Tesco at Little Lever - Dossier - Point No 9

Point No 9 – Access to the site

There are three proposed points of entry to the site.

1         1)            The dedicated pedestrian only entrance from Lever Street

2.      2)     The entry to the staff car park from Victory Rd

3.      3)     The main entrance from Ainsworth Rd via Crossley Street.

The main entrance has to cater for customer vehicles, cycles and pedestrians as well as HGV delivery vehicles.

It must be noted that the Public Right of Way crosses the site between the Crossley St entrance and the Victory Rd entrance – so necessarily, pedestrians will also enter the site from the Victory Rd entrance.

There are no issues with the Lever St or Victory Rd entrances.

However Crossley St is a different matter.

There are NO details or dimensions provided with this application for the design of the Crossley Street access other than the annotation :-

“Site Access subject to Highway Engineers Design”

(See Appendix)

..................................................................................................................................

Crossley St is bordered on the left by the Tree Plot. The trees on this are protected by TPO’s which were introduced specifically to prevent development of this area at the time of the Wainhomes application.

The developers have said that they intend to widen Crossley St by taking 2 metres off the tree plot. This could probably be done without interfering with the trees.

By my own physical measurement, this would give the total width of the widened Crossley St as close to 30 feet.

Given that a safe width of pavement either side would be 6 feet, this would leave 18 feet for the carriageway – or, 9 feet for each half of the carriageway.

The width of a standard HGV is 8feet 4 inches leaving clearance of just 4 inches either side.

Even if the increased radius of the left hand side entrance could accommodate HGV’s entering without crossing the centre lines of either Ainsworth Rd or Crossley St, (and there are no calculations submitted to show this) the obvious proximity of such vehicles to pedestrians on the footpath would in my view constitute an unacceptable safety hazard.

Widening Crossley street beyond this extra two metres of the Tree Plot would involve removal of the trees and,according to the Officer’s report, the construction of the turning head would certainly involve removal of one or more trees.

This would require the following of procedures laid out in the reply to my FOI (See Appendix).

The fact that these TPO’s were introduced as a Planning Decision in order to prevent development of the land has been testified to by the then Chairman of the Planning Committee, (the then Councillor Hornby).

Since it is apparent that the tree plot has already been sold to the developer then the note at the bottom of the FOI reply does not apply and Procedure 2 must be followed. (ie Appeal to the Secretary of State)

Conclusion

Given that the Crossley St access is the most critical choke point of the whole development involving cars, vans, cycles, pedestrians and HGV’s, granting permission without the final access design addressing the above ‘width’ problem would, in my view, be being reckless with the issue of pedestrian safety.

Further to this, if removal of any of the trees is required for the purposes of constructing the access or indeed for Signage, then the issues involved in the FOI reply procedures must be investigated before planning consent can be given.