Fears were expressed this week that the Manual for streets will fail to deliver significant change because it ducks the challenge of applying ‘shared space’ principles to non-residential roads. The Manual for streets sounding board has been pushing for other local roads to be covered in this replacement for the Design bulletin 32 guidance, while the Countryside Agency has also highlighted the need to fill the ‘guidance gap’ on country lanes. But the draft manual, published for consultation last week, disappointed those pushing for innovative shared space ideas to supercede the motorway-style Design manual for roads and bridges promotion of segregating vehicular and other traffic. It states that, contrary to expectations, it focuses purely on ‘residential and other lightly-trafficked streets’. While it stresses that some of ‘the key principles’ are applicable to other local roads, and future editions ‘may address busier urban routes,’ consultant Ben Hamilton-Baillie was disappointed at the ‘failure to fill the vacuum between DB32 and the DMRB’. ‘By only drawing up the guidance for the easy-to-tackle residential streets, the consultants have left no policy framework for the vast bulk of local roads, including 90% of streets in London. ‘Hopefully, it’s only a starting point – but the Department for Transport might say when it’s published that “we’ve done streets now.”’ Engineers in Suffolk turned to the DMRB for a shared space scheme drawn up for a main road into Ipswich, saying ‘you can’t do this or that, because the DMRB says you need to meet certain “high-friction coefficients”, and have good sightlines’. Countryside Agency senior policy officer, Kathleen Covill, said that while some of the design guidance in the manual was likely to be suitable for country lanes, ‘it won’t fill the guidance gap that currently exists for practioners working on rural roads’. She hoped that the MfS would be expanded to cover rural roads fully ‘to ensure that local authorities don’t have to fall back on the DMRB’. But members of the MfS sounding board were hopeful that, despite the focus on residential roads, local highway engineers would apply the guidance more widely. John Smart, director of technical affairs at the Institution of Highways & Transportation, said it was his understanding that this was ‘only the start’, but, in the meantime, there was nothing to stop councils drawing on the manual for non-residential streets. ‘We shouldn’t just be pulling the DMRB off the shelf when designing layouts.’ Devon County Council’s environment director, Edward Chorlton, believed the draft could be ‘a major force for change,’ aimed at all highways which have important functions beyond the movement of traffic.