A 15-minute shared space introduction

There are a great many shared space concepts that apply to BCR. The most interesting psychological bit is the first four minutes of part 2.

SHARED SPACE PART 1: This video stutters a bit unless you pause it for a minute or so before attempting to play.




SHARED SPACE PART 2: This video streams better than part 1.

Clogged drains as a traffic-calming device

Ed Pentz posted these photos taken in 2007 when he caught a driver changing their mind after seeing the mother of all puddles.

BCRA Hoping to advise County Council on pavement repairs

BCR is definitely going to have its pavement repairs some time in 2009/10. In addition, Cllr Fooks is busy discussing with the council BCRA's interest in working with the highways engineers to have some say in the way the pavement is remodeled, rather than just having the current undulating profile of the pavement smoothed over and the stone kerbs chucked out. We hope to end up with a level pavement that doesn't tip buggies and wheelchairs over, but still allows cars to access front drives.

BCRA Meetings with County Council

Mark Hull, Ted Dewan and Ed Pentz from BCRA and Alexandra Allen from Sustrans met in September with Cllr Jean Fooks and Cllr Ian Hudspeth (Oxfordshire County Council Cabinet Member for Transport) to talk about our plans for Beech Croft Rd and the DIY Streets project. The next BCRA meeting with the Council is scheduled for 10 November. We need to get the Council to adopt the concept of the DIY Streets Scheme in order to progress.

Kerb treatment idea

I've done a bit of research on the whole dropped-kerb business, and how we might avoid ending up with rampy, undulating pavement. The standard practice is to create at most a 1:12 ramp from kerb to drive. Yet, other officially adopted solutions exist right here in Oxford.

Here's a good one already in place in Headington on St Andrews Street, just north of London Road..

This treatment levels the pavement, retains the stone kerb and the cobbles, offers good drainage, and still allows cars to drive into their off-street parking spaces.

St Andrews Street has a slightly higher street-to-pavement level change than we have on BCR, so the cobble ramp is higher along the wall frontage. Where a car needs access to a drive, the pavement drops ever so slightly, but this dropped kerb is actually approximately as high as our un-dropped kerbs are relative to the street level. Kinda hard to see from the photos, but that's my estimate from being on-site.

I'm currently drawing up a sketch of how I think we could adapt this sort of treatment to BCR. The idea could translate to BCR by using the existing gutter space as a ramp rather than cut it out of the narrow pavement area, and shift the drainage burden to the channel along the join between the cobbles and the street tarmac.

It makes for a slightly bumpier ride up to the front drives, but hardly worth worrying about in my opinion, especially if it makes the pavements suitable for non-motorised use.

There are six drains along BCR, but only two drains along the frontage of houses with drives at numbers 1 and 37. I'm no civil engineer, but I reckon these two drain regions would need to come in for some sort of special attention to the profile of the cobble ramp. The other four drains are adjacent to full-height kerbs where no front-drive access exists so they could be left alone.

What do you think?