Wider pavements and pop up cycle routes could form public realm changes in Wales to help with pandemic response

Wrexham, along with many other town centres, could see common areas changed to enable social distancing to help people return to use shops in a as-normal as possible manner.

The Welsh Government roadmap document published on Friday includes sector based traffic lights, including a black rating, to indicate what stage Wales is at and what type of steps could be seen for that specific change.

The ‘going shopping’ section is shown as:

We noted the “adaptations to public realm” that could be seen in town centres, and asked the First Minister if he could give some examples to the types of changes the public could see in the weeks and months to come.

We also asked who would be responsible for those changes, Welsh Government, retailers or local authorities.

The First Minister replied, “Let me just give you one example of what we mean. We know that we’re going to have to have more active travel measures in place for to enable people to get back into town centers and to take advantage of some of the things that may be possible in the future. So we have established a small fund, it’s with local authorities to allow them to make proposals to us for additional bus lanes, for pop up bicycling lanes, to widen pavement so that people can remain at a social distance from one another.”

“So when we talk about the public realm and town centers, it is about intensely practical things that will prepare for the day when people can return in large numbers to them.

“We’ve seen in other parts of the world, that when areas are opened up, and people don’t feel safe about going to them, people just don’t go. So we will want people to feel safe going back into our town centers.

“And there are some very practical things we’re doing with our local authorities now, to prepare for the day when people will be able to do that safely.”

London has created car-free streets to enable millions of journeys to be safely made on foot or by bike, with Manchester locking off areas of the city centre in similar ways and making large pedestrianisation zones.

Images have been surfacing across the UK of parking bays closed and other on street areas coned off to allow extra pedestrian usage of town centres.

No timeframes have been given for such changes to towns and cities across Wrexham, nor any information yet how it will intersect with ongoing plans to tweak and improve the public realm of Wrexham town centre.

The overall ‘roadmap’ PDF (viewable here) and includes a colour coded example list for various areas of society, it is quite possible that Wales will be on ‘red’ for one type of activities, ‘amber’ for another and still in lockdown for a third.