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Behind the scenes of Leeds Kirkstall Road bus project
If you live in Leeds you cannot fail to have noticed the works on Kirkstall Road – as engineers prepare for the final phase of the project, Neil Hudson got a look behind the scenes.
Officially titled the ‘A65 quality bus corridor’, the scheme has involved widening more than a mile of road to incorporate bus priority lanes heading into and out of the city.
The council is constructing the scheme with contractor Carillion after a full year of planning.
On Friday February 24, it is planned to open a newly constructed approach to the city, starting at the Willow Road junction near Viaduct Road.
The transition is likely to take place during the small hours so that, come Friday morning, commuters will be able to use the new route.
Drainage
Even so, says principal engineer Paul Russell, many probably won’t notice the change immediately.
“I can guarantee most people will be half way down the new section of road before they even realise it,” said Mr Russell, principal engineer for Leeds City Council, who have been overseeing the scheme since its inception in January 2010.
“Still,” he added. “That means we have done our job right.”
The scale of the project facing engineers has been truly immense.
By the time the scheme is completed this summer, they will have built 4km of new bus lane, 5km of new footpath and a total of 50,000sq m of new road surface.
But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Engineers have already clocked up 175,000 man hours and that will rise to 250,000 by the time the project is complete.
They have also had to lay 5km of piping (3km of which form part of an innovative drainage and water storage system and 2km for gas and water mains.)
Then there’s the 20km of underground ducts, which required almost 100 road crossings and 25km of cabling for electricity, telecoms and street lighting.
If all goes as planned, bus journey times will be cut by six minutes along the route and real-time displays will be installed in shelters.
However, for the average driver, journey times will remain much the same. So, is it worth all the commotion?
According to Mr Russell it will be.
“We got the go-ahead for this scheme in January 2010 but we have been working on it since 2006. Huge volumes of traffic come down the A65 and buses get stuck in that but they will now be able to bypass much of it and gain priority at satellite-controlled traffic lights.”
But parts of Kirkstall Road which are currently single-carriageway will become dual carriageway and from February 24, there will be a new ‘boulevard-style’ approach to the city, from the Willow Road junction, which should ease traffic flows at least a little.
Keeping traffic flowing while works have been ongoing has been a major challenge and engineers have done all they can to minimise disruption to motorists and residents, although there have been a few hiccups.
Paul said: “When we dig a night near houses, we use acoustic shielding to try to minimise noise levels. When we were digging outside ITV Yorkshire we disrupted the filming of Emmerdale – they asked us to keep the noise down. We found a solution by storing topsoil down there, which were the huge mounds people could see as they drove past, and that helped reduce sound levels.”
As the scheme nears completion, however, engineers are still working flat out to meet their deadline and so far, everything is on track and on budget.
“Where possible, we have tried to minimise costs and a lot of good ideas have come from working with the contractor, Carillion, who have great expertise.
“At one point, we had to dig out a lot of old cellars which had been left in the ground despite the old streets long since being demolished and rather than take all the waste product off site, we were able to incorporate it into the site, which was a cost saving.”
Nesting
The level of detail which has gone into the planning is astonishing, as group engineer Sean Hewitt explained: “Before we got the go ahead for the scheme, we were all hoping it would come early in the year, before March, because that is when bird nesting season starts. Had it been after that, it would have meant a six month delay as it is illegal to disturb nesting birds.”
One of the biggest jobs has been to create a complex underground water storage network to stop floodwaters running into the existing sewer network.
Mr Russell said: “At the western end of Kirkstall Road we have put two 80,000 litre storage tanks into the ground but there wasn’t room to do that at the eastern end and so what we have instead are a series of metre-wide pipes, which in total give roughly the same amount of storage and will prevent surges and release run-off slowly into the system.”
The siting of the storage tanks represented a major engineering undertaking, not least because they had to be rotated 180 degree while suspended from a crane. The whole even was captured on time-lapse photography by Steve Noble, an engineer and amateur photographer.
He said: “I was just interested in capturing the tanks going in but aside from that the images have also been used to show other engineers back in the office how it was done. I also got some images of the old cellars before they were filled in and some of a mini digger in the bottom of the hole we dug for the tanks.”
Another major undertaking was moving gas, water and electricity networks out of the Willow Street junction and onto a new grass verge.
Once the project is complete, there will be a new emphasis on public transport into the city, with First providing 18 new buses and extra journeys at peak times.
Station
The target is to increase bus passengers by nine per cent, which should, in turn mean fewer cars on the road.
Cyclists will be able to use the new bus lane and there will be 10 new controlled pedestrian crossings and eight pedestrian islands.
But the scheme will really come into its own around 2014 when the planned new railway station at Kirkstall Forge is finally opened, giving commuters from the west and north a clear route into the city using public transport.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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