Roads authorities in Scotland have raised concerns about proposed new design guidance for residential streets as not being prescriptive enough, which they fear could leave them open to litigation.
In response to the consultation draft of Designing streets, the Scottish equivalent of the Manual for streets – which seeks to introduce 20mph limits which are enforced by the design of streets – councils have told the Scottish Government that the guidance lacks detail.
Aberdeen City Council is concerned over ‘ambiguity’ in the document as to which roads the new advice applies to. West Lothian believes it will need to develop detailed design guidance itself.
The document, which is meant to replace the Design manual for roads and bridges, with an important ‘place’ function, such as ‘residential or lightly-trafficked streets’, does not contain its own prescriptive rules for layout and geometric design.
Angus Council states: ‘Local authorities have a right to be concerned at having to adjudicate on the effectiveness of innovative non-standard designs, or on designs subject to a degree of interpretation of less prescriptive rules. They may become liable for collisions occasioned by such relaxations.’
The Society of Chief Officers for Transportation, by contrast, had welcomed the flexibility for councils to set new road widths and visibility standards themselves, depending on local conditions (Surveyor, 11 September 2008).
However, SCOTS has acknowledged a need for national road standards in line with the guidance – which Transform Scotland also criticised as being ‘overly discursive’ – given the amount of work entailed in revising local road standards.
Stuart D’All, of the SCOTS roads group, said there was a need for more evidence based on a wider range of examples than those studied by TRL, if councils were to reduce motorists’ visibility across their networks. However, SCOTS was ‘supportive of the ethos of the document’, while ‘recognising what’s right for an Edinburgh C road is different for a C road in rural Aberdeenshire’.
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