Dropped kerbs & vehicle crossovers in Macclesfield

The pavement and the kerb outside your house are not yours. They belong to the highway authority — Cheshire East Council — and driving a vehicle across a footway without a properly constructed crossover is an offence. It is also a practical problem: a footway is built for people, not for cars, so repeatedly driving over it cracks the flags, damages the kerb and can break the utility apparatus that runs underneath.

So forming a crossover needs the council's consent under section 184 of the Highways Act 1980, and the council decides both whether it is acceptable and how it is built. The considerations are road safety rather than convenience: visibility in both directions, the width and gradient of the access, proximity to a junction, a bus stop, a pedestrian crossing or a street tree, whether losing an on-street parking space is acceptable, and what is buried under the footway.

There is a second consent people frequently miss. Where the drive comes out onto a classified road — an A, B or C road — planning permission is required as well as the highway consent, because the permitted development right that covers a new access does not extend to classified roads. On an unclassified residential street the highway consent alone is usually enough. Getting that wrong is a genuinely expensive mistake.

The construction is specified by the council rather than by preference, and it is heavier than most people expect. It normally means the existing kerb line taken out and dropped kerbs and transition kerbs set on a concrete bed and haunch, the footway construction strengthened to take vehicles, the surface reinstated to the council's specification, and any statutory undertaker's apparatus — gas, water, electricity, telecoms — protected or diverted. In most cases the work has to be done by a contractor the council has approved to work in the highway.

Timescales are the thing to plan around. An application goes in, the council inspects, and there may be conditions or a request for changes. Where utilities need moving, the utility company sets its own programme, which can add months and real cost — a gas or electricity chamber sitting exactly where the crossover has to go is the single most common source of delay and expense. None of that fits into the week the blocks arrive.

It is also worth thinking about what the crossover has to serve, not just whether one is allowed. A crossover narrower than the drive means clipping the kerb every time you turn in, which damages the kerb and the edge of your drive. A crossover on a busy road wants enough room on the property to turn round rather than reverse out. And on a terraced street where the houses are built hard against the pavement — which the Macclesfield Character Assessment describes as characteristic of the town's silk-era cottages — there may simply be no frontage to drive onto, and that is a straight answer worth getting early.