Liveable Neighbourhoods - Print version

Liveable neighbourhoods provide a great opportunity to reduce traffic and create cleaner air where we live. Liveable neighbourhoods can help create more peaceful neighbourhoods with safer streets and enhance communities with more greenery and usable outdoor spaces. Over 200 similar schemes have been delivered around the UK, offering multiple benefits for residents and businesses. More information can be found below about recent studies and case studies.

Liveable neighbourhoods will help encourage more active travel in our city, creating streets that are safer for walking, wheeling and cycling. It can also encourage the use of public transport, which will improve public health and reduce carbon emissions. The Council has recently launched the draft Climate Change Strategy [https://www.coventry.gov.uk/draftclimatechangestrategy], and the Council’s Transport Strategy [https://www.coventry.gov.uk/transport-strategy-2/transport-strategy] was approved last autumn, which set out our ambitions to create a more sustainable city. Tackling the cause and effects of Climate Change is one of the Council’s top three priorities in our One Coventry Plan [https://www.coventry.gov.uk/theonecoventryplan].

Liveable neighbourhoods can be delivered through a range of ways, including putting traffic filters on residential streets to help stop cars, vans and lorries using the streets as through-roads. Other measures could include improving walking and cycling by adding crossing points, cycle lanes and storage, introducing more greenery through planters and rain gardens, and creating more social spaces such as outdoor seating and parklets.

Here are some examples of what liveable neighbourhoods can look like:

Thanks to Active Travel England’s Active Travel Fund, which is managed by the West Midlands Combined Authority, we will be looking to work with local people to create two liveable neighbourhoods in Coventry. Local people will be at the heart of the design and development.

The consultation for liveable neighbourhoods allows residents to design the streets they live on and give feedback throughout, to create a fully co-designed liveable neighbourhood.

Residents will still be able to drive to their homes and park there, businesses can still get deliveries, and pedestrians and bikes can get through freely.

Monitoring and evaluation will be an important part of the pilots to fully understand the impacts of interventions and inform future decision making about introducing further liveable neighbourhoods across the city in the future. The project team are also using lessons learnt from other areas that have implemented liveable neighbourhood to help ensure Coventry’s pilot schemes are a success.

Liveable Neighbourhood studies

• Department for Transport Low Traffic Neighbourhood Study (2021) [https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1004948/low-traffic-neighbourhoods-residents-survey.pdf]
• Centre for London Street Shift: The Future of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (2022) [https://www.centreforlondon.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/CFL-StreetShift-LTNs-Final.pdf]

Benefits of Liveable Neighbourhoods

Liveable neighbourhoods aim to look at the intended function of roads by stopping cars from using quieter, residential roads as rat runs, and encouraging the use of main roads which are designed for higher levels of traffic. Liveable neighbourhoods will engage with the community and look at traffic flows as a whole before designing any changes.

Liveable neighbourhoods are a great opportunity for businesses to get higher footfall and increase trade. Creating a liveable neighbourhood enables local high streets to become destinations where people enjoy spending time. This means that people want to stay longer, further supporting local shops and businesses.

Vehicle access will be maintained to all homes in a liveable neighbourhood, however, changes may be made to the roads. These changes could potentially include making a road one-way or stopping up one end of the road, meaning that it cannot be used as a through-road for vehicles. Blue lights services such as the ambulances will be fully consulted and involved with potential road layout changes.

There are many benefits to residents' health and activity levels in liveable neighbourhoods. By encouraging more active travel, reducing vehicle numbers and pollution, alongside creating a more attractive environment with more green space, communities will benefit from:

• improved air quality
• increased activity levels, due to better facilities for walking or cycling
• improved physical health and wellbeing
• better community wellbeing
• reduced social isolation

Earlsdon Liveable Neighbourhood

Earlsdon Liveable Neighbourhood Consultation has concluded and here are the final plans.

The consultation to help make Earlsdon a more liveable neighbourhood has ended and the final plans are now available. We have reviewed all of your comments and made some changes to the proposals we shared with you during October and November last year. [https://letstalk.coventry.gov.uk/elnproposals]

Some of the proposals received wide support and we plan to introduce them without any changes. These include:

• Area-wide 20mph zone
• Toucan crossing on Albany Road and zebra crossing on Earlsdon Street close to the Co-op
• Widening the pavement outside Earlsdon Primary School with new seating and greening
• New benches
• Widening the pavement on Earlsdon Avenue South between the Elsie Jones Centre and the City Arms to provide a better pedestrian route
• Adding another West Midlands Cycle Hire dock outside the library

We listened to your feedback and as a result we will make the following changes to the original proposals. For comparison, you can see the proposals we consulted on [https://letstalk.coventry.gov.uk/26973/widgets/84449/documents/51625]. These are now superseded by the final proposals plan [https://letstalk.coventry.gov.uk/26973/widgets/84446/documents/51623].

Spencer Park area

We will not be introducing a bus gate on Spencer Road or a one-way system on Newcombe Road and Spencer Avenue. We will not be introducing a no-entry on Berkeley Road North.

Instead, we will be introducing a raised table at the junction of Spencer Road and Dalton Road and at the junction of Broadway and Belvedere Road. A raised table means the road is raised to pavement level at the entire junction. This slows down traffic and creates a safer, step-free crossing area for pedestrians.

Beechwood Avenue area

• We will not be introducing a no-entry at Warwick Avenue or Styvechale Avenue.
• We will be introducing additional traffic calming features on Beechwood Avenue instead.
• This will be a raised table at the junction of Beechwood Avenue and Warwick Avenue / Stoneleigh Avenue.
• The proposed closure at Stoneleigh Avenue junction with Kenilworth Road will now be a no-entry instead. This will enable traffic to exit onto Kenilworth Road. The roads beyond the no-entry will remain two-way for all traffic. Cycles will be exempt from the no-entry.
• We will reduce the length of proposed yellow lines on Beechwood Avenue. This will still improve visibility out of Styvechale Avenue and Warwick Avenue but will mean more parking is available between the golf club and Kenilworth Road.
• We will be installing traffic calming features along Beechwood Avenue, to reduce vehicle speeds including changes to road markings, enhancing the roundabout at Hartington Crescent, and reducing yellow lines to help with parking.

Earlsdon Street area

We will be reducing the number of proposed no-entry and one-way streets. The following streets will remain as they are now:

• Moor Street
• Providence Street
• Berkeley Road North
• Berkeley Road South

We still plan to make Warwick Street one-way, from Moor Street to Arden Street. This will enable us to create additional parking. We will also hope to add an additional West Midlands Cycle Hire dock.
We will not be installing a market gate. Instead, we will introduce a traffic order that allows the road to be closed with temporary infrastructure when needed.
We will be narrowing the junction of Moor Street and Earlsdon Street to make it more difficult for traffic to ignore the existing no-entry.
We will be adding seating and cycle parking close to the zebra crossing at Providence Street making it harder for people to park on the zig-zag markings.
The new crossing at the Co-op means we will make small changes to parking on Earlsdon Street. We will create a daytime-only taxi bay (7am-7pm), on Moor Street - replacing the double yellow lines.

Arden Street and Shaftesbury Road

We will still introduce closures on these streets, to remove through traffic between Beechwood Avenue and Earlsdon Street. Using removable bollards will ensure access can be opened on event days such as Earlsdon Festival and for emergencies or road works etc.
We will add small sections of yellow lines to create a turning area for smaller vehicles. We will not be introducing a no-entry on Arden Street at the Radcliffe Road end.

The Traffic Regulation Orders (TROs) [https://www.coventry.gov.uk/roads-highways-pavements/traffic-regulation-orders/2] have now been advertised. These are required before we can get started on some parts of the scheme. Some parts of the Earlsdon Liveable Neighbourhood plan don’t need a Traffic Regulation Order so you may see work starting on things like pavement widening and traffic islands soon.

Sign up for our newsletter for further information about the Earlsdon Liveable Neighbourhood at www.coventry.gov.uk/lnemailalerts [http://www.coventry.gov.uk/lnemailalerts]