Paignton Golden Mile car ban ends

Traders still don’t think it’s enough

Traders in Paignton’s ‘Golden Mile’ will meet senior councillors this week to thrash out the latest stage in the bad-tempered saga of the street’s car ban.

Traffic is back in Torbay Road this week after a backlash from traders to a pedestrianisation trial which began last September. But the trader who led the protests against the ban says the latest solution is still a mess.

Torbay Council – then led by a Liberal Democrat/Independent coalition – consulted the public early in 2022 and found a majority who responded wanted traffic prohibited from the busy road which links the town centre to the seafront.

But when the ban was brought in for its first trial, angry business owners said it was killing trade. Dozens of them marched in the street with placards.

The second phase of the trial then allowed traffic in at the seafront end of the road but kept the top section car-free.

Traders continued to protest, and in the run-up to the local elections in May the Conservatives promised in their manifesto to be the party that let cars back in.

Now they have done just that, opening up the road to traffic from Station Square down to Queens Road, with wider pedestrian areas on the ‘sunny’ south-facing side of the street, but the traders want it to go further.

Ricc Stozzi, who runs the Stoked surfwear shop, led the protests last year, and told the BBC: “This is once again an absolute mess. We don’t have what we asked for, or what we were promised.

“We don’t have the parking back, which is what we all wanted. I appreciate what the leader of the council has done for us so far, but it’s still a complete waste of money.

“The easiest thing to have done would have been to return the road to how it was previously. There was nothing wrong with it.”

Council leader David Thomas (Con, Preston) said the latest stage of the trial had restored Hyde Road to two lanes from the single lane format which, he said, had been causing long traffic delays.

He said the current layout was a ‘hybrid’ scheme with a 20 mph limit and wide pavements down the ‘sunny’ side.

“It allows a connection from the town to the seafront which I feel was lost,” he said. “People would arrive in the town centre and the next thing they knew they would be heading out towards Clennon Valley, thinking ‘if that was Paignton, I’ll move on to the next town’.”

A final decision on pedestrianisation will be made in February, once all stages of the trial have run their course, and a meeting will be held with traders this week.

“If there are still concerns, then we are happy to have conversations,” he said. “We will look and see if there are further tweaks that can be done, to make it work for as many people as possible.

“But we will never be able to make it work 100 per cent of the time for 100 per cent of the people.”