Finding a good location for a station does not appear to be easy here either, you can either have a station on a main road a long walk from the nearest residential areas, or a station on quiet residential street serving a small residential estate with no provision for car park etc. The various housing estates are not connected to each other very well and there are few road crossings of the railway line to provide good links to the areas on either side. A station on Tom Benson Way would probably serve Cottam as well as is possible, but not the residential areas to the south.
Since the railway runs alongside Tom Benson way for well over a mile, your suggestion (which I've bolded) could be interpreted in a lot of different ways!
I would have thought if you want to serve the highest number of people, the most sensible place for a station would be where Blackpool Road crosses the line, which would put the station within easy walking distance of a
lot of houses (although it wouldn't really be a 'Cottam' station then
) If you wanted a car park, it would presumably mean losing a bit of Haslam Park though - I'm guessing that may be worth it if you could tempt a reasonable number of motorists to park-and-ride there rather than driving into the centre of Preston. That location has the advantage that it could serve people coming both from Cottam and from places towards Ashton along Blackpool Road.
