The problem

WHY HIGHWAYS APPROVAL CAUSES DELAYS?

In recent years, our industry found Highways to be one of the main reasons for delay in housing delivery. Overengineered movement infrastructures and car-led design has resulted in poor design quality environments that discourage pedestrian and cycling movement in favour of private vehicle use. However, Nottingham City, as a unitary authority, has been ahead of the kerb in pushing for innovation and people-led street design. Working towards the Manual for Streets standards since its first publication, Nottingham has just updated the New Street Design Criteria that will sit within the Area Wide City Code and which includes technical standards for streets and parking (links below). The vision for Nottingham is to deliver:

“…streets as PLACES, ecologies we share with other species. Vehicles happen to be able to circulate through these ecologies.”

“…a people-first design ethos and therefore, streets that are not designed primarily with vehicles in mind.”

“…the inclusion of cycling lanes and sustainable drainage measures from early stages in the design concept.”

But despite the guidance, criteria and technical information being offered to applicants, the authority remains battling for design quality daily, engaging in design workshops, co-design sessions and often having to re-design schemes on behalf of applicants to achieve a minimum design quality threshold and crucially, to provide a sound, future-proof infrastructure. In this article, we show the process we engaged in on three occasions and how schemes changed from the initial sketch to the granted scheme.

HIGHWAYS DELAYS AUDIT 2018-2023

There were strong trends and consistencies across all cases in the way different developers approached the design stages and in how they responded through the planning process. Although assistance - and often training - were offered to all applicants during pre-application stages, in some cases it took a long time to accept design support from the authority. Despite the design issues highlighted being so fundamental, housebuilders believed they knew their business and how to make things work. Unfortunately, in most cases, they demonstrated they knew how to deliver their standard models and how to achieve their margins, but they failed to design good placemaking and coherent neighbourhoods that could sustain resilient communities.

Six Common Design Issues

Design issues on planning submissions cause serious delays on a regular basis, and they cost authorities across the country significant time and resources. In Nottingham, we found highways design issues that are easily avoidable, are also recurrent. We show some examples below.  

1. Road Hierarchy and Radii

Proposals tend to include street networks without clear hierarchies. Road carriageway widths tend to be 6-8 metres, with all corners in a 6 metres radii. But not all streets need to be that wide. Nottingham Street Classification Guide shows carriageways varying from 6.5m to 3.6m.

2. Traffic Calming

A trend has developed over time to include wavy and gently curved roads as an attempt to soften the impact of the car across the landscape and to reduce vehicular speeds in residential areas. However, this is a highly inefficient way to design road infrastructure, one that consumes huge amounts of land, the biggest commodity in housing delivery. Road curvature does not reduce speed when carriageways and radii are wide and pose no physical obstacles to vehicles.

3. Cul-de-sacs

The use of dead ends has become a popular way to deliver quiet zones within residential areas. Unfortunately, this is an inefficient urban pattern that consumes large amounts of land. On the other hand, dead ends discourage walking and cycling, instead, they prompt further individual vehicle use. There are some benefits with dead ends (like policing), but research shows the negative consequences of cul-de-sac layouts outweigh the positives.

4.   Turning Heads

Another consequence of dead ends is the need to accommodate large turning heads to cater for waste collection, service and emergency vehicles. Large turning heads not only take up land, but also contribute to making environments less welcoming to pedestrians. Alternative design solutions are not explored enough, instead, the traditional oversized model remains favoured.

 

5. On Plot Parking

It appears that the design of on-plot parking is not fully understood. Applications often include small niche-parking spaces appearing within garden fence enclosures located at the end of rear garden boundaries. Not only this arrangement is highly inconvenient for residents, but often the parking widths do not permit car doors opening, or parking arrangements include cars parked in tandem without enough width to walk around cars, clearly an impossible parking situation.

On-plot parking spaces must be located within the enclose perimeter/boundaries and not within publicly accessible, remote areas. Inwards opening, automatic (or manual but adaptable to automatic) gates must be provided.

6.   Driveway Parking

There is a clear lack of rigour and consistency in the provision of driveway parking. Proposals ranged vastly in width and length, in most cases being oversized but at times being so narrow cars would not be able to open the doors whilst parked on their own driveway, or having three cars in tandem on spaces without space to walk around the vehicles. Overall, there were significant amounts of land wasted on driveways, particularly when layouts showed curved streets.

 
 

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WHAT CAUSES HIGHWAYS APPROVAL DELAYS?

Lack of skills on the following topics

  • Highways design and placemaking principles.

  • Site complexities, including levels, flooding, contamination, microclimates, geography, context, etc.

  • Levels implications on how the place functions and how it is perceived. Working on plan (not 3D) without consideration of heights and how places are perceived by humans.

  • Vehicular access and movement first approach: this is what we call car-led design, streets being the first consideration in giving structure to developments on the basis of vehicular movement. The correct approach is the Street Ecology ethos.

  • Technical details and how these can have major implications on place quality.

Poor attitudes found through the process

  • Disinterest and unwillingness to address issues raised by the authority. Instead, a predisposition to push proposals through in their initial form or with insignificant changes.

  • Design processes being driven by housing finance teams, who often disregard their internal design teams’ recommendations.

  • Predisposition to overlook ecosystems, biodiversity and water management and assumption to add these at a later stage.

  • Tendency to leave landscape design as a later add-on, rather than incorporating features and trees as an integral part of the design.

  • Tendency to resolve planning issues at speed but with minimal or no design changes. Planning was be perceived as a burden rather than as an opportunity to achieve better places.

  • Disregard for how residents would interact, socialise and enjoy their new neighbourhoods. Instead, a tendency to view houses as places where people drive to and neighbourhoods as sanitised, transient groups of houses.

 

HOW TO ADREESS THE ISSUE

For decades, the planning process has continued to absorb the responsibility to safeguard design quality. This has brought along a fear of change, a reluctance to pilot new models, a platform where developers and authorities are delivering poor design by “failing without trying”.

A plethora of tools have been introduced over the last few decades, from Design and Access Statements to Design Guides, from Design Review Panels to Design Code. All useful and with a role to play, but all trying to put a plaster over a major wound. If housing delivery is such a priority, then why, as a nation, we are not investing in adequate higher education courses and apprenticeships to address the main barrier to delivery: appropriate housing and neighbourhood design skills?

Developers may want to access up-skilling courses and sessions on housing design to speed yp the application process, please contact us.