King’s Road / Beaufort Street
There were three reported personal injury collision involving a pedestrian at this junction during the last three years. This junction currently has only one staggered Green Man pedestrian crossing, across the eastern arm of King’s Road. We modelled several options here, including pedestrian crossings across all four arms, but found that this would push the junction over its capacity resulting in unacceptable delays and congestion.
The modelling concluded that the best balance between improved pedestrian amenity and minimising delays is to propose two additional Green Man crossings – a ‘straight-across’ one over the northern arm and a ‘staggered’ one over the southern arm, giving three in total. To achieve the phase across the northern arm, we will need to ban the left turn for all traffic from King’s Road into Beaufort Street.
If we provide a Green Man crossing without banning the left turn, all traffic would need to be held on a red signal. This would result in a substantial increase in queuing and delay at the junction compared to the existing situation. The banned turn will allow the pedestrian crossing on the northern arm to operate while the eastern and western arms have a green signal for traffic.
The modelling assumes that most of the traffic displaced by the banned left turn will use Old Church Street. This means that during the busiest hours, a maximum of approximately 50 additional vehicles per hour – fewer than one per minute - will be displaced most likely to Old Church Street, as per the graphic below. In practice, a proportion of them will probably use The Vale.
Image of banned left turn
* A Passenger Car Unit (PCU) is a measure used to assess highway capacity for modelling purposes. Different vehicles are assigned different values, according to the space they take up. A car has a value of one, smaller vehicles have lower values, and larger vehicles have higher values.