Transport and Infrastructure

Connecting Airedale Transport Improvements Keighley Transport Improvements (Dualling Hard Ings Road, Cavendish Street Bus Gate & Keighley Town Centre Access Improvements).

This part of the Connecting Airedale Transport Improvement project will improve access to Keighley town centre and reduce congestion within the Keighley area of Airedale.

The A650 is the spine road through the heart of Airedale. The proposed scheme is located to the north of Keighley town centre on Hard Ings Road (A650), between the Victoria Park (Bradford Road) and Skipton Road roundabouts. Although the A650 is predominantly dual carriageway in the north western part of the Airedale Masterplan area, the section of the A650 on Hard Ings Road is single carriageway. This is, therefore, a bottleneck on the Bradford District strategic highway network and road users in the Keighley area experience severe congestion. Completing this missing link was included as a priority scheme in the Transport Vision produced as part of the Leeds City Region Development Programme (November 2006) and was identified during consultation for the Airedale Masterplan and Keighley Town Centre and Rail Station Study (May 2007).

The Airedale corridor experiences high levels of commuting from the principal towns of Skipton and Keighley to Leeds and Bradford. Even with significant investment in the rail and bus networks, many people who have journeys that are difficult to make by public transport, and freight traffic, will continue to use Hard Ings Road and would continue to find it a severe bottleneck unless action is taken to reduce congestion.

The Keighley Town Centre and Rail Station Study proposed solutions to enable regeneration in what is currently a congested town centre with poor access to the rail station by bus and on foot. The emerging Local Development Framework planning policy will raise the profile of Keighley, formalising it as the location for new development. The plans detailed in the Airedale Masterplan are starting to take shape with the forthcoming opening of Park Lane College, Keighley. A new Asda supermarket will also be opening shortly close to the rail station. There is no space available to significantly increase car parking at the rail station and, as the busiest station on the Airedale line; demand for parking currently outstrips supply. Therefore, it is vital that bus and pedestrian links around the town and to the station are improved. In this context, Cavendish Street is an attractive, historic street of canopied shops linking the bus and rail stations. The Airedale Masterplan envisaged closing this link to through traffic, achieving bus and servicing only access and a more attractive avenue for pedestrians and shoppers. Restricting access to Cavendish Street is considered by many stakeholders to be part of the solution to regenerating the town centre but it will put more traffic on to the parallel A650 Hard Ings Road which thus strengthens the case for improvement to that length of road.

It is envisaged that the first year of major spend on construction will be in 2014/2015.