‘All new estates should come with 20mph limits’ Town centre nextinline for zone?
Maidstone town centre could leapfrog a ward left waiting 12 years for a 20mph zone.
Kent County Council (KCC) is considering how to spend a potential second tranche of Government funding on travel. Cllr Paul Harper (Lab) suggested Fant would be ideal for a 20mph zone. He said: “We have already gathered signatures on a petition that show a vast amount of resident support.” In fact Stuart Jeffery from Maidstone Greens first campaigned for it in October 2008. But Russell Boorman, KCC’s capital projects manager, said his officers were actually looking at a 20mph around the town centre near Fremlin Walk to encourage footfall.
He said: “We are still awaiting guidance on what will be required from projects in the second tranche. We’ll have to see what emerges.”
Kent County Council (KCC) has been urged to make 20mph zones standard for all new housing developments.
The calls came from Maidstone councillor Brian Clark (Lib Dem) at a meeting of the borough’s Joint Transportation Board.
He explained the scheme had been rolled out in other areas of the country, adding: “How challenging would it be for the highway authority to adopt a policy to set 20mph as the default position, and then if there were reasons why 20mph could not be applied on a particular site that would have to be argued.” No planning officer from KCC was present at the meeting, but the board’s chairman Cllr Paul Cooper (Con), agreed to discuss it as an agenda item at a future meeting.
Cllr Clark’s suggestion came as the joint meeting of local county and borough councillors learned how KCC intended to spend money it had received from the Government under its “emergency active travel scheme” to help counter the adverse effects of the coronavirus pandemic.
The county had won £1.6m in the first tranche and was hopeful of getting a further £6.4m. The downside with the first raft of funding was that it was a requirement that the money be spent within 12 weeks. This had left little time for consultation, so the highway authority had gone ahead and picked projects to progress quickly. In Maidstone these were extending the pedestrian area in Earl Street down from Week Street to Pudding Lane, to encourage hospitality venues to set out tables and chairs in the street.
A second scheme was to create a “pop-up cycle lane” in King Street from the A249 to The Mall shopping centre.