Campaigns and Issues
Cycling from east to west up St Owen Street (St Owen Street contraflow)
Cyclists with long memories and generally grumpy engagement with Hereford local authorities may remember that there has been an aspiration, since the late 1980s at least, to allow cycle access to the city centre from the east, by means of a contraflow 'facility' along St Owen Street.
Translating from aspiration to legal street cycling has been dogged with problems. The biggest is that, due to width restrictions, it is not possible to provide a conventional contraflow along the entire length of St Owen Street and the various schemes proposed over the years have required detours longer than the contraflow itself in order to get to the contraflow. The most recent proposal would have brought cyclists into conflict with both pedestrians and car occupants.
To solve this problem, Cycle Hereford have advocated an informal contraflow. The Department for Transport allows these where speeds are close to 20mph, which is the case on St Owen Street for much, but not all, of the time.
We also wanted the Council to follow the movement principles adopted by the Forum: to take into account street function and the road user hierarchy when seeking to solve the problem of cycle access.
Our suspicions that the Council hadn't bothered to follow the principles were confirmed by the consultants' report on the last, rejected, half-length contraflow. The council had actually instructed the consultants to do nothing to restrain traffic speed or volume along the street. Any and all traffic calming measures were ruled out. Moreover, it was clear that the consultants did not look beyond the road geometry and traffic flows to consider what actually goes on in St Owen Street.
Fortunately, the Council has finally come on board and accepted the informal contraflow approach. The first step is a street audit taking into account the way St Owen Street is used, all road users and the importance of its streetscape to Hereford. This is necessary to put the informal contraflow in context and should benefit everyone.
We hope the outcome will be a more continental, 'shared space' type of solution, with cyclists simply exempted from the one-way working, as is common in the Netherlands.
Getting the right result in St Owen Street is important. It could become the precedent for a more sensitive approach that looks at movement in context and ensures that space is reallocated to pedestrians and cyclists.