Working on behalf of the John Lewis Partnership, IPaD assisted with planning and the delivery of a Waitrose superstore located adjacent to the Touchwood Centre in the centre of Solihull.
IPaD provided all aspects of technical highways and drainage advice to support the planning application and subsequent S278 highways design and delivery.
The site was subject to considerable constraint, being located on a brownfield infill site previously occupied by multi-storey office with high traffic flows on surrounding streets. There were also local concerns with regards to the levels of existing congestion along Homer Road from which the site would be accessed off.
To deal with these concerns, a new movement strategy for the site was formulated by IPaD which brought together aspects of signal control to connect with the wider SCOOT traffic signal control system in operation at junctions on the adjacent ring road.
S278 works included the delivery of both a new signalised store access off Homer Road, together with a new signal’s junction at the existing Homer Road/ Herbert Street junction. Delivery of the new signalised junctions were designed to ensure effective transition of vehicle flows through the network to the existing signalised junctions on the town centre ring road, to ensure that no single part of the highways network would become overly congested.
To demonstrate this, the off-site network was modelled using the microsimulation tool VISSIM and visual representation of the model outputs were presented at stakeholder consultation events to demonstrate how the proposed network would operate and how vehicles would pass from one junction to another and to show how existing levels of congestion were likely to be reduced.
The site was subsequently approved by planning committee with unanimous approval.
