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Reducing Peach Street to one lane is one of the ideas put forward in the Public Realm Strategy workshop
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Peach Street lane reduction discussed at public realm workshop

By Laura Herbert
February 25, 2013

Peach Street may be reduced to one lane under plans to transform Wokingham town centre’s roads.

Ideas to reduce congestion and improve public spaces were examined at the council’s Public Realm Strategy workshop, to gauge people’s reaction to initial suggestions.

Wokingham Borough Council is working with planners at LDA Design and ARUP to come up with proposals to transform Peach Street, Market Place, Denmark Street, Rose Street, Broad Street and The Plaza.

Sophie Thompson, of LDA Design, added: “The public realm is the space between buildings, streets, road, open spaces and parks. It really reflects quality of life and people’s experience at a place. You should expect to get to your town centre easily, walk around and enjoy the environment.

“A good public realm will encourage good social and economic regeneration.”

Concerns were raised about the suggestion to reduce Peach Street to one lane, fearing it will make queuing traffic worse.

But Joe Clarbour, of ARUP which looks at traffic movement in the strategy, said: “A lot of the congestion is caused by poorly managed loading activity and lights at crossings out of sync, giving an unbalanced priority.

“We are confident we can get Peach Street taking traffic in a single lane with existing and predicted future traffic flows.”

Other ideas looked at included reducing the width of the road in Denmark Street, increasing the width of some footpaths and removing traffic light crossings and replacing them with courtesy crossings, which rely on drivers giving way to pedestrians.

Around 25 people, including town and borough councillors, also looked at suggestions to remove red brick footpaths, install feature lighting at night to highlight Wokingham’s historic architecture and create designated loading and parking bays, at Saturday’s workshop at The Cornerstone in Norreys Avenue.

The Public Realm Strategy is not part of the regeneration of the town, but it will run alongside the scheme.

Further consultation work will take place on the strategy before it is finalised and adopted.

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When it is done and the congestion is permanently like it is when there is a lorry loading will the person who it getting paid do this have some kind of forfeit?

Will their model include the 10's of thousands of new homes coming into the borough over the next 13 years?

Perhaps we are being over zealous in spending our infrastructure money. No-one is that clever. We do not know when working from home is going to take off. Leave it until you have tried the traffic lights and blocked a lane off for a regular month, when the other factors are in play.

Kaz4Wokingham, Wokingham
26/02/2013 at 23:09

I don't understand how anyone can think funneling the A329 and the A321 into a single lane road through Wokingham is anything other than Bonkers!

Unless car drivers can get into Wokingham easily and park easily they will go elsewhere.

Do consultants come up with ideas that can't possibly work so they have another job for next year!

If the highway jonnies at WBC can't get the lights properly synchronized may I suggest they are sacked for gross incompetence.

well, well, well
26/02/2013 at 19:42

@mavdo - that's a big question and one you and I could talk about for hours on!

My optimistic view - shops / restaurants are naturally moving into zones (or whatever the fashionable term is). Peach St is for takeaways, Broad St for restaurants, Market Place and Denmark St a combination of restaurants and retail. Hopefully the additional space in Peach Place and Elms will pad out the retail bit a little in a healthy combination of chains and independents. I wouldn't complain if they added some variety to the restaurant scene too. A Wagamamas and a Mexican are top of my list, yum yum.

On that note - there's yet another planning application for 18 Broad St - this time just for a big window in place of one of the two front doors. Looks like it's being prepared for another restaurant... (and in case you didn't see one of my first posts - Sapori building is being demolished, only A1 retail in the replacement building).

alex_f, Wokingham
26/02/2013 at 17:09

@alex_f - so I heard. They'd be chucked out of Rose Street anyway. It all bodes *really* well for pizza collection doesn't it. We're going to have a high street of take-aways, restaurants and charity shops. Where's the draw?

mavdo, Wokingham
26/02/2013 at 16:27

Millets is soon to be Dominos Pizza by the way. If you're interested!

alex_f, Wokingham
26/02/2013 at 15:05

@PR - absolutely. I don't know why this truely simple solution, that really doesn't penalise pedestrians significantly, hasn't been thought out. It is cheap, quick, simple, and painless. But if you ask an engineering company for a solution, they're not going to give you a quick and cheap solution that works over an expensive and complex one that they will be paid to implement.

@Mark Savill - It isn't just cockpit path (and I don't think much of this car park would lose out at all), it is also both Denmark Street car parks, and private land behind the shops for the length of this road (currently a 90 degree turn on Denton Place). A fair bit of the land you are trying to "convert" is privately owned, and the cost of compulsory purchase of all of that land is simply prohibitive for this suggestion to be cost effective. Millets would have to entirely be demolished and not replaced to allow access to this road for lorries etc that can current use Denmark Street to access Tesco, Pets at Home, Esso and Majestic etc because bends in roads are very difficult for them to navigate. You've suggested this before and I had the same opinion then as I do now. It isn't feasible.

mavdo, Wokingham
26/02/2013 at 12:02

I commute home through the town centre every day, and it's my experience that, although the pedestrian crossings can be a little annoying, I'm generally stuck in traffic (queueing for the carnival pool roundabout - and the traffic the other way queues at Tudor house/for the station) - so I'm able to wave pedestrians across the road and the lights don't come into it.

It does bring-up one of my bugbears, though, this discussion; pedestrians don't think. You can be stopped in traffic, and someone turns up, immediately presses the button, looks at traffic, sees we're not moving, and crosses safely. Then after they're across, traffic can flow again but the lights turn red! Very inconsiderate, wasteful, bad for the environment etc.

Damiano_Tommassi, Wokingham
26/02/2013 at 11:59

The change needed on the lights on the pedestrian crossings is simply to extend the minimum time between red phases. If a pedestrian presses the button immediately after the lights turn green, currently only about three cars get through before the lights turn red again.

As this is true of both the town hall crossing and the one by the post office, this can result in very little traffic movement during periods of heavy pedestrian use.

PoneRana, Wokingham
26/02/2013 at 11:47

@mavdo - Millets building is also ripe for regeneration, so a long term plan could be to knock it down and replace it with a narrower more attractive building which would therefore enable Denton Place to be made wider. Parking would need more consideration but the space currently taken up by cockpit path car park already includes a two way road so a clever redesign might enable a road to run that way without losing too much parking.

Mark Savill, Wokingham
26/02/2013 at 11:33

As has been mentioned on here, delivery lorries cause blockages on this road, and the traffic lights are so skewed in favour of pedestrians that the main distribution road through our town clogs up every two minutes so that five people can take 5s to cross in a 20s red light phase, and that's just repeated 30 yards up the road. Zebra crossings will just make this worse because then pedestrians are allowed to stop traffic - it isn't reliant on cars giving way, they *must* stop if a pedestrian steps out.

Make the phasing shorter, change it so pedestrians have to wait their turn, and connect the three main crossings together (the one by haka doesn't cause as many problems). That's the obvious solution.

And sort out the selfish people who are moving road closed and no parking signs to drive along a road, or load. They are there for a reason!

To those suggesting public transport, unfortunately it is too expensive, doesn't go to enough places and stops too early to be of any use whatsoever. If you block the road through wokingham any more, then most of us will just go someplace else. It is the town that will ultimately suffer.

mavdo, Wokingham
26/02/2013 at 09:06

@Mark Savill - Denton Place is too narrow with tight turns for that to work, and it would mean the closure of all remaining car parks after the ones behind Virgin Active and Rose street are all closed as part of the regeneration. A satellite map makes Denton Place look feasible, but cars can only just squeeze through as it is. It isn't big enough for any kind of main road use.

mavdo, Wokingham
26/02/2013 at 08:55

A cycle lane all the way up Denmark Street is urgently needed. This plan seems to be an oportunity to create one.

PoneRana, Wokingham
25/02/2013 at 23:31

Regurgitating old and failed ideas.

well, well, well
25/02/2013 at 18:32

WBC will have to provide grown-up sustainable non-car transportation infrastructure one day.... why not start today as the cost will only increase. In some ways, I believe that this Public Realm Strategy could better benefit Wokingham Town than the mega-bucks regeneration plan.

Beef Cake Argh!
25/02/2013 at 16:39

Blackburn Rovers fan, that's right; if they raise it by 2% or more they have to have a local referendum or some such, I believe. of course, Mr Pickles has said that purely for party political gain; the conservative strategy is to keep council tax frozen buy paying national government bribes; this is artificial, and council tax will have to rise eventually, in every council (due to inflation if nothing else). Any council that isn't raising it now will have to raise it a lot later. But the political parties are playing childish games with it.