With regard to the Heavitree LTN, will you be able to assess whether traffic on roads just outside the LTN boundary for example Woodwater Lane, Warwick Road and Parklands Drive, has increased and if so, how is this measured? If you cannot measure any potential changes in traffic flows, how will these roads be considered within the measures of success because any increase here is surely a negative impact and should be part of the success criteria measures considered? If there is a decrease in traffic within the LTN this surely should not be cancelled out by increases on roads with no/little monitoring data?
The council has a number of permanent Automatic Traffic Counters (ATCs) around the City. These are comprised of inductive loops embedded in the surface of the carriageway, and record the vehicular traffic that passes over them. It is ATCs like this which have been used to assess changes to the traffic flows on the Heavitree and Whipton Active Streets trial boundary roads. We have also undertaken single day traffic counts on a number of occasions, and installed a small number of semi-permanent AI cameras within the LTN area to assess the measures of success on selected roads within the trial area where we do not have ATCs.
With only one or two exceptions, all the permanent ATCs in Exeter are located on the main distributor roads in the city, and therefore we do not have records of traffic flows on roads like Woodwater Lane, Warwick Road and Parklands Drive, nor have we undertaken single day traffic surveys on these roads.
The nearest locations to the Active Streets trial area where we have permanent ATCs are at:
• Cumberland Way
• Prince Charles Road
• Beacon Lane
• Topsham Road
• Moor Lane (Sowton)
• Sidmouth Road
• New North Road
It should be noted that some ATCs only count traffic in one direction, and they do also develop faults from time to time, so although they are permanent infrastructure, it does not necessarily mean that we have data for 100% of the time for all directions of traffic at every location.