Rugby wants to extend its 11am to 4pm town centre vehicle ban to 11pm. The application has sat with Warwickshire County Council since May, with no start date.
The hours when motor vehicles are banned from the heart of Rugby town centre could nearly double, from five hours a day to twelve. Rugby Borough Council applied to Warwickshire County Council in May to change the traffic regulation order, and the application is still waiting.
That timeline appears in the town centre regeneration update, item 7 on the cabinet agenda for 8 September. It is the first published account of what happened after the council consulted on the idea last autumn.
What would change
The current order covers Sheep Street, High Street, Market Place and Chapel Street, and keeps motor vehicles out between 11am and 4pm. The council is asking for two changes:
- no motor vehicles of any kind on Market Place, Chapel Street, High Street and Sheep Street between 11am and 11pm
- planting and street furniture to close the through route from North Street to Lawrence Sheriff Street, with access kept to every property
The council’s own consultation page lists the wider area affected as Market Place, Sheep Street, High Street, Chapel Street, Little Church Street, Drury Lane, Wooll Street, Windsor Court and North Street. It gives the reasons as pedestrian and cyclist safety, support for the night time economy, parking management, the look of the town centre, air quality and climate resilience.
What people said
The council ran its consultation from 24 September to 22 October 2025. The cabinet report gives the result in one line: 96 per cent of respondents were Rugby residents, and 77 per cent were in favour of the changes.
The report does not publish the number of responses, the objections, or a breakdown by street or by business, and no fuller consultation report has been put on the council’s website.
Deliveries are still unresolved
The obvious question for the traders on those four streets is when stock arrives. The council’s consultation page acknowledges the problem without answering it, saying a strategy for delivery drivers using businesses in the area “is currently being looked into alongside Warwickshire County Council”.
No such strategy has been published. An 11pm cut-off would leave deliveries to the hours before 11am and after 11pm, unless an exemption is written into the order.
A 1947 cycling ban is being scrapped
Buried in the same report is a separate change. Council has approved revoking a 1947 byelaw that prohibits “the use of persons riding bicycles, tricycles or other similar vehicles on certain footpaths in Rugby”. Legal Services are working through the steps needed to revoke it.
The council says removing it will let the active travel network in Rugby be expanded, and will clear out routes in the byelaw that no longer exist or are already recorded as rights of way or cycle routes. The report gives no date for the revocation taking effect.
When any of this happens
Not yet, and the council has not said when. The cabinet report is explicit that the change is “subject to the application and consultation process” at Warwickshire County Council, which is the highway authority and the only body that can make the order. Neither the report nor the council’s consultation page gives an expected date.
A traffic regulation order also has its own statutory stage: the county has to advertise the proposed order and publish a period in which anyone can object, before it decides. That notice is the point at which residents and businesses get a formal say, and it is separate from the borough council’s 2025 consultation.
When we covered the town centre business workshops in August, we noted that no traffic regulation order had been advertised. That is still true. What has changed is that we now know the application went in four months ago.
What it means for you
If you drive into Market Place, High Street, Sheep Street or Chapel Street after 4pm, that is the habit this would end. Nothing changes until the county makes the order, so the current 11am to 4pm restriction is what applies today.
If you run a business on those streets, the delivery strategy is the thing to press for now, while it is still being written, rather than after the order is made. The council has set up a single contact point for town centre queries at towncentre@rugby.gov.uk.
If you cycle, the 1947 byelaw is on its way out, but it has not gone yet, and the council has not published which footpaths were covered by it.
Watch for the county’s formal notice: that is your window to object or support. We will flag it on our Rugby roadworks and travel page when it appears. For where you can leave a car in the meantime, see our guide to parking in Rugby.
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