This week’s front page story on an accident in Station Approach highlights once again the dangerous volume of traffic in that area of town where there can be lots of pedestrians; and the need to think through a planned approach to the problem.
Rye’s Neighbourhood Plan (RNP) may be voted on in a referendum later this year, possibly coinciding with the vote on whether or not to stay in Europe, and views were being sought on the latest draft in St Mary’s Centre last Saturday by the Mayor Cllr Bernardine Fiddemore, RNP Steering Group Vice Chair Colonel Anthony Kimber, and others – with apparently around 60-70 people at least attending the exhibition.
One controversial area, inevitably, will be how traffic and people can safely share the same place; and this is highlighted daily as bigger and bigger lorries (often with trailers) coming down into town from the Udimore Road have to squeeze past the traffic island at the top of Station Approach in order to get to South Undercliff.
At the same time though, and in the same area, pedestrians arrive by bus and train to get into the town centre, while others are visiting the Post Office or supermarket, or getting to and from school. Station Approach can be a very dangerous place therefore and, while a number of by-pass options (8 or 9 I recall) were dumped in the 80s/90s, the need for one has not gone away, and indeed may have got greater.
What do you think should be done to make life easier for pedestrians around Station Approach ? and what can be done to ease our traffic problems ? Recently it took only one badly parked car on a corner by the Landgate to block a double decker bus and bring the town to a shuddering halt, and something similar happens all too often in the High Street in particular.
For example this week I was in a Rye Community Transport mini-bus edging inch by inch with great difficulty past a large Jempsons lorry making a delivery to a pub in The Mint, holding up pedestrians in either direction and with traffic rapidly building up behind it. How much longer can we ignore these problems ?