Best practice for highway planning

Detailed guidance has been produced to help with future highway planning in the National Park.

As the most populated National Park in the UK, many towns and villages lie along the route of busy rural country roads.

For the majority of visitors and residents, it is the highway network that frames our experience of the National Park.

The guidance, prepared by Ethos Consultants, and developed in partnership with Parish Councils and Local Highway Authorities, aims to minimise the impact of traffic on the built and natural environment, prioritising walking, wheeling and cycling. It is also intended to assist Parish and Town Councils in assembling evidenced schemes that can be submitted for funding bids and highway authority work programs.

It includes a number of key recommendations:

Design principles should be considered and addressed at the initial design stage of development.
Consideration of appropriate design for the National Park should be at the forefront of thinking when developing a scheme to avoid a retrofitting approach.
Ensure design is inclusive of all users with protected characteristics.
Reduce traffic dominance through surface treatment and layout.
Where spaces need to be defined between transport users, use green infrastructure or changes in surfacing.
Simple use of street furniture, with suitable locally significant materials or timber in the first instance.
Gateway features should be the consistent approach to village entry points. These should include shared identity and be coordinated to avoid overuse of signage.
Avoid use of overly large-scale signage and bright or fluorescent colours which can urbanise and diminish the scenic value of the area.

The guidance is aimed at Local Highway Authorities, parish and town councils, and developers to refer to in placemaking, highway planning and to assist public bodies in fulfilling their s245 duty to seek to further the purposes of the National Park. Find out more here.

Find the documents below: