Please can you help us make Cwmbach Road a safer highway for road users and residents?

The Cwmbach Rd (B4308) between the Stradey Woods junction (opposite the old Farriers Pub) and the entrance to Stradey Castle (c.200m west of Denham Avenue) is dangerous for road users, and is frequently the site of road traffic collisions. This particularly affects residents of Cwmbach and Trimsaran, who use the road as their main highway to access Llanelli and the M4. 

The highway is dangerous for a number of reasons. It is marked with a broken centre line across its entire length, despite being too narrow in places. As a consequence, there have been several road traffic collisions where the road narrows. In many cases, vehicles have collided with the stone boundary wall, loosening the stones in the wall.

Under the Department for Transport's Traffic Signs Manual (TSM) - Chapter 5, it states that:

"2.5.9 - Where the carriageway is less than 5.5m in width, the centre line should be omitted but edged lines, where used, continued. Where edge lines are not already in use, their introduction over the length where the centre line is interrupted will help draw attention to the hazard."

The highways is less than 5.5m wide at the western end of Cwmbach Rd, and yet there are centre lines and edge markings provided. This gives road users a false impression that the road is wide enough to safely accommodate the width of two passing vehicles, which is not the case.

The Stradey Estate have notified the council that the highway is less than 5.5m in width in places, and has offered to gift (at no cost) a strip of land along the entire length of the southern edge of the Cwmbach Rd between No. 60 Cwmbach Rd and the entrance to Stradey Castle, in order for the highway to be widened, for a pavement with street lamps to be built and for the stone wall to be re-built further back from the road.

The council have advised that requests of this nature for highways infrastructure and road safety improvements make a far greater call on their resources than budgets can realistically deliver. To this end, they assess and prioritise requests by means of The Highway Infrastructure and Road Safety Prioritised List, which is periodically reviewed to consider new scheme requests like this on an exception basis in the event of changes in local circumstances. The request has been recorded - as detailed below - for inclusion in a future prioritisation review:

'B4308 - Cwmbach Road, Furnace, Llanelli: Request for footway provision and carriageway widening along Cwmbach Road - noting: landowner has indicated willingness to dedicate land along the southern curtilage of the B4308 for this purpose'

We have created this petition to allow local residents, and those that use this road, to make their road safety concerns known, and for them to support the request for this work to be included in The Highway Infrastructure and Road Safety Prioritised List. 

We also call for the speed limit along the section of Cwmbach Road between Denham Avenue and Cwmbach village to be reduced from the current 40 MPH to 30 MPH which is in line with Government Guidance for carriageways with street lights. There are several residential properties along this stretch of the road, and reducing the speed limit will make turning onto the Cwmbach Road less hazardous than it is at the current speed limit.

We hope that you will be able to support these changes to help make Cwmbach Road a safer highway for road users, whether you are a local resident, a regular commuter or a pedestrian hoping to increase connections to the nearby coastal path.

Thank you for reading our petition. We hope you will support it by adding your name to the list of people that support it. 

Thank you

Nia & Ed Mansel Lewis

Stradey Estate