Over the last couple of weeks I've had a lot of enquiries about the current Highways work on Derby Road, outside West Notts College.
I feel it’s important to address some of the questions, where there seems to be a bit of confusion and misreporting about what's going on.
There are some suggestions that the roadworks there are all in the name of some “really expensive cycle path”. I can reassure residents that this is not the case.
This is a £2m improvement to the Highway, and a spot that residents consistently contact me to complain about.
It's road and footway resurfacing, the introduction of new road safety measures and crossings, and signalling improvements at the junction.
Yes, there is also a cycle path, and it's this is the element that has unlocked the funding for the rest of the work, because as I've described before, a good chunk of Highways funding is ring-fenced for 'active travel'.
It’s not within my gift to decide how this funding is spent, it’s a national ring-fencing and we don't have flexibility to decide differently.
However, what we are doing is using this funding to deliver road resurfacing, improvements, and road safety measures alongside the active travel requirement wherever we can. This approach means we can access more money for our roads.
It's fair to say it's a long project overall, some 40+ weeks in total, but I always want to reassure residents that the most disruptive bits including the temporary lights that we have now are only due to last a few weeks. Further phases of the work will not include this kind of traffic management.
I know that people want roads to improve. We all do, and unfortunately inevitably that means those areas will need a level of traffic management to do that work. That could include temporary lights like on Derby Road, or occasional short term road closures whilst areas are resurfaced. I’m afraid that without this, road improvements can't happen.
The inevitable short term consequence of road investment and improvements is more road works. However, longer term its how we get to having a better, higher quality road network.
The good news is that there is more investment into our roads from Government and additional funding decided at County Hall. Major projects like this are now getting underway, and our roads are slowly improving. You can see the work at nottshighways.co.uk
Locally, we can’t change the rules around this Government Active Travel funding right now. However, I have been working on the long-term answer to this, to get the flexibility we want.
From May 2024 we WILL have that flexibility to do this better and reprioritise that money. This is due to new plans to devolve this funding and these decisions down to the East Midlands rather than it happening in London.
Our first Mayor for the East Midlands, who will be elected next May, will be able to use new powers and funds to invest heavily in road maintenance if they choose.
That's the kind of new opportunity that devolution brings, and whilst none of it is perfect, and the system certainly isn't perfect, it presents a solution to some of these kinds of problems.
