Stafford Traffic.

cj1

Well-Known Forumite
But if the big shopping centre was built out of town it would of been another nail on the coffin of the stafford high street. Hopefully this development would help reverse that trend also stafford roads only tends to be busy at rush hour not many People shop at this time so traffic impact is probably minor
 

John Marwood

I ♥ cryptic crosswords
But if the big shopping centre was built out of town it would of been another nail on the coffin of the stafford high street. Hopefully this development would help reverse that trend also stafford roads only tends to be busy at rush hour not many People shop at this time so traffic impact is probably minor

I don't see much of a connection - people drive to Tesco, do a weekly shop, drive home

If you are driving with the railway station on your right and you want to turn left onto Newport Road, at most times of the day, you will be delayed because of traffic trying to gain road position for the lane to Tesco
 

cj1

Well-Known Forumite
My point is roads in stafford only tend to be at or overcapacity during the rush hour and most people go shopping at other times when there is available capacity the affect on congestion isn't going to be as bad as people think
 

markpa12003

Well-Known Forumite
The tesco junction is a mess and I have raised it with SCC. Unfortunately the junction design standards require the stupid junction that we have. Sadly this leaves no room for common sense. The junction could be improved if the left hand filter lane was increased in length and if there were no traffic lights on the turn into tescos. I don't understand the need for a giveway and lights on the left turn, surely one of those measures would have sufficed. I would personally prefer just a giveway as this would allow traffic to enter tesco a lot easier therefore reducing the amount of traffic congestion on the Newport road.
 

Gramaisc

Forum O. G.
The tesco junction is a mess and I have raised it with SCC. Unfortunately the junction design standards require the stupid junction that we have. Sadly this leaves no room for common sense. The junction could be improved if the left hand filter lane was increased in length and if there were no traffic lights on the turn into tescos. I don't understand the need for a giveway and lights on the left turn, surely one of those measures would have sufficed. I would personally prefer just a giveway as this would allow traffic to enter tesco a lot easier therefore reducing the amount of traffic congestion on the Newport road.
The re-instatement of the right-turn to nowhere is verging on mental illness.
 

John Marwood

I ♥ cryptic crosswords
I propose one large roundabout

on the total site of that big store place

I remember Tesco being in Salter Street in the olden days

And they traded their products under the Delamere brand

And you were embarrassed to have the label on any item of clothing because Ben Sherman was God
 

John Marwood

I ♥ cryptic crosswords
The re-instatement of the right-turn to nowhere is verging on mental illness.

Ew2STtw.jpg
 

Gramaisc

Forum O. G.
I remember Tesco being in Salter Street in the olden days

And they traded their products under the Delamere brand

And you were embarrassed to have the label on any item of clothing because Ben Sherman was God
That was the back entrance of Tesco Home'n'Wear, the front was in Market Street - and the food was in Tipping Street.
 

Maryland

Well-Known Forumite
It's terrible isn't it. The worst causes of the peak-time traffic congestion in Stafford in this driver's opinion:

1. Parents driving their kids to school. Every summer, and for the odd week at other times, there is a merciful return to acceptable driving conditions for those of us who have to drive somewhere to get to work in the morning. Then, come one heart sinking week in September, it all starts all over again. Parked cars lining the residential streets surrounding my local primary school twice a day. Parked cars obstructing the very small road on which I live, twice a day, with the fecund sometimes taking their own sweet time to bugger off and leave our otherwise peaceful neighbourhood while they gather to have a natter and to drop their fag ends outside our homes. The way they pretend not to see you as they blast into your street and manoeuvre their vehicles feet away from where you're gardening, or talking to your neighbours, or waiting for them to get the **** out of the way so you can leave your own property. God, they get on my nerves, these head-in-the-air, don't-look-at-the-locals-because-we-know-damn-well-we're-annoying-them bloody people. Then, once you manage to get onto the main roads, you find the lollipop persons, happily stopping traffic every couple of minutes in between the overworked pelican crossings. In the morning peak period, on a main aerial which connects the town to the motorway.

Two suggestions: stafford borough council, spend some of the money you take from us to pay for the education of other people's children and use it to fund SCHOOL BUSES. You know, to take kids to school in. These are needed, obviously, just as much to feed primary schools in the middle of a residential area as they are to feed out of town secondaries, IF NOT BLOODY MORE SO from the point of view of the local residents who have to put up with this twice-daily plague. Make it clear to parents that they will be expected to take their kids to the school bus stop rather than take their kids to a convenient parking place outside the home of a complete stranger who doesn't want you there. As I write, one such has just turned up, turned their car around outside my home, parked a few feet away, several car doors slamming, sod the residents. And now there's another.
 

cj1

Well-Known Forumite
if the parents are not parking in a legally responsible manor you could ask the council to patrol the area at set times. as it is a road safety issue most drivers don't like fines and will do the right thing thereafter
 

phildo

Well-Known Forumite
Two suggestions: stafford borough council, spend some of the money you take from us to pay for the education of other people's children and use it to fund SCHOOL BUSES.

Or make the kids walk.... you know, using them things called legs!
 

Maryland

Well-Known Forumite
Cj, the trouble is that most of it is not illegal, other than the 'laws are for other people' types who park illegally close to the junction between this little street and the larger road, making it difficult and dangerous for us to get out of our street due to reduced visibility and being forced onto the wrong side of the road in order to get out. The issue is the evident sense of entitlement to disturb peoples' homes with their turning around outside them and parking where they will on our street. All of which they are legally allowed to do, unfortunately. As mentioned, this happens twice a day when the schools are working. The one small mercy is that - usually - they don't stay here for very long. But, oh, how we wish they'd all bugger off and not come again.

The underlying cause of complaint is that this intrusive and inconsiderate blighting of other peoples' private lives is carried out in the assumption that those so affected don't mind. Well we bloody well do! Had any consideration been given, by school, planners or transport officials, to the impact of this parental driving and parking activity, then it would have been obvious that the actions of these parents brings misery, inconvenience and risk to local residents, and a less harmful solution to the problem of getting small kids to school would have been found. The parents don't care, that much is quite clear. The glaringly obvious answer is to provide communal transport. It's not a large catchment area: all it would take is two or three small buses to make a couple of sweeps of the locality, and for the parents to place their kids at the pickup points in time to get on them. That's not too difficult is it? Instead of which, it's clearly, I'll do what I damn well please, to my own timetable, and if I regularly annoy other people by doing so, sod them.
 

Maryland

Well-Known Forumite
Legs. You must be joking. They're surely not allowed to use legs these days. Health 'n safety. Peedohs. Respeck. Whatever. There's bound to be some reason why children must not use legs any more, in case of Something.

There's one of those animated films, possibly Wall-E, where humanity of the future has lost the use of its own lower limbs for the purposes of mobility and has to scoot about on hover-loungers or something. I not infrequently observe the small kids of today, not just the ones I see being unloaded from cars outside my house, and think that that day is probably a lot closer than we imagine. Yesterday evening, knackered and laden with bags, I had to stand at the back of a bus for 20 minutes because the nine seats around me were occupied by three adults and six under school age children. None of the parents offered to get a child off a seat to allow a tired adult fare payer to sit down, naturally. Same on the tube.
 

Maryland

Well-Known Forumite
Don't worry, I'll have got over this episode soon and will then shut up.

Second huge source of traffic-creating irritation: the price of local bus fares.

I'd like to use the train to get to London sometimes. I don't, and consequently drive, for three reasons:

1. The trains that get there quickly and offer reasonable comfort - Virgin- are way out of my price range now.

2. The trains that I can afford, just about, - London Midland - take over two hours to get down and over three hours to get back. And they're cattle trucks. And if you have to work lateish they offer the delightful prospect of being abandoned without assistance at New Street late at night because an indolent and sackable LM conductor, or however they style themselves these days, possibly 'senior customer experience executive', is entitled, as one such explained to me once, to take his meal break, even if that means hundreds of other working people can't get home from Birmingham late at night. On that occasion, I saw a weeping teenage girl being turned away from the LM 'help desk'.

3. But the main reason is that if I use a local bus in Stafford to get to the station, it adds nearly a fiver to the cost of my commute. The single fare, from a mile and a half away, is £2.20. In London, I can take a bus five miles from Victoria to Cricklewood for £1.40. Stafford local buses will sell me a multiple journey ticket that reduces the fare, but that has validity for a week, I believe, or possibly a month, after which the money remaining is lost to me. In London, the money I put on an Oystercard stays there until I use it,,whether that's next week or next year.

If we had a local authority in Stafford that cared about reducing traffic, improving the environment and actually doing something that would really help the people who pay its wages and from whom it extracts, with ruthless efficiency, threats and bullying bailiffs, the council tax which it's supposed to use for the benefit of all (as opposed to endless face painting sessions for children at the castle every summer and a largely invisible police presence and providing lovely new surfaces for the lanes in close vicinity to the farmhouse residences of various 'cabinet members' for this and that - oh no, silly me, that's the county council isn't it) then we might, just possibly, have a local bus service that people who have to pay their own fares could actually afford to use. But it appears to be the case that as long as a Stafford bus can fill up with those who travel free or heavily subsidised - with which I don't have an issue - the rest of us can go hang. Just as those of us who have to endure the school parking shenanigans can go hang: not our problem, walk away whistling and let's get some more face painting laid on for hard-working families. Or is it supposed to be hard working people? No, I'm sure we're still on 'families'...

It would be truly in the realms of fantasy though, wouldnt it, to imagine local buses that were not noisy, filthy, rattling and uncomfortable relics of the 1980s, such as might possibly be provided for the citizens of Stafford if transport operators were required to meet more than the bare minimum of a service requirement? Or that had modern ticketing equipment that might permit the use of modern ticketing and charging methods? Or whose drivers were able to keep to a published timetable of an evening, when there is practically no traffic, weather, war or pestilence in Stafford town centre that could possibly prevent their doing so, but there ARE cold, tired and hungry people waiting up to ten minutes (in my personal experience) longer than the scheduled time to be picked up from outside the railway station so that they can hand over their £2.20 for the next five minutes spent listening to teenagers swearing loudly. And - this is really mad - whose drivers do not sit immobile and unsmiling, doubtless expecting a middle aged civil servant to run away without paying, until the final five pee of the £2.20 has been laid down and stepped away from, before pressing the button that causes the ticket to be issued?

OK, I've finished. Feel a bit better now.
 

Jonah

Spouting nonsense since the day I learned to talk
Don't people realise that one of the main reasons children get driven to school now is because, in the majority of cases, BOTH parents HAVE to work to be able to pay the mortgage and the parent who is taking them is actually on their way to work?
 

Gramaisc

Forum O. G.
Don't people realise that one of the main reasons children get driven to school now is because, in the majority of cases, BOTH parents HAVE to work to be able to pay the mortgage and the parent who is taking them is actually on their way to work?
That may be a reason in some cases, but it seems unlikely that the ones that turn up three-quarters of an hour before closing-time, in order to get a 'good spot' fit into that category.
 

Maryland

Well-Known Forumite
Big blue, this people is quite well aware that both partners in many couples have to work iot pay the mortgage. Believe me, it's a lot harder if you're not a couple, beside the point though that may be.

But I don't see how a parent having to go to work could stop a child from getting on a bus, were a bus to be available. Or from walking, for that matter. Ever heard of a 'walking bus' or a 'walking train'? One or two (there's doubtless a statutory requirement) responsible adults, duly vetted by the constabulary for tendencies that have already come to the attention of the authorities, collecting small children from their homes or other place of safety, and conducting them on foot and together with a number of their fellows, to the school? Never seen that in Stafford: why not?

I spent five years of primary and junior school sometimes being picked up and delivered by a teacher parent on his own way to work, but more often getting on the bus or walking a couple of miles. Then I spent seven years of secondary school getting on the bus. Once, a saddo exposed himself to me on the bus before running away. That was the only danger I ever experienced. The percentage of perverts in the population is, I'd wager, probably fairly stable. Road conditions and standards of driver training have improved significantly in the last fifty years. People do not drive whilst pissed any more, on the whole. We care more about the safety of kids, true, and rightly so, but where an inch is given a mile is very often taken. There are perfectly acceptable alternatives, which should be adopted by a comprehensively responsible and inclusive society, to the notion that the only safe way for a kid to get to school is by being delivered by car by a parent.
 

My Name is URL

Well-Known Forumite
Got to agree about crud busses - £1.80 from the train station to the Hospital when I have to get to the bus stop 10 minutes before the advertised pick-up time, wait 25 - 30 minutes for the bus because its running late, put up with hundreds of college students - most of which are ok but a few think it hilarious to press the stop button 50 times - it takes ages because it stops constantly, the drivers are usually as polite / helpful as an ISIS fighter, luckily for me it drops me off where I need to be but I imagine for many people it would drop them off a fair walk away....
 
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