Traffic Calming Doesn’t Have to be Ugly: Making Britain’s Roads Great Again
How much is your village worth? Is it a pretty market town that people want to live in and visit? Or is it an eyesore that only locals pass through?
Let’s look at a practical example: one of our customers is a local council in the south of England. They were recently approached by an estate agent looking to build some houses nearby. Their questions were simple, but somewhat unsettling. Did the council have any plans to install traffic calming? If so, would that be cobbles, or could they specify cobbles instead of the modern yellow thermoplastic and nasty rubber?
Cobbles don’t come cheap, but Quicksetts mean we can install them in a matter of hours with zero road closure and very little mess. And unlike tarmac humps and poxy thermoplastic or rubber, cobblesetts traffic calming doesn’t need to be replaced or touched up in a few years. The advantages in terms of cost-effectiveness, longevity, and aesthetic are absolutely clear.
What this estate agent was doing was, in effect, price-testing the council. What their development was likely to cost them, and how much they’d have to pay for a nice road surface.
If your council or development will be installing traffic calming, it’s in everyone’s interest for that to be beautiful.
Nice Streets = Rising House Prices
In April 2016, the Halifax conducted a report comparing house price data in every street in Britain. They then overlaid this with an index of the physical quality of those streets. Their conclusion? “A positive correlation between higher street quality scores and higher house prices.”
Pretty obvious, isn’t it? In fact, it’s so obvious that it’s easy to overlook. And if you’re a council, it’s easy to say that your streets look nice enough. Why change?
Packed with Happy Residents = Less Wear and Tear
In fact, if you’re a council and you make your streets look nice, then they won’t just look nice. They’ll also last longer. They won’t need maintenance as often. In fact, some of that maintenance won’t be needed at all.
Because it’s well-known that in a nice place, more people choose to use public transport, to cycle, to walk. That, of course, is a good thing because of the health and environmental benefits. But it’s also good because there’s less wear and tear on the roads.
People Drive Carefully in Attractive Areas
Equally, people drive more carefully in an area that they see as nice. They do this not because they’re paranoid of scratching their alloys or mending their suspensions. They do it because they want to be good neighbours.
Speeding up and down residential streets when there’s a chance of a child appearing around the next corner isn’t a legal requirement. It’s a social contract.
Ugly Traffic Calming Instils Road Rage
It’s worth mentioning, just to hammer the point home, that the opposite is also true. Ugly traffic calming, roads in poor repair, bumpy surfaces, it all encourages motorists to be less careful. It signals to them that “well, this place doesn’t care about the roads, so why should I?”
In truth, it all adds up to a vicious cycle. We like living in a nice village, we care about our houses and roads, we want to live in a nice place. But because it’s a village, there’s limited money for maintenance. The roads look poor, new people move in and don’t care so much. Older people move out to somewhere nicer. Cycle continues. But it’s not an inevitability.
Beauty Doesn’t Have to Be Expensive
Beauty need not be expensive. Beautiful roads, traffic calming, doesn’t have to involve costly materials or outlandish designs. In fact, often the simplest things are the best. A few cobbles. A bit of traditional tarmac. A surface dressing.
Maintenance makes the difference.
All these things look cheap and cheerful as they’re being laid. But if you use quality materials and put them in with skill, they’re very, very difficult to replace.
Any builder can rip out tarmac and replace it with rubber speed humps. Any builder can fill a pothole and then leave it for three years. Then start the cycle all over again. Reputable contractors, who aren’t planning to move on in six months, will spend more time on the surface and build quality into the installation.
Material costs matter less when you’re looking at longer lifespans, so it’s all about getting the balance right. These are public spaces that affect everyone in the community. It’s not about saving 10% by hiring the cheapest supplier and using the poorest materials.
Every customer we send a quote to asks how long it takes to install, and how much disruption is involved. And we can quote almost any job we do with the guarantee that it can be done in a single overnight visit, with no road closure and minimal mess.
Quicksetts are also at the absolute cutting edge of quality control and workmanship. In fact, most of our competitors have taken the Quicksetts name and put it on inferior products. So, if you are quoted for anything other than traditional cobblestones which are set in a quick-setting compound, then beware!
Visitors Can Be Won Over by Beauty
Sure, the average motorist probably doesn’t know the difference between a speed hump made from tarmac and one made from cobbles. But the people who are most likely to come to your village are more discerning. People with disposable income, people with more choice, people with an eye for quality.
Making a village nice is not just about making your streets look good. It’s about making it a place that people want to visit, so you’re also adding to the local economy.
Need some more hard-nosed evidence? A report by The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales found that “streetscapes that are safe, walkable and pleasant to look at would provide significant economic and social benefits.” It even called for a change in EU law to allow councils to take these kinds of initiatives.
If we can demonstrate that attractive roads and streetscapes are not an optional extra, not a luxury for a nice area with lots of money, but an economic, health, and social good, then everyone wins.
We think that the case for pretty, traditional-looking roads is compelling. In fact, there’s a pretty simple test that you can do without a scientific study or years of analysis. Just ask yourself this:
“Is the village beautiful?”
If it is, well done. If it isn’t, think about how much more beautiful it could be.
The Future of Heritage Areas: Where Quicksetts Really Shine
Britain’s historic towns and villages represent a special case when it comes to traffic calming. On the one hand, it’s easy to see why they have a problem. Traffic speeds need controlling; pedestrian areas need protection; conservation areas need shielding from speeding drivers.
On the other hand, you want to preserve the character of those areas. You don’t want to mar that character with ugly, visually violent traffic calming. For years, those were the only options.
Quicksetts change the equation. Cobbled traffic calming solutions don’t just fit in better with traditional architectural styles. They actively complement them. The materials are authentic, the look is sympathetic, and the installation quality can match the buildings themselves.
In conservation areas, this is a massive advantage. Local planning authorities are typically sensitive about development that would change a street’s character, and traffic calming often falls foul of that instinct. Quicksetts help councils get around that problem. They have nothing to object to, no aesthetic grounds on which to turn down applications for traffic calming schemes. A well-designed, cobbled traffic calming project will actually enhance a street, restoring some of the historical authenticity that decades of tarmacking over may have stripped away.
The tourism benefits are a significant part of that story as well.
Heritage tourism is a key economic driver for a lot of British towns and cities, so preserving that heritage is important. Tourists don’t want to visit a heritage attraction that’s been visually compromised by modern traffic calming. Cobbled solutions maintain that feel (or even strengthen it, depending on the installation) in a way that conventional methods can’t.
Community Pride and Public Perception
Beautiful traffic calming isn’t just nice to have, it’s essential if you want to create streets that people love. Local authorities installing off-the-shelf traffic calming are basically saying to their citizens “We care about your safety, but we don’t care about your environment.” In essence, it’s an offer you can’t refuse, since no-one wants to trade speed reduction for visual degradation.
Residents accept the schemes with a mixture of grudging acceptance and outright hostility. The safety benefits are tangible, but the ugliness is not. They don’t like their street getting safety calmed, and they don’t advertise that fact when they have visitors.
Beautiful traffic calming sends a very different message: “We care about your safety and your environment, and you deserve both.” It’s an investment in the community, and a signal that the area is worth investing in. It’s an expression of local pride.
The psychological effect of that is hard to overstate. Beautiful streets create a virtuous circle. People take more care of beautiful streets. Littering becomes a crime, vandalism a sacrilege. Neighbourhoods become sources of pride.
The flipside is that ugly streets become self-fulfilling prophecies. Residents will generally do as little by way of maintenance and protection as they can get away with, since the environment doesn’t feel worth it. The more rundown a street looks, the less the community cares for it.
Jobling Pursers Vision: “Make Britain’s Roads Great Again”
Our campaign is motivated by the belief that this doesn’t have to be this way. That beautiful traffic calming is possible. That cobbled traffic calming is a viable solution for 21st-century traffic calming needs. That Quicksetts can be a game-changer for road safety and road beauty.
Britain used to have great roads. Britain used to have beautiful roads. Our historic townscapes are a reminder of that, with their carefully crafted surfaces of cobbled setts and decorative paving. Somewhere along the way, we traded all that away for cheap, quick, ugly solutions that we all came to accept as the price of modernity.
That doesn’t have to be how it is, and it shouldn’t be. Beautiful roads and safe roads are not a zero-sum game. Traffic calming doesn’t have to uglify our towns and cities. We don’t have to make trade-offs between safety and the public realm.
The arguments for making that switch are, by now, self-evident. The economic case for long-lasting quality over cheap and cheerful disposable is clear. The psychological and societal benefits of living in beautiful streets have been well-established. The technological and practical barriers that once made cobbled traffic calming impossible have long since been overcome by innovations like Quicksetts.
The fact is that if you install speed humps, a speed table, or a set of rumble strips, you’re making a choice.
You can choose ugly, cheap, visually violent solutions that will earn the resentment of everyone who has to use them, or you can choose beautiful, durable, respect-commanding installations that make streets better in every way.
At Jobling Purser, we want to see Britain’s roads become great again. We’re not just selling Quicksetts, we’re campaigning for better road safety. For a culture that takes the public realm as seriously as the built environment. For an end to the assumption that ugly traffic calming is the only option.
It’s not. We can have beautiful, cobbled traffic calming schemes, and it’s our mission to prove that to as many road authorities as possible.
