LLANELLI: Safer walk to school promised as missing pavement gets filled in from Monday

Children walking to Ysgol y Strade in Llanelli are getting a safer route to school, with work starting on Monday to turn a grass verge into a missing stretch of pavement.

The work at the Iscoed Road and Denham Avenue junction in Stradey begins on Monday 10 August and is expected to take around two weeks, Carmarthenshire County Council said.

Three-way temporary traffic signals will run at the junction while the verge is converted, with the council expecting minimal disruption, and letters with further details are being delivered to nearby homes and businesses this week.

The scheme fills a gap in the existing footway, closing the missing link for walkers on one of the main routes to the school.

It follows a push from Cllr Martyn Palfreman, one of the two Hengoed ward county councillors, who has two children at Ysgol y Strade himself.

In a video posted to social media from the junction, he said he was “really pleased to say that the council has listened to our requests and over the next couple of weeks they will be turning the grass verge behind me into a proper pavement”.

“It’s going to make the route to and from school much safer and it’s going to be better for pedestrians more generally in the area,” he said.

He said letters would set out when the works were being done and what residents could expect, and invited anyone with problems to get in touch with him directly.

The junction is one of two ways in and out of the Stradey Park estate. The other, via Sandy Road and Maes y Coed, has had traffic lights since they were installed as part of the estate’s development, and the junction went on to become one of Llanelli’s most persistent congestion blackspots.

New intelligent signals and a dedicated right-turn lane went live there last September after years of campaigning, though residents warned at the time that the upgrade did not go far enough, with some having called for the lights to be removed altogether.

It means both of the estate’s access roads will have traffic lights for the next fortnight, one set temporary, one permanent.

Cllr Palfreman and ward colleague Cllr Edward Skinner have kept up the argument for a wider fix since, most recently demanding further traffic improvements as a condition of Aldi’s planned supermarket on Sandy Road.

The works contact address points to the same team: queries about the footway go to sandyroad@atkinsrealis.com, the project inbox for the wider Sandy Road corridor.

The pavement work starts on Monday 10 August and is expected to finish before the new school year begins.