Thursday 25 April 2013

Lochee Road air pollution - traffic management update

Further to the meeting I had with council environmental health and transportation officers earlier this week about air pollution concerns at Lochee Road at the Cleghorn Street/Dudhope Terrace/Rankine Street junction, the City Council's Head of Transportation has updated me as follows with regard to traffic management:

"Following on from our meeting earlier this week regarding Lochee Road and the consideration for introducing traffic signals at the junction of Lochee Road And Rankine Street in order to improve air quality in the area. It is considered that an additional set of traffic signals will introduce more delay on main road traffic flow as this will have to stop when the lights go red where as currently the Lochee Road is essentially free flow.  The interruption of traffic flow would impact on the main flow  traffic speeds and reduce air quality.  Additionally given the proximity of Cleghorn Street it would be very likely that this would also have to be signalised also and this would almost certainly reduce junction capacity further.  From an air quality and road capacity point of view I would not recommend installing traffic signals on Lochee Road at Rankine Street or Cleghorn Street. 

I have also had the UTC staff have a look at the performance of the traffic signals at Dudhope Terrace and this junction has just recently had additional loops cut to ensure vehicles are detected on approach to the junction.  The Junction does not run Vehicle Actuated (VA) during the peak times as we have certain traffic signals plans that operate during these periods.  However outwith the peaks the junction operates VA and should respond to approaching vehicles quickly depending on the traffic demand.

We will commit to monitoring the performance of this junction over an extended period to ensure that they perform as efficiently as possible to aid in air quality improvement and keep the traffic moving as smoothly as possible.  Likewise during financial year 2013/14, we will look at further restrictions / traffic management options that may assist traffic flow."

I have asked the Head of Transportation to explore other possible alterations to improve performance at both the Cleghorn Street part of the junction and opposite there at Rankine Street and he has confirmed this will be looked into.