Tackling Traffic in Carshalton

I had four consecutive meetings at the Council offices yesterday about a variety of traffic schemes proposed for Carshalton. The results were positive.

Residential roads across the Borough are divided up into areas known as Strategic Traffic & Environmental Problem Studies or STEPS zones for short. STEPS zone 19 includes Salisbury, Blakehall and Carshalton Park Road and the roads around the perimeter of Carshalton Park. It reaches across to Manor Road in Wallington.

All residents received a letter from the Council asking if they considered their road to be a rat-run, whether it should be made into a 20mph zone and if any traffic calming should be considered. 20% of residents replied with a mixed bag of replies. In order to make sense of them, the area was broken down into four bite-size chunks.

Residents around Blakehall Road were split, with Carshalton Park Road identified as the biggest rat-run. However, neither the level of responses or the accident data merited the need for speed bumps etc. I did insist that attention was given to sightlines on the junctions. There are a lot of children that go up to Stanley Park Infants and Juniors along that route. The corner of Blakehall and Salisbury is dreadful with vans and cars blocking the view for turning traffic and the corners near Glebe Road are similar. There are several occasions when traffic is forced into the path of oncoming traffic. I know that parking is getting more difficult in that area having seen more cars in twenty years that I have lived here, but I would be supportive of yellow lines on the corners to ease this problem.

Residents around the Park did not generally see their road as a cut through and so it was easy to decide to leave well alone. The other two smaller areas are not in my ward and were less clear cut. Residents in Grosvenor Avenue and Grosvenor Road were keener on slowing the traffic that speeds up the straight road, though there have been no accidents along Grosvenor Avenue and only one on the kink in Grosvenor Road. Accidents have occured as one might expect, at the junction with Park Lane. The area in Wallington has not been resolved yet as the ward councillors are meeting with officers this week.

Update: View the results broken down by road here.