Manchester Active Mode Corridors
Project Overview
Identify and develop potential improvements for six priority corridors focused on delivering high-quality facilities for active modes and better quality places.
Primary Services
- Active and sustainable travel
- Strategic advice and planning
- Landscape design
- Traffic engineering / Highway design
- Stakeholder engagement
- GIS and Digital reporting
The Challenge
The emerging Manchester City Centre (MCC) Transport Strategy to 2040 sets a vision to be a well-connected, zero-carbon city centre at the heart of the North, with an ambition for walking and cycling to be the main ways to get around.
Sweco was commissioned to undertake a feasibility study, engage stakeholders and provide design services to identify and develop potential improvements for six priority corridors into the city centre. The schemes seek to address current challenges, support strategic ambitions and deliver a step-change in the quality of provision for walking and cycling.
The Solution
- Analyse – this first stage focussed on data capture, collation and processing followed by gap analysis and strategic understanding to adopt a research and evidence-based approach in identifying the opportunities and challenges. This involved engagement with Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) to obtain traffic signal, count and model data, and C2 Statutory Undertakers searches to understand specific risks. It also involved the collation of wider traffic, safety, asset, environmental and planning data which was mapped in a GIS database so the project team could best review and understand the data to help define the specific priorities for each corridor.
- Envision – using the analysis from the first stage the team identified a corridor-level design philosophy considering future aspirations for place and movement to align with the council’s strategic ambitions. By applying this philosophy, the team were able to generate and assess a long-list of potential options.
- Develop – building on the previous stages and using feedback from stakeholders preferred schemes were identified and engineering designs were developed to create a proposed Action Plan for each corridor.
- Assess – this stage assessed the impacts and considered delivery implications including safety, signal operation (including junction modelling where possible), user impacts, risk management strategies, costs and timescales.
Collaboration with the client team happened throughout the project including regular client meetings to provide updates on progress and discuss any risks or opportunities, and Stakeholder engagement workings took place at key milestones to help define strategic priorities and review and shape the designs.
The Result and Benefit to the Client
The key output of the work was the development of concept designs and a summary of impacts for each of the corridors demonstrating what could be achieved. In addition to technical reports and plans the team added value by producing a series of visualisations, including 3D layouts, sketch style concepts and cross-sections. A GIS-based digital summary report with interactive mapping was also produced to help the council undertake future engagement. The team used this interactive mapping to provide an end of project to presentation to members of the council and Transport for Greater Manchester.
10 out of 10. Sweco carried out the works packages with utmost professionalism and a high standard of outputs. The team which worked with us for this project has been a pleasure to work with and exceeded expectations of communication throughout and deliverables of the project.
Becky Bolam Project Lead, Manchester City Council