Red Tarmac is the finishing touch for Hinxton's traffic calming

I followed up from a discussion at Ickleton Parish Council this week to ask  the County Highways team to put in place the red Tarmac that will flag up the new traffic calming at each end of the village. It all helps to flag up to drivers that they NEED TO SLOW DOWN. 

But it does work - especially the road in from Duxford. 

20 mph zone for Ickleton

Had a useful meeting with the chair of Ickleton Parish Council and the Highways project manager from the County Council overseeing the installation of traffic calming in the village - here in Frogge Street I saw a real difference in traffic speeds. But our meeting was about what happens next and how to take forward the long held aspiration for a 20 mph zone covering the village. 

Progress was made. 

Ickleton - Frogge Street 30 mph signs

I was at the parish council meeting at Ickleton last evening where I was glad to report that - having spoken to the county highways team about this last month - the engineers have agreed now to move the 30mph speed signs further out along Frogge Street. This means that the proposed speed calming pinch points can be installed where the local residents want them. So there is progress. The county has now started the consultation process for getting this done.

The county engineers have also agreed that the 20 mph zone can in principle cover the whole of the village rather than just the middle bit which has been a bone of contention going back a few months. I am pleased to have been able to get this sorted so that the prospect of the 20 mph zone might start to happen. 

Hunts Road at Duxford - a spring dressing

Hunts Road gets a fair old pounding as it is the main route through Duxford and on to Ickleton, with lorries as well as cars using it. Despite the traffic calming features, because it is nice and straight people tend to go for it along there too.
Added to this the road is also quite narrow which means that wide vehicles tend to take a few centimetres off the sides, so that the road surface gets eaten into from the sides as the foundations are exposed.
The County Council highways team have been out filling in the worst of the potholes, and will do some more, and then in the spring the whole surface will be dressed.

Ickleton 20mph zone

The police are helpfully saying that they will be very willing to come and talk the parish council through what is needed by way of a speed survey so that the long-running attempt to get a 20mph zone on Abbey Street and Frogge Street can move on apace.

hanley grange - a fifth anniversary

Five years ago - in the early summer of 2008 - people living in the villages of this part of Cambridgeshire mobilised in their hundreds to "stop Hanley Grange" and oppose the proposals for a 10,000 house development.
People believed that the planned new-town, put forward under the eco-town initiative of the then government, would have swamped Hinxton, Pampisford and the villages of Great and Little Abington, put Sawston High Street out of busines, and made the A505 even more of a gridlock than it is already.
Over the last few weeks I have been reminded of that effort by local people in the faded car bumper sticker I saw at Pampisford last Thursday and the odd poster on a playground fence. Now the local housing plan has been published, showing that most of the new houses over the next 20 years will be built at Northstowe, Bourn Airfield, Waterbeach and on the outskirts of Cambridge at Trumpington.
But there is always the chance that the people who own the land on which Hanley Grange would have been built will argue that allowing such a settlement would - mirroring Northstowe - meet the housing demand south of the City.
So as always, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

Ickleton and Babraham - roads as rat-runs, roads unmaintained, roads you can't get onto...

In the beautiful villages of Ickleton and Babraham this afternoon, where the consistent issue was the speed and press of traffic using narrow village streets as rat-runs, either to get to Sawston industrial area in the case of Babaraham or to shave some time off an M11/A11 journey by jinxing through Ickleton via Frogge Street.

The road surfaces themselves are not brilliant, and Babraham has real issues with the busy roads surrounding it that make it difficult to get onto or turn off from, especially the A1307, but the main point was the speed of the cars and vans trying to get through these villages, oblivious to polite speed signs. More robust traffic calming and re-routing of HGVs seems to be what is needed.
 

A sharp curve into Ickleton

This is the curve of the road into Ickleton from Duxford. Ten metres further on from where I was parked is the beginning of Abbey Street, a narrow road made narrower by parked cars.

I was there this afternoon on a blustery cold day talking to people in Abbey Street itself - who were asking how to slow cars down as they take this corner in particular, and not to go barrelling down past the pub - which was doing good business - and do a handbrake turn into Frogge Street. So traffic calming is one to think about here.
Even though there was a cricket match taking place by the village hall, it certainly did  NOT feel like late April.

Local enterprise

The village shop at the Abingtons must be one of the best stocked around. Up there this afternoon and the battery in my car key failed. Did they sell a replacement - of course they did!.
Later I was in Thriplow where it was good to see the newly re-opened Green Man doing brisk businesss.
This morning I was hearing from a young couple in Ickleton who had gone into the micro-brewing business, using local produce.
Not every business has to be mega to be successful.