable and more human in scale. The latest idea will fail because people won’t switch to public transport for all their journeys and people get angry about needless congestion.

SHEFFIELD FORUM: Another council highways cock-up