Bin collection and street checks

Two more checks in the Design review group of ✅ Checks: how bins get from each home to the collection vehicle, and whether each street is the right kind of street for the homes that use it. Both run on every plan, including Free.

Drawing bin stores

There are three bin store styles and a bin collection point, in two places:

• In a house type. Open the house builder and use Bin stores → + Add bin store. The store is placed clear of the front door and any drive; drag it anywhere on the Plan tab and turn it with ⟳. Every house of that type then gets one, mirrored when a house is handed, and left off a joined side where it would sit under the neighbour. On the site plan, click a house’s store in Edit mode to take it over as an object of its own for that house only — move it or delete it there and the rest of the type is unchanged.
• From the library. The Waste & Recycling category has the same three stores — timber and metal for three 240 litre wheelie bins, and a brick communal store for four 1100 litre bins — three single wheelie bins (waste, recycling and garden waste, marked W, R and G on the plan) for a home with a space for its bins but no store, and the Bin collection point, a paved pad with a marker post for where bins go out on collection day. To the checks a wheelie bin is a store of one bin: the carry starts from the nearest one to the door.

Stores draw as their model in the colour plan, and as a store symbol in sketch and DXF (layers BIN_STORE and BIN_POINT): a bay per bin and a heavy line on the door side. They go to Revit as the same library objects.

Three journeys, measured separately

Getting refuse from a home to the lorry is three different distances, moved by different people, with different figures. They are never added together.

• Door to store is only measured where a store is drawn. Without one the bins live at the house and there is nothing to carry. Flats use the nearest communal store; a house is never handed someone else’s.
• Store to collection point starts at the store, or at the front door when no store is drawn. A home on a street puts its bins out at the back of its own footway. A home on a private shared drive puts them out where the drive meets the street, measured along the drive, because collection authorities almost never send a vehicle down a private drive — unless you draw a bin collection point beside that drive, which then becomes where its homes take them. A store behind a mid-terrace home gets a note: it has no way round to the street except through the house, unless you draw a rear access footpath, joined to the rest of the path or street network, passing within about 8 m of the store, which clears it.
• Collection point to vehicle is measured from each bin collection point, and from each communal store (the crew collects from the store itself), to the kerb of the nearest street a refuse vehicle can use — not a private drive.

Street type for the homes it serves

For each stretch of street, the review counts every home whose route uses it — the way highway authorities’ design guides count, so homes on a loop are counted on the whole loop, not split between its two ends. It then reports:

• a private shared drive reached by more than five homes (six on the Compact preset);
• a street narrower than 5.5 m carrying more than about 50 homes — on the Durham preset, any estate road under 5.5 m, because Durham has asked for 5.5 m on every estate road since 2023. A street drawn with no footway is a shared surface and is not held to these widths;
• a note above about 400 homes that authorities often step a street up a type at that point, with Manual for Streets’ view that frontage access works on far busier streets;
• a note where a street wider than 6 m serves fewer than 50 homes: Manual for Streets 2 says lanes wider than 3 m are not needed on most urban streets, and width invites speed. The 50-home cut-off is ours, and the entry road is left alone.

What these checks do not claim

• The collection authority sets the real figures, and many differ: some ask for 30 m to the collection point, some say 10 m for every bin, and a few will send a vehicle down a private drive under an agreement.
• Slopes and steps on the bin route (Approved Document H asks for no more than 1:12 and three steps) need levels, which the plan does not hold.
• Passing a check is not adoption. The local design guide and the section 38 agreement are what count.