Tonight was the latest Milton Road Liaison Forum - the local meeting which is meant to be residents' way of inputting into the CIty Deal's plans for the area.

Tonight was the official consultants response to the Residents' Association/Cycle Campaign alterations to the original proposals (known as "Do Optimum"), and I'm afraid to say I'm disappointed overall.

More detail will be available once the plans are online, but several points stood out:

• The consultants WSP, had taken the "Do Optimum" proposals as the starting point - something welcome
• THey were however critical of a number of technical details
• Cycle provisioned was worsened (eg removing two way cycling and replacing with one way) but they'd failed to realise this
• They could not explain why the modelling method they'd used seemed to say 'Dutch Style' roundabouts didn't work
• The major metric used seemed to be traffic flow - and didn't separate this out into Bus flow versus car flow
• I was unimpressed with the quality of the tree planting shown - although it was at least not tiny strip willows

Once again I pressed for trailing of some of the ideas, and I was the only Cllr on the panel to question the rush to get the proposals before the City Deal.

It did however, remind me why I was relected - someone needs to hold the Labour/Tory lead city deal to it's promises, and it clearly wasn't going to be Labour Councillors!

I'll add more detail tomorrow once the documents shown are published.  

Ian Manning

County Councillor, Chesterton Division