OUTRAGED residents are up in arms over plans to create a shared surface bus lane between their homes at Kingshill amid fears that mixing children and buses is too dangerous.

Despite protests from residents of North Home Road on the Beeches estate in Cirencester, it is feared the developer Berkeley Homes will plough forward with works on a bus and cycle lane access to the estate.

Neighbours Michael Jupp and Martin Phelps said their lives would be turned into a "living nightmare" and their human rights compromised if the 4.1metre wide road was completed and buses were passing all day long between their homes, just metres away from their side walls and back gardens.

Michael said local residents had never been properly consulted about the road, which used to be a pathway to allotments, by Cotswold District Council or Gloucestershire County Council.

And he said there had been no announcement that original plans for a controlled access road with rising bollards to stop vehicles other than buses using it and a separate cycle path and pavement had been scrapped by the developer in favour of a "shared surface" scheme.

"The first I knew about the changes was when they started excavating the road in May," he said.

Similar to the new Market Place scheme for Cirencester town centre, the road would be used by buses, bicycles and pedestrians, with no pavement or markings. Other vehicles would be deterred from using the access road by CCTV control with planned penalties for motorists who flout it.

"If residents had been shown the shared surface idea they would never have agreed to it – it’s dangerous to have children using the same road as buses," Michael said. "It would make much more sense for the Kingshill South buses to go in and out at the Tesco roundabout."

Works were halted on the road in the summer when it was revealed that the developer did not have approval from CDC.

Now CDC is in discussion with Gloucestershire Highways about design details submitted by the developer. No detailed approval has yet been given for the works to go ahead.

A CDC spokesman said that as the details of the bus gate were not subject to a planning application, consultation was not necessary.

However, the spokesman added: "In this instance, many hours of correspondence and meetings have been undertaken with Mr Jupp, which go far beyond the normal procedure."

Berkeley Homes refused to comment on the plans.