Romiley is a village near the Peak District, 8 miles from Manchester. In addition to the local shops, cafes and restaurants it has a theatre and a station. The main road through Romiley is a B-road. This thread is about enhancing the village centre. But why should you care? 
Well, Romiley is a good example of a very common road-improvement problem: best practices need wide roads to fit in space for pedestrians, bikes/micro-mobility and motor vehicles. But places like Romiley don’t have those wide roads. So what’s the best approach?
The @WalkRideRomiley group did some great work last year and got money from the Greater Manchester Mayoral Challenge Fund. Their plans are here - mailchi.mp/002c2ec5efce/g….
Romiley is a nice place to live, but it could be even nicer. The problem is the busy main road, which can't really avoid taking a fair chunk of heavy goods vehicles in addition to the usual local traffic.
The main road is very constrained, not least by the railway bridge but also buildings running close up on both sides. Good luck fitting for wider pavements or segregated cycle paths around the railway line.
Just outside the centre it has some cycle provision. Well, sort of. This is a good example of well-meaning provision that actually makes a road less safe for cyclists: it’s essentially unusable, but because it exists, drivers will expect cyclists to be on it.
So what can we do - ideally without spending a fortune? The B6014 through Romiley is never going to be a wide boulevard, but there's still plenty that can be done to persuade people to spend more time and money in the village centre.
1. Put a small roundabout at the junction of Sandy Lane and Compstall Road. The idea is to slow down traffic on the main road, make it safer for people on bike and pedestrians, and create a clear gateway that tells people they are entering the village centre.
2. Make the entrances to the roundabout nice and tight. No-one should be speeding around the roundabout or overtaking anyone on it. Sandy Lane currently has a very wide mouth, encouraging drivers to speed around the corner. Here’s an example.
3. Create some form of gateway at the other end of the village too - near the Methodist church. This could be as simple as a band of setts across the road or something more impressive, but it needs to be physical to signal to drivers that they are entering a village centre.
4. Through the village centre continue the pavement across side roads, so anyone turning on or off the main road has to slow down and give way to pedestrians. It looks something like this.
5. Long sections of pavement have forbidding railings along them. They offer little protection (pic from a recent accident elsewhere), and Romiley folk are no more likely than anyone else to jump into the road. Take them out, replacing with bollards to stop parking if needed.
6. Remove the centre white lines through the village centre. It's really cheap to do and there's clear evidence that doing it makes traffic slow down and so makes the road safer.
7. While most of Romiley suffers from narrow pavements, the section by the Romiley Forum theatre is easily wide enough to convert some of it into a pocket park and put more trees along it, especially with the fencing gone.
8a. I've thought long and hard about cycle provision. There are no sensible alternative routes to send people on bikes and the road isn't wide enough for segregated cycle paths. There are small sections where you could put a separate cycle lane, but...
8b. ...You'd end up with a silly on/off situation where cyclists were mostly on the road, duck off for a bit, then get pushed back on. That's dangerous. If cyclists have to be on the road most of the time, keep them on the road all the time and make it suitable for people cycling
9. You need to set up an expectation for anyone driving through Romiley that the village centre is shared space at all times, not that there are some motor-vehicle-only sections.
10. Make the section through the village centre 20mph - a higher speed limit would make it unsafe for people using different forms of transport to share. Use signage, paint and (budgets permitting) coloured asphalt to drive the point home. Be bold, have fun. Colour the road.
11. Create more places for pedestrians to cross. If the job's been done right, they can cross almost anywhere but adding in an Altrincham-style implied zebra or, if necessary, some zebra or light-controlled crossings won't hurt.
12. Nearly all Romiley residents live within 15 mins walk or 5 mins bike ride of the village centre. Run a campaign to remind residents that walking or biking is good for the village and by the time they've sat in traffic jams and hunted for a parking space, might be quicker too
13. Keep the on-street parking. There isn't very much, and in time it might not be needed, but for now it's better to hold onto it.
14. None of this costs a fortune, and the most expensive elements (the roundabout and raised pavements) already have funding from the Mayoral Challenge Fund. Romiley's already great, but it could be even better.
And that's the END. Romiley, and countless other towns and villages like it, are really tough places to create an environment where people of all ages and abilities feel comfortable walking and cycling. These are my thoughts - I'd be interested to hear yours.
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