Mini roundabout at the junction of Granville Road and St George's Avenue, Sheerness, is finally to be replaced
Published: 00:01, 31 May 2014
A mini roundabout is to be replaced with a standard give-way T-junction – nearly five years after plans for its removal were approved.
The £10,000 scheme for the junction of Granville Road and St George’s Avenue in Sheerness has been funded from Cllr Angela Harrison’s combined members’ grant from last year.
She said she has been pursuing the matter since 2005 and frequently gets complaints from residents that the mini roundabout is still there.
The Kent County and Swale councillor said: “It’s too small, it should never have been there in the first place. Some people would stop and some wouldn’t.
“It’s a mini roundabout that you can’t go round because it’s not big enough.
“I think in engineering there are fads every few years and sometimes they are useful but this caused more problems than it was supposed to sort out.”
She believes the roundabout was installed in the early 1990s when speed bumps were put in place in St George’s Avenue.
Granville Road is a one-way street with access going to, but not from, St George’s Avenue, which has traffic both ways.
Residents have received notices of the start of works which are planned for Tuesday, June 3, and Wednesday, June 4.
The changes will involve flattening the hump in the middle of the road, repainting and installing new signage.
A proposal to reinstate the T-junction was approved by the Swale Joint Transportation Board in December 2009 after Cllr Harrison raised safety concerns about visibility problems, but it was never carried forward owing to a lack of funds.
Evidence supporting the plan at the time included four crashes in which people were injured from 2006 up to the end of June 2009.
One involved a pedestrian attempting to cross the road, two were shunts as vehicles pulled out and one concerned a bus which stopped suddenly and a passenger was injured.
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Lewis Dyson