Long-awaited quiet lanes and home zones regulations have finally given highway authorities in England powers to designate lightly-trafficked routes where residents’ local activities have precedence over traffic movement. The Quiet Lanes and Home Zones (England) Regulations 2006 specify what highway authorities must consider when introducing the measures amenity bodies have been pressing for. On such roads, prescribed activities may take place even where they are public thoroughfares. Quiet lanes seek to contain rising traffic growth and will include community involvement, area-wide redirection of traffic, and entry and exit signs. But the Department for Transport says only minor roads with low traffic speeds are suitable. Home zones – the urban equivalent – are only deemed appropriate on roads which are predominantly residential or have sub-20mph speeds. The biggest change from pilot quiet lanes implemented in Norfolk and Kent – and from schemes introduced elsewhere, despite the absence of regulations, since the legislation paving the way for them was introduced six years ago – is the scrapping of the previous, less urban-looking sign. The DfT has chosen a new, larger sign depicting pedestrians, cyclists and equestrians after councils’ concerns that the pilot sign – which simply said ‘quiet lanes’ on a wooden post – would not be understood. The original sign, almost half the height of the new 68cm-high sign, had been designed to be in keeping with a rural environment. Highways officials welcomed publication of the regulations, but stressed the cost involved in providing quiet lanes. A DfT consultation reveals that local authorities estimate the costs of designating one quiet lane as being as much as £150,000, while the accompanying speed orders are up to £10,000. County Surveyors’ Society transport and environment committee chair, Graham Dunhill, said such schemes involved very extensive consultations, and had significant resource implications. ‘Both home zones and quiet lanes are very much community-based, and extensive consultations are required,’ he says. ‘But experience shows that where they introduced, they will work, as there’s a consensus in the community to make them work.’ He said he believed the guidance had the balance right on using roads where existing speeds were low and on signage requirements. But Paige Mitchell of the Slower Speeds Initiative said that, effectively, a road had to be a quiet lane or home zone already before it was designated as such. ‘Quiet lanes should be the default condition of the rural network,’ she said. She also questioned the idea of specified activities and predicted that it would be difficult for councils to comprehensively set out what could and could not be done in a given street.