The other key issue which was not addressed was the issue of the speed of cars travelling along this raod. It is clearly not enough to simply have a sign indicating speed. I lived previously in another road off the Northside which was not a rat-run and I am amazed at the recklessness of drivers using Stormont Road. This is a road predominantly occupied by families. The risk to children from straying into the road is great. Even for adults, it is hard to stay in the road to e.g. remove shopping form a car without running the risk of being run over. 

It cannot be beyond the wit of us to solve the speed issue. I have been told that there were concerns regarding ambulances, etc. which prevented speed bumps being added. This cannot apply to smaller speed bumps surely. And there must be alternative traffic calming measures which could be adopted.

I hope that it does not take a serious accident or child’s death to make the council take action properly on this. 

Well, I was being a little flippant, but thank-you for the comments about the quality of the paper! As I’m sure you can imagine the council isn’t often complimented on them.

But there is a wider point in how councils consult and communicate. As you point out there was significant variation between the roads’ responses, but this isn’t the sort of thing that can be introduced in isolation. The effects will be felt in roads some distance away as drivers adapt and change their habits. In six months’ time asking the same question in the same roads may elicit a totally different response as they have seen the effects of the changes.

The art in this (and I think it is an art, rather than a science) is often as much about how you interpret the answers. You rightly point out that the roads that didn’t respond were mews houses that do not have through traffic and, therefore, don’t have the incentive for change. However, they may have (but not realise they it yet) an incentive to keep the status quo because they use certain routes. As someone cynically commented to me recently, people are very keen in traffic calming on residential roads – just not the residential roads they drive to work on. Working out what to do from a relatively small and not so clear cut response isn’t just about what people say now, but also trying to anticipate the complaints and campaigns that will arise in six months.

No great surprise there – the roads that don’t connect to the Common don’t see much rat-running traffic, and for the residents more turning restrictions are probably just a minor nuisance, albeit not one they care about much.

There’s what looks like quite a good mandate to proceed in the detailed figures, but as you note the headline figure doesn’t help a lot. I suppose to get any meaningful outcome you have to weight the responses according to who is likely to be most affected by the changes; and factor in the non-responses as ‘don’t cares’ (if you include lots of marginally affected roads, they’re likely to change the overall result – as residents would vote against it ‘just in case’ they ever happen to turn that way). Someone’s put some time into the Council paper, as the breakdown of results is very thorough – quite impressed by the level of thought that has gone into it.