Open Street Map Cycle Map Location
Camden Council proposes two-way working for all vehicles in Regent Square.
This is another good permeability measure and very useful last step in the route between Kings Cross/St Pancras stations and the SSL (Route 0). As a result of our demo in November 2007, when St Pancras International opened, Camden Council agreed to implement this link.
See details. The rest of the link was completed within six months.
Click here to see the consultation leaflet.
CCC’s response
CCC strongly supports this very useful permeability measure. As you know, it is the final step in the route between Kings Cross/St Pancras stations and the SSL (Route 0).
As a result of our demo in November 2007, when St Pancras International opened, Camden Council agreed to implement this link via Whidmore Street, Cromer Street and Harrison Street. This involved removing the bollard in the cycle gap in the centre of Euston Road, indicating that cyclists can cycle southbound through Whidborne Street, improving the surfaces at the entry to the Regent Square – Harrison Street cycle gap and replacing the anti-vehicle surfacing at the junction of Cromer and Harrison Street with normal paving. In addition two-way directional signage was provided between Pancras Road and Regent Square. All of this was completed within six months.
The last step was to allow two-way cycling in Regent Square as proposed in this consultation.
We gather from the newspapers that there is considerable local opposition to the current consultation. We suspect that residents’ fears of an increase in traffic are unfounded. The idea that eastbound vehicles may go round the square when there’s a queue on the south side would be valid if such queues are common. Unfortunately the CRISP Report on Link 30 does not include traffic counts for Regent Square, but we suspect they may be available, for example, from a study done of the SSL between Judd Street and Grays Inn Road by Camden Consultancy Services in 2007. This notion should not be accepted without knowledge of traffic conditions.
Cyclists travelling southbound from Pancras Road to the SSL and then wanting to go west along the SSL currently have to go round three sides of Regent Square. We therefore believe strongly that if this proposal does not go ahead then a new proposal for contraflow cycling should be consulted on.
