Relief Road - But Relief for Who?

So we’ve got round to Friday and almost all the children have returned to school after the summer holidays.

Doesn’t it make a difference to the amount of traffic on the roads between 8.00 – 9.00 am and 3.30 – 4.30 pm?

I usually take my wife to work just before 8.00 am in the morning and it has been simplicity itself getting out of Manor Road on to the Cottingley New Road, but yesterday we were back to the old routine of a constant stream of nose-to-tail traffic heading in both directions along Cottingley New Road, and the only time when it was safe to join the traffic flow was when the nearby traffic lights had caused a break in the flow of traffic on this road.

There are, within a distance of approximately 1 mile, three schools. One Primary and two large Secondary Schools, and despite the fact that a lot of the Secondary age children are bussed to school, still a high proportion of children are brought to school, in cars, by their parents.

I think that the local authorities fail to plan as far as the end of their noses sometimes! Not too long ago we had a local first school, a local catholic school, two local middle schools and a local upper school. Now we have one local primary and two local secondary schools, thus it can quite easily be seen that the total number of schoolchildren, who used to be spread amongst five different sites are now being retained in only three of those sites – hence the rise in congestion at school times.

Bingley Relief Road at Cottingley Bar

Just prior to this change in education from a three tier system (First/Middle/Upper) to a two tier system (Primary/Secondary) a local relief road was built which in effect by passed Bingley. Whilst this was good for reducing through traffic in Bingley it exacerbated the problems on the surrounding roads. Traffic coming down the Aire Valley Corridor and passing through Bingley was broken up by no less than five sets of traffic lights. The situation now is that the same traffic comes speeding along the relief road, and hits an its first obstacle (in the shape of a roundabout) where the relief road rejoins the original Shipley – Bingley route, and an even greater problem once it reaches Saltaire roundabout!

Much of this traffic, which used to go through Saltaire, on its way to Bradford and beyond now turns up Cottingley New Road (B6146), even though this causes problems with the amount of traffic now using the road! No less than three mini roundabouts between Manor Road and Cottingley Moor Road have done little to help the problems of motorists trying to get out of Cottingley during rush hour!

Aerial view of Cottingley

There are still a fairly high proportion of the resident population of 4,600 in employment (despite the best endeavours of the present Labour Government and Gordon Brown in particular) and trying to get out of Cottingley during rush hour to go to work is problematical to say the least!