Getting the hump - or two

Remember the unexpected pavement works which introduced the two yellow bobbly pavement slopes at the Banbury Road end of Beech Croft Road?
Well, according to Summertown Councillor Jean Fooks, the workmen will be returning later this year, to create a "raised entry treatment" (an extended hump or 'table'). Apparently the new Banbury Road pavement down from Summertown was always supposed to include this unexpected, but very welcome 'table' across Beech Croft Road but there was some mix-up and the table was forgotten. A 'table' is a raised area across the entrance to BCR that maintains level pavement heights all the way, and necessarily slows cars down as they go up onto the table and then down again. However, Jean informs us that Beech Croft Road will be getting a "raised entry treatment" some time soon, at both the Banbury and Woodstock Road ends of BCR, and that Thorncliffe Road is included as well.
So generally very good news for this part of Summertown. You read it here first! ...

Painting the Streets as a Community Project

I've just been contacted by one of the people who have set up the website for a street-painting initiative in St Paul, Minnesota, inspired by a pilot project in Portland, Oregon. They have formalised the process of painting their own streets, with full acquiescence of the local authorities. They use ordinary domestic latex paints and maintain it all themselves by formal 10-year agreement with the local authorities.

Although the designs themselves are a far cry from what we've been bouncing around, their methods and experience could be extremely useful if we need or we choose to go down the community painting project route rather than the professional route. This site is a very thorough and useful resource, complete with sample agreements, notices, and a tried-and-tested procedure for getting good results, all of which could have been very useful in making the most of our first paint trial two years ago!

http://www.paintthepavement.org/

New road surface possibilities

The City Council is not promising anything just yet, but there is a possibility Beech Croft Road could be resurfaced this year.
Resurfacing can mean anything from just a bit of grit and tar spread on top of the old bumpy road to a whole new inch of top surface. Obviously, we would all like the potholes at the edges filled in, provided, as people often say, it doesn't encourage cars to race down the street. But, hopefully, our range of psychological calming methods will induce less frenetic responses in drivers. This top end possibility would make the road smoother, more waterproof, and leave no potholes or rough edges. However, we might lose the three rows of setts (cobbles) at the edges, although they could re-used as part of a new dropped kerb treatment to keep the pavement flat and level all the way along (see other posts on this blog). If we were to get this Rolls Royce surface then the street's drainage would also improve, as the road surface would at last be higher than the gullies!
Another possibility is a less comprehensive resurfacing - a cheap job. But this still gives us a great opportunity to change the colour of the road if we wish to: the road doesn't have to be Henry Ford black. The new Summertown scheme has white chunks in the road which creates some psychological impression on drivers (pedestrian area? car park? you are on a runway?), and Plantation Road has been turned brown recently, so have a look, think about it, and let us know your views.
But road resurfacing also offers us another great opportunity: to temporarily pilot, and live with, alternative road painting designs, before they are covered by the new surface. All we need is advance notice of when the resurfacing is going to occur, a small budget for paints (we have), and some volunteers. Then we can trial designs, live with them, and once the road has been resurfaced (in a new colour?), take our time to reflect on which designs worked best, and how we liked living with them.
So some exciting possibilities in 2009. First, though, we must wait until we have a definite work proposal from the Council. We'll keep you posted on this blog, but let us know your views on designs and road colouring.

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.

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?