£2.5 million road improvements in Bransty

The government has announced that it will put £1.67 of taxpayer funding from the National Infrastructure Productivity Fund into the "North Shore Access Project" to improve the safety and people movement at the Bransty Road junction area of Whitehaven. An additional £0.8 million will come from the Energy Coast, delivering a total of £2.5 million of investment.

This represents the approval of a bid from Cumbria County Council for junction and pedestrian improvements aimed at getting better access and road safety between the South end of Bransty Hill, the railway station, Tescos, and the North Shore area.

You can read details of the CCC bid which the Department of Transport has now approved at

http://www.cumbria.gov.uk/eLibrary/Content/Internet/544/3887/4292111643.pdf 

Comments

Anonymous said…
What is the"North Shore Access Project"?
8:42 am
Chris Whiteside said…
It's the formal title of a proposal to improve the junctions in the Bransty Row area.

I've added a link to the main post above to the bid documents which can be read as a PDF on the County Council website.

The description in the documents is

"Reconfiguration of the existing priority T junction at Bransty Row / North Shore Road and realignment of North Shore Road to improve operation of the junction and enhance the pedestrian environment to create cohesive development sites within the North Shore area of Whitehaven Town Centre."
9:56 am
Anonymous said…
Is there a Plan for it? Have the Public been consulted on it? Willthe Public be consulted on it?
6:13 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
Yes and yes to the first two questions - the proposal has been around for years and been the subject of previous consultation exercises - and I would hope and expect that there will be further consultation while the details of the present scheme are being finalised and before it is implemented.
9:38 pm
Anonymous said…
Really?
Google site:www.cumbria.gov.uk "North Shore Access"

11:56 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
That takes you to the same document to which I had already added a link in the main post in response to the first question in this thread.

Do keep up!
5:49 pm
Anonymous said…
Where's your claimed plan and consultation? All there is is an application for funding and a press release.
10:40 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
I refer you to my previous comment. The funding application describes the scheme in a bit more detail than in my blog post.

I said that the proposal has been around for years (which it has - IIRC for about a decade) and has been the subject of previous consultation exercises, not that there is a live one at the moment.

I said that I hope and expect that there will be a further consultation as the scheme is finalised and before it is implemented, but did not claim that I am in a position to promise this.

Whether there is such a consultation will be decided by the county cabinet, currently run by a Labour and Lib/Dem coalition which excludes my party.

The only thing I am in a position to promise is that if the county council administration were to try to implement this scheme without any further consultation - and I have no reason to think that they intend to do that - I will give them grief for that at County Council meetings.
9:44 am
Anonymous said…
So you're saying the Council are using the abandoned Whitehaven Transport Interchange scheme as the basis for this "North Shore Access Project" that appears to be a very different scheme.

I have no idea what the plans are for this Project and it would appear you have no idea either. What is clear is that the funding application claims that everyone is in support of the scheme even though no one has been consulted on it. It claims "Numerous alternative arrangements have been considered... ", but not by the public, or by the Councillor;, if we had been it would be recorded somewhere.
There is no information about the scheme to be found anywhere on the Council's website.

7:59 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
I am sorry but that is not a particuarly coherent or constructive position.

On the one hand you say that you "have no idea" what the plans are and yet at the same time you seem to think you do have enough idea of what they are to say that the proposal "appears to be a very different scheme" from the previous interchange proposals.

I am quite prepared to engage with people who have something constructive to say but I cannot be bothered to feed the self-importance of the sort of person who posts insults while hiding behind a cloak of anonymity.

If you want to continue the debate, please sign your name to any further comments. If you don't have the courage to do that, please stop wasting your own and my time.

Any further anonymous posts on this thread will be deleted.
2:25 am
Chris Whiteside said…
For the benefit of anyone reading this who is interested in the facts rather than exchanging insults, I asked a couple of questions about the proposals when they were briefly discussed at the last meeting of the Highways Working Group of Cumbria County Council's local committee for Copeland.

IIRC this discussion took place under agenda item 97, the Highway network manager's report, though I would not swear to that. The minutes of local commmittee and particularly working group meetings of CCC are intended as a record of decisions taken and not as a full verbatim account of everything said, and the converstation was not minuted.

From the answers to those questions it was quite clear that this proposal is indeed the latest iteration of the Transport Interchange project which was the subject of consultation a few years back.

There had been due to be another meeting of the Highways Working Group last week but it was postponed because the officers who support it were busy dealing with flood and storm damage.

At the next opportunity, either at Local Committee or at the Highways Working Group when it reconvenes, I shall ask, now that the North Shore Project has received funding, for details of the plans to progress the scheme including what arrangements will be made for public consultation.

In the interests of transparency I will also ask that this request and the reply be recorded in the minutes.
2:21 pm
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