Weredoomed

Whatever next you ask? The Clean Air Zone (CAZ), which will - initially - not see cars charged for the privilege(?) of travelling (or queueing) on the IRR. SCC say it is only a temporary measure until cars become less polluting and will thus only be in place for a few years. God alone knows what it will cost. As said, cars won't be charged initially, unless SCC don't get the air pollution down to some level or other. Then all options (get yer wallet out Mr. Car Driver) are on the table. Lovely. BUT... Anyone with any common sense would realise that the world of work has changed and there is a distinct possibility that the large numbers of people who used to commute into the city centre pre-Covid may not do so in future, as firms downsize their office floor space and have their large numbers of their staff work from home. So it may be that traffic levels will fall such that the CAZ isn't justified. So delaying implementing the CAZ might save the UK taxpayer a considerable sum of money by not installing this charging system. This will mean SCC taking a financial hit as they wouldn't then get the £££ charges from drivers using the IRR. Oh dear, how sad, never mind. And before anyone says the CAZ most definitely MUST go ahead to meet some government deadline, may I remind forum members that HMG have done all sorts of things this last few months that would have been "Utterly impossible old chap" pre-Covid. So delaying the CAZ would be an eminently sensible thing to do to see how things pan out over the next year or so. AH BUT... On de uvva 'and, as SCC tend to exhibit a distinct lack of common sense on a disturbingly frequent basis, I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised for them to install the CAZ, somehow make everyone pay, (except the planet-saving cyclists of course), and thus drive a further handful of nails into the future of the city centre. Time will tell?

Quite. Planner1 says we shouldn't get carried away as they've "only taken out a lane on one stretch of a multi-lane road". Which at face value is true. A fine example of weasel words as I've seen in a long time but true nonetheless. Until you examine EXACTLY what it is SCC have done. A single traffic lane in free-flowing conditions has a capacity of around 1500 vehicles per hour (vph). Throw traffic signals into the mix (and aren't SCC good at placing them absolutely everywhere?) and this figure drops to possibly as low as 600vph or so. So at Shalesmoor, in each direction generally has 2 lanes, so an hourly capacity of 1200vph or thereabouts due to the presence of so many traffic signals. This is substantially less than the 3000 vph it would have if there weren't so many traffic signals but there you go. What SCC, have done, in their infinite and NEVER wrong wisdom, is reduce the one way capacity of the IRR down from 1200vph to 600vph - a 50% reduction in it's normal capacity. Now the interesting question is, what was the peak hourly flow on that section of Shalesmoor before this ill-conceived "temporary" scheme was introduced. If it was more than 600vph then SCC will have known it would produce congestion. So what, if any, measures did they take to reduce the resulting congestion and pollution caused by their scheme if they are, as planner1 claims, so concerned about pollution? And if they did know it would cause problems but took no steps to ameliorate them, why are heads not rolling as I type? Oh and I suspect the normal peak flow around Shalesmoor may be more than 1200vph, due to the regular queueing that occurs, so why anyone would think that reducing the capacity to 600vph is a good idea is way beyond me. Edit: I believe the one way peak hour flow may be as much as 2400vph, based on various traffic flow data I've recently found. So that would explain why the IRR is stuffed in normal times, let alone when SCC have yet another of their "good" ideas. Indeed, one could argue the road should be widened from a dual 2 lane carriageway to a dual 3 or even 4 lane one. As if SCC would ever do that!

Very well said indeed. Sadly I predict SCC will leave the current congestion and pollution causing measures in place for at least a month, because to remove them now, (as should happen), would be an admission that they don't know what they are doing. An admission these clowns will never make, because they know better than us. Allegedly. Oh and I see another one of my posts has been deleted VERY quickly after I posted it. The post questioned planner1's assertions that to raise the speed limit of Penistone Road would be costly. As my deleted post made clear, his assertion was utter nonsense and the speed limit could easily be raised but SCC would never do it as to do so would admit fault.

Nonsense and as someone involved in the highway industry you very well know that. Or you ought to. On roads with a speed limit of 50mph and higher that is the case. It is a blatant falsehood to say this is the case at 40. Define the extra equipment and thus costs for detection equipment on a 40 road as opposed to a 30. An extra set of loops? A detector with slightly more range? Peanuts over it's lifespan. You need to stop throwing the "It's too expensive, we can't afford it" excuse out there, it shows a complete lack of foresight if that is the attitude of council officers. Well said.

Stop asking awkward questions, don't you know that it's all central government's fault. They gave the money to SCC to do this. Now SCC didn't have to take it but they did. But they DEFINITELY are NOT to blame. Planner1 said so. Riiiight.

So you're admitting SCC didn't have a clue when they put the current cycle lane in? But surely they consulted with the cycling fraternity. Didn't they? Or did they just have a clueless stab at it and hope for the best?

Oh really? Would you care to take a wild guess at how many cyclists I saw using this "fantastic" facility this morning as I crawled past it? Let me give you a clue - it wasn't even in single figures. A complete woke waste of taxpayers money brought to you by anti-car SCC. Clueless muppetry at it's finest.

No. What will happen is businesses will move away from the city centre. Covid has proven to many firm that they don't need a desk for every office worker. Many people are now working from home and will continue to do so. Firms will reduce the floor space they rent and the city centre will have even more empty buildings. Covid and the resulting change in the way many people now work has done more to reduce congestion than SCC's half-baked traffic schemes have ever done. Shalesmoor is yet one more nail in the city centre's coffin, as it makes the city centre an even less attractive place to base your business. But feel free to keep banging the drum that an aging population is clamouring to walk or cycle for miles in hilly Sheffield. I'm sure there must be a few people out there who believe your SCC anti-car propaganda. Stop quoting inconvenient facts, SCC won't thank you for it.

Makes one wonder if SCC are supportive of hired e-scooters and hope to see them in the city, given how "successful" the yellow bike scheme was a few years ago... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53219331 Well done Magneteer, it's rare to see SCC and common sense mentioned in the same sentence 🙂 And I note the mods have removed an earlier post of mine from this topic. Nothing like silencing a critic, is there?

...and in a few weeks, (at most), from now it will all be over and done with. Try not to worry about it, it's not worth the grief. Someone is doing a job, nothing to see here, move along please.

You mean they're making it up as they go along, with no clue as to what they are doing? We'd noticed dear boy, we'd noticed...

Once this virus is over, I wonder if the number of people working from home will be sufficient to clean up the city centre's air such that this zone isn't needed? Perhaps SCC shouldn't rush into this. Unless they are overly interested in the income it will generate for them of course.

Always got an excuse, haven't you?

I used to.

Two years to make a few Traffic Regulation Orders? I guess you can't rush these things, particularly when you're incompetent.

How do you get from, "Plane circling overhead", to, "It's in distress and looking for somewhere to land"? A plane "in distress" would surely not circle over a built up area. Rather it would attempt to head for a rural area, where there would be considerably more opportunities for it to land? Such as, oh, I dunno, things called "fields"? I despair about some people in this city.

...and Meadowhall is free parking and under cover. Bit of a no-brainer for most shopping TBH.

So Rotherham are in the process of improving access to their borough at one end of the Parkway. What are Sheffield doing at their end? Apart from the square root of nothing, because apparently it's costly and difficult. Gosh, imagine having to put some effort into one's job. You mention structures - there are precisely none in any of the sections of Sheffield Parkway that I've mentioned which are not already paved, so mentioning them as a potential problem is spurious. Sheffield Parkway and it's associated structures were built with a view to making it easy to widen in future. Only the will to actually pursue this is lacking at SCC. If the will is there the money will eventually follow.

Simple sections of extra pavement construction and road marking alterations, with a few new directional signs. Honestly very simple in civil engineering terms. Perhaps some new drainage if the original installation wasn't built with future widening in mind. Overall it doesn't need to be gold-plated. I recall a proposal for an extra lane to be added to Sheffield Parkway as a bus lane a few years ago. If it was possible to do it for a bus lane, then clearly it could be done for general traffic. Much of the construction work could be done as small, discrete schemes over a number of years, all coming into operation in the last year potentially. The taxpayer pays. Whether it happens or not is down to SCC having any interest in making traffic flow better to and from the city centre they are trying to promote. Perhaps they need to look outside the city centre to do this? And not concentrate all their efforts within the IRR. Big schemes are expensive, small ones are not. Like I said earlier, softly softly, catchee monkey.

Yes.

You'll note that the bridge is already paved: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.3793189,-1.4269308,186m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en Excavating the grass verge and converting it to an extra lane would be extremely quick and simple. The 3 discrete sections of verge you can see on that overhead image - any competent civil engineering contract could do that job in less than a month.

That is not, by any stretch of the imagination, "a lot".

Good old SCC, the "sit back and do nothing" attitude strikes again. ...and you conveniently ignore my comments on how easy it would be to widen Sheffield Parkway which, coupled with widening Mosborough Parkway would ease access into the city centre.

I've never understood this "everyone drive in the nearside lane" mentality on a dual carriageway that seems so prevalent in Sheffield. Just bad driving plain and simple. The IRR clockwise, heading towards Glossop Road seems to be a prime example of where this occurs but I'm sure there are many other locations.