Debate contribution: A20 Portaferry Road, Newtownards: Road Safety Improvements

Debate contribution by Mr Nick Mathison on 12 March 2024.

MLA

Mr Nick Mathison

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

12 March 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Adjournment

Heading

A20 Portaferry Road, Newtownards: Road Safety Improvements

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4267252

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I, too, add my thanks to Michelle McIlveen for securing this Adjournment debate today. This is an issue that anybody who has ever represented Newtownards, the Ards peninsula or the wider Strangford constituency will have had raised with them. I also thank the Minister for attending today to respond to the debate. I mentioned that anyone who has ever represented Newtownards, in particular, will be very mindful of the issues. As you leave Newtownards, heading down the Portaferry Road, there is a particularly dangerous section. Tragically, it is a section that, as was referred to, has seen fatal and serious accidents in recent years. Michelle went through those in some detail, so I will not go through each one, but I will refer specifically to the incident in 2022 when, tragically, a motorcyclist died near the entrance to Teal Rocks. That incident really reignited, at that time, the calls to look at the road safety interventions needed on that stretch of road. Unfortunately, my experience of engagement with the Department was a refusal to engage with a request for an on-site meeting at that time. I think that references were made to a live, ongoing investigation, but I felt that an on-site meeting with elected representatives to look at the topography and at what the issues were would have been very helpful at that time. Regrettably, despite that tragic loss of life and many other incidents that have been mentioned — the residents of Teal Rocks have been central to this, in that they have been very vocal with all elected representatives on the issue — until now, there has been a lack of direct action from the Department. I hope that we will see some progress on the back of this debate. I want to draw out what I see as the two most critical asks, and they have been covered already. The first is the speed limit, which needs to be reviewed urgently. As you leave Newtownards, as soon as you pass Londonderry Park, the speed limit changes to a national speed limit. To my mind, this sends a clear message to drivers, particularly to the many tourists who use the road, who do not know it and are unfamiliar with the fact that it is a really difficult road to navigate, that it is now appropriate to raise their speed. That just sends the wrong message when, in fact, they are approaching a winding, rural road, completely exposed to the coast on the other side. Also, they very quickly arrive at the junction with a large housing estate, Teal Rocks, which, as we have heard, is, due to a recent planning application, soon to become a much larger development. In my view, the speed limit is neither safe nor appropriate for the road in question. As referenced by my colleague, quite rightly, it is not necessarily the roads that are unsafe but driver behaviour. I think that every one of us has a massive responsibility, when we get behind the wheel, to drive appropriately for the conditions that we are presented with. However, I also think that the Department has a responsibility to set speed limits at a level that reasonably alerts drivers to what is an appropriate speed for the road in question. At the minute, those two things feel very out of sync, and that really needs attention. The second critical intervention, which has been covered as well, concerns the footway that runs from Teal Rocks towards Newtownards. The Department has confirmed to me in writing that the footway does not even come close to meeting current standards. There has been no attempt to suggest that it does. However, the Department has also repeatedly refused to widen it. There has also been a failure to ensure regular maintenance of that footpath where there is a lot of overgrowth from private land. It is only when elected reps remind the Department that it is overgrown, is exacerbating safety concerns and is further narrowing an already unacceptably narrow footway that the Department seems to engage. There does not seem to be routine engagement with the landowner. That means that pedestrians walking from Teal Rocks are forced to use a footway on a road with a national speed limit, and, at points, the footway is much too narrow for two people to pass, never mind pushchairs, wheelchairs or anything else. I delivered a petition in 2020. I surveyed every house in Teal Rocks, and it was unanimously agreed that the speed limit and footway needed urgent attention. What I hear from residents in that development is that, although they want to access on foot the beautiful landscape around them, Floodgates Park and a large part of the coastal path along the lough, and they want to access the facilities at Londonderry Park, they are choosing to get behind the wheel of their car for a short two-minute drive, simply because they would not ask their children to walk on that footpath. That does not seem to be acceptable to me. We are asking families to run the gauntlet every time they want to access their local facilities, and we need to try to give that the attention that it deserves. I want to pick up on a reference that was made to being a slave to policy. I think that every Member here for this debate will have had the standard response from the Department about policies on setting speed limits and how the current limit is appropriate. One aspect of that, which is repeatedly raised, is that there needs to be frontage development on both sides of the road. On one side of the road is the sea. There is never going to be frontage development in Strangford lough; it is not going to happen. We really will have entered into a parallel dimension if we start to develop that section of the coast. That does not mean that the national speed limit is appropriate. We cannot be slaves to policy. We have to look at the history of that road and what local people tell us about it. I really hope that the Minister can respond positively to what are, I think, moderate requests. None of us wants to see a further tragedy on the road. I hope that DFI has a plan to improve road safety. I reiterate my thanks to Michelle McIlveen for bringing forward this debate today.

1,074 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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