Please sign this petition for submission to Manchester City Council to make them reverse the decision to reduce Deansgate, one of the main traffic arteries in the city, to one lane. There are a great number of reasons why this is an atrociously bad decision on the part of the Council, but the traffic congestion it has created through suffocation of the road network speaks for itself. Traffic flow in the city centre is now almost non-existent, and not just at peak times. If the Council wants to maintain Manchester as a vibrant cultural venue then it has to rethink its decision; artists will not book to perform at a venue where half the audience can actually make it to the performance! Manchester is meant to be the most important city in the UK behind London for business, but offices will soon relocate if travel becomes impossible for staff and clients. The Council has shown utter ignorance and disregard for its residents. The reasoning that it wants to push people towards the ring road is only feasible if a) it assumes people were stupid and prefer to sit in traffic instead of driving around a clear road; b) the ring road is always clear; c) the ring road will never be congested; d) people never need to access the city centre; e) people never need to turn right off Deansgate.  If a single car needs to turn right off Deansgate, under the current system, all cars behind it that need to go either ahead or right are rendered stationary also as they cannot move until the car at the front has managed to turn, which will generally only be once the lights have turned and oncoming traffic has ceased.  This means that in a  lot of cases only one car advances per traffic light cycle.

What is wrong with people using Deansgate to access the city centre, or even as a thoroughfare? Before the changes were made the traffic worked perfectly well in my opinion (I drive into the city centre for work every day). And now when I leave the office to travel home, at an off peak time, the congestion is beyond anything I have ever seen. The traffic from outside the Hilton hotel on 22 Feb 2012 was solid and stationary right back to the M602. 

This needs to be reversed. Please sign this petition and make your opinion heard.

In addition to this I have just learned that from 4th March the top end of Deansgate (the Cathedral end) will be completely shut to vehicles.  I fail to see how this can be a good thing on any level.  The 15 seconds that it saves a pedestrain crossing the road is more than outweighed by the extra 30 minutes, say, that it will take a vehicle to get from one side of the city to the other.  Nonsensical.