CREDITON TOWN COUNCIL

Three part plan to ease traffic problems in Crediton

A THREE part plan to try to improve traffic problems came out of a meeting with members of Crediton Town Council and Devon County Council highway officers at Crediton.

These were that the county council roads and traffic officers would begin to look at issues around Jockey Hill and Church Street, where there are fears of an increase in the number of lorries hoping to find a short cut through there to the centre of town.

The county council would send maps to the town council so that it could mark where there were on street parking problems.

Thirdly, it would also look at the short, medium and long-term traffic issues in the town.

These offers came from a meeting of the town council's policy and forward planning working group with Cllr Liz Brookes-Hocking as chairman.

She commented: "Someone must do something. We have been asking for information from the county council.

"We do not mind doing the leg work and thinking, but we need information and we would like to engage with people who could help us find solutions.

"We are faced with these problems and time and time again the town council wastes time trying to resolve things (without information)."

One of the three county council officers was Steve Tucker, Neighbourhood Highway Officer, who visits the town regularly and who said if something was valid, he could begin the process of finding a solution or take it to a higher officer.

He added that top of his list for Crediton was for the pavement kerb to be lowered at the Church Street entrance to the parish church where wedding cars and the hearses stop.

Earlier in the meeting it seemed that things became a little heated when four of the people whose homes are around the bottom of Jockey Hill wanted to know if anything was going to be done there to ease the effect of the link road.

They were saying there should be a sign to tell lorry drivers not to try to drive up Blagdon to try to get to the A377 more quickly from Lords Meadow.

Cllr Brookes-Hocking agreed with them that going up Blagdon and trying to get to the High Street via Church Street was "completely unsuitable" for vehicles over a certain weight but there was nothing to tell the drivers that.

"They may be following sat nav but we do need something to tell drivers not to go that way," she said.

Mr Tucker said there were two forms of sat nav, one that cost about £50 with 16 categories of road for car drivers, the other, costing about £1,000, with four categories for goods vehicles.

"If we could insist all lorries have a commercial sat nav, there would not be a problem but most use the car version," he said.

A sign warning of problems ahead could not be made up, it had to be in the "book of signs". Only the police could enforce whatever sign was put up.

Three of the people living near the Jockey Hill roundabout who were at the meeting were there because their homes had been hit by a lorry.

It costs the county council money each time the bollards are flattened by a lorry and once a street light was damaged and had to be replaced.

Mr Tucker added that the county council had looked at the Blagdon area to see if any improvement could be made for pedestrians.

Cllr Brookes-Hocking said there had been talk of doing something for Crediton to solve its main road problem with the expectation since the 1980s of a road "that would mean we would not be here when you (DCC) made the decision to have a link road but the expectation has still been there partly because everyone is aware of the HGVs and other problems we have."

One of the other two county council officers was its Senior Traffic Engineer, Mike Jones, who had explained he did not know Crediton and had picked up this meeting the previous day because someone had left.

He was told that other people had been creating the problems he had stepped into.

"Serious problems people had flagged up were pushed to one side because there was not the will for anything better for Crediton," he was told.

Cllr Brookes-Hocking added that although everyone knew the problems of lorries with sat nav and thatched cottages down narrow lanes, at Crediton the problems were made worse.

Mr Jones commented that, apart from having someone at Blagdon 24 hours a day saying lorries should not to go on, he was not sure what else might be done at present but something could probably be done and he would come out to see for himself.

He had been honest in saying that he was at a meeting about traffic and parking in a town he hardly knew and which he had only taken on the previous day.

He explained that the county council was losing staff, who were not being replaced and everything they knew went with them.

Mr Tucker added that their department was down to four people covering the whole of Devon.

Asked if cars would use the link road, Cllr Brookes-Hocking said no-one really knew how it would be used until it was open.

She said she would "quibble" with the county council statistics but all that could be said was that the county council's traffic modelling had said there would not be a significant increase of traffic up Jockey Hill, a slight increase up the High Street with an improvement for Exeter Road.

Asked what good the link road would do, Cllr Brookes-Hocking said if nothing was done the increase of traffic would increase problems on Exeter Road. The link road was about Exeter Road and nothing else.

On the problems of cars parking in the mornings on the part-time loading bays in the town, it was said it was Government policy and not county council policy that was wrong in not allowing anything to be written on the road for these bays.