Coldham’s Lane Bridge

Image as described adjacent
Artist’s impression of the new cycle and foot bridge alongside Coldham’s Lane road bridge

A new bridge for cyclists and pedestrians is to be built on the Beehive side of Coldham’s Lane railway bridge. It has the potential to be a really good facility, but it has been spoiled by inadequate access and inadequate width.

Despite talking around the disadvantages of the proposals and appearing to accept the criticism, councillors voted at their meeting on October 29th. to agree the plan anyway.

This means that cyclists heading towards Sainsbury’s would have to cross and re-cross the road at traffic signals. This is after negotiating the busy roundabout at the Beehive entrance which is shortly to have a fourth arm added.

Image as described adjacent
The shared use that never was: not adequate and not legal as a way to avoid the roundabout to go from the beehive to the new bridge

Officers reluctantly conceded that a way to get into and out of the Beehive was needed without going right round the roundabout. They said a 1m wide shared use pavement around the corner was enough, simply because it already existed. But actually it doesn’t exist: it stops short of the roundabout by about 3m. In any case that’s no way to provide properly for cyclists, and it does nothing to join up with the York Street path or cyclists leaving the site across the busy shopping centre entrance.

The bridge will be about a metre narrower than the bridge at the Station.

At least the Cromwell Road end looks satisfactory, after some further tweaks to the original plan.

Before the meeting we described the arrangements as ‘entirely inadequate’ in a letter to officers. We also did a press release on the matter when it was clear that County Council officers had completely ignored our representations.

There’s some more background on the original proposal in Newsletter 37 and a summary of what we said at the original consultation meetings in the summer, in Newsletter 38.

There will be a full report in the forthcoming Newsletter 39