By Johnny Sharp

In the CIHT Webinar on 3 November, ‘Realistic and radical – How to create pedestrian-friendly side-road junctions’, specialists Robert Weetman and Mark Philpotts will share their insights on making side roads more accessible to pedestrians through local and network changes.
T or staggered junctions account for 23% of fatalities on UK roads yet, in theory, the guidelines for drivers are clear: Rule H2 of the Highway Code states that road users should give way to pedestrians when turning into side routes. This law was amended in 2022 to include pedestrians who have not yet stepped into the road but are waiting to cross. 

“We already know what we need to keep pedestrians safe, which is the drivers give way,” says Weetman, an expert on how design affects street users. “What we haven't done is ask, what do we do in terms of infrastructure design to make that happen?”

“A rules-based approach fine to some extent,” adds Philpotts, Sustainable Mobility Design Specialist at City Infinity. “But it requires pretty much everybody to have read the rule book, understood it, and decided to act within those rules. It doesn't take very many people to go against that, and the whole thing breaks down.”
 
Weetman and Philpotts believe a more effective approach is to design junctions more effectively to ensure safe road use. 

“Often the street environment has been designed to make it very easy to turn into a side road,” adds Philpotts, pointing to the fact that in many cases there’s little need for vehicles to slow down around corners, heightening the danger. 

Image: Robert Weetman, one of the UK’s leading authorities on continuous footways.

Making layouts pedestrian friendly

Inevitably arguments against this kind of design will be forthcoming; “People will say, we’d have queues because there’s too much traffic,” Weetman says. “Or, you’ve got HGVs going through these residential areas. So, we then have to start to think, how do we make that work? The work we're doing covers all of those series of consequences, and these designs are just the starting point.”

To help achieve pedestrian-friendly layouts, Weetman and Philpotts say it ultimately hinges on “a design that makes it likely that drivers obey the Highway Code rule".

One system that they point to as an example worth following is ‘Dutch exit treatments’, where continuous footways are built across side road junctions to make it clearer that pedestrians and cyclists have priority, with steep ramps further reinforcing the need for traffic turning into or out of these side roads to slow down to walking speed. 

There’s some confusion here, too, however, with many different styles of design claiming to be continuous footways when, as Weetman says, “Very few of them bore much relation to what we regard as the original inspiration for continuous footways, which was Dutch exit treatments.”

Weetman and Philpotts acknowledge, though, that this is a wide-ranging subject, to which they can only hope to offer an introduction at their CIHT workshop webinar.

Sign up for the webinar now.

Image: Robert Weetman, one of the UK’s leading authorities on continuous footways.