Cheltenham Civic Society has condemned the county council’s consultation on a sweeping 20mph speed limit as a “disappointing and weakly-evidenced exercise” that threatens to replicate the disastrous Boots Corner closure. The Society, a registered charity and formal planning consultee, lodged its critical response on 19 June, the very day the consultation closed, warning that Gloucestershire County Council had failed to learn from the earlier fiasco that was abandoned in January 2020.
The consultation covers proposals to blanket much of Cheltenham and surrounding parishes including Swindon Village, Leckhampton with Warden Hill, Prestbury, Charlton Kings and Up Hatherley with a default 20mph limit. Andrew Booton, the Society’s chair, said the exercise confused correlation with causation. “The consultation shows where collisions happened but provides remarkably little evidence explaining why they happened,” the Society’s submission states. “The majority of incidents identified appear to have occurred at junctions, crossing points and locations where different road users interact. Yet the Council has not demonstrated that excessive speed was the primary cause of those incidents or that a blanket 20mph limit is the most effective response.”
Over the past five years 790 road casualties have been recorded in and around Cheltenham, a quarter resulting in death or serious injury. The current scheme forms part of the Safer Roads and Community 20s programme, which has secured almost £2.8 million in funding and aims to halve deaths and serious injuries on Gloucestershire’s roads by 2032. The Council held pop-up engagement events on Cheltenham High Street on 3 June, in Montpellier Gardens on 10 June, and an online webinar the day before. If sufficient community support materialises, a formal consultation on Traffic Orders could follow in the autumn, with the first physical changes arriving during 2026/27.
The Boots Corner trial, which began in June 2018, restricted general traffic from Clarence Street and surrounding roads as part of the Cheltenham Transport Plan. The experimental orders attracted sustained criticism, not least from the Civic Society which objected to the lack of alternative routes and the temporary street furniture installed. An amended six-month trial started in June 2019, but public confidence drained away amid accusations of selective data presentation, and the whole scheme was scrapped in January 2020. Councillor Roger Whyborn, cabinet member for sustainable transport and road safety, has defended the new 20mph plan as evidence-led, but the Society insists that identifying collision hotspots is not the same as proving a town-wide limit is the right solution.
More than 150 parish councils and unparished areas have expressed interest in the programme, with Cheltenham town centre, Tuffley and Dursley prioritised for the first phase. Later phases covering other parts of Cheltenham are pencilled in for 2027 and 2028.
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