BELATED safety measures will be introduced at a dangerous Winchester junction less than a year after a pensioner was killed.

A city residents' group has accused Hampshire County Council for ignoring the threat before the fatality despite warnings by the group.

Winchester City Residents Association say action should have been taken long before the accident that killed Gladys Waite happened.

The accident prompted a review of the junction and as a result the council is now introducing a pedestrian phase on the traffic lights on the junction of St George's Street and Upper Brook Street between Jaeger and the Brooks Centre.

For the first time walkers will be clearly directed to where they can safely cross. Barriers will also be installed further along St George's Street close to where Mrs Waite, 90, of Eastgate Street, was knocked down by a bus last December.

To create room for pedestrians who use the busy junction the traffic lights will be moved a short distance back along St George's Street.

Alan Weeks, chairman of the Winchester City Residents' Association, said: "This is a significant safety improvement.

"It has taken a fatality to bring this forward which is appalling. It raises the question how much a human life is worth?"

Maurice Charrett, a friend of Mrs Waite, said he had campaigned since 2001 to have safety measures introduced at that junction. He added Hampshire County Council needed to take more seriously the chronic abuse by cars of the semi-pedestrianed part of St George's Street.

A county council spokeswoman revealed following Mrs Waite's death the junction had been looked at again. She said: "Where there is a fatality we review whether new measures are needed. It has decided they are and so this is what we are doing."

The county council had previously been reluctant to spend money on making changes to the junction because the Broadway-Friarsgate development will eventually take all the buses from that street.