Council watch - is the council falling out of love with roads?
My attention was caught recently by an article in the Chronicle & Echo headlined “Several major traffic mitigation schemes in West Northamptonshire scrapped from local transport plan”1.
This interested me because I think the council should be spending money on active travel schemes and public transport rather than new roads. The reasons for this may not surprise you:
- We need to cut fossil fuel-powered miles to reduce greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere
- Petrol and diesel emissions, plus particulates from brakes and tyres (an issue for EVs too) are creating air pollution which is a serious public health issue
- Travelling by cycle or on foot, though less comfortable than the car, is not only cleaner but better for our physical and mental health
- New roads are only a temporary fix for congestion – there is a well documented phenomenon called ‘induced demand’2, which means that for various reasons a new road can actually result in more road miles travelled and therefore lead to renewed congestion within just a couple of years
I had been impressed with the decision of the Welsh Government to freeze road building and use the money saved for sustainable transport3.
One of the reasons the Welsh Future Generations Commissioner campaigned for this is the blindingly obvious fact that only people with cars benefit from new roads, therefore road building is a policy that reinforces existing inequalities. Not just because lower income, older or disabled citizens who can’t drive or can’t afford a car don’t get to roll along the new tarmac but also because more roads means more houses near roads. These are more likely to be occupied by the less well off because it’s cheaper. And then they get to breathe in more of that polluted air.
I was rather ashamed that as a car owner the inequity of road-building had never occurred to me and I suspect the same is true of some councillors and other decision makers, since they probably also sit on the comfortable side of that divide.
So I wondered whether WNC was creeping towards recognition that road building is not such a good thing after all. Sadly, looking into the story more closely I found that the headline had misled me, so my hopes were dashed*.
Reaching for a more hopeful perspective I remembered that the draft new Local Plan which was consulted on last year and the draft Climate Change Strategy both contained encouraging words on sustainable transport, for example, this extract from the Local Plan:
Policy TR1 – Sustainable transport
Development proposals should demonstrate and achieve the following sustainable travel principles: i. Prioritise pedestrian, wheeler, cyclist and public transport users ahead of car users; ii. Ensure new development is located close to or along existing strategic transport public transport corridors that can be promoted a strengthened;
Is sustainable transport where the council’s heart is? I am inclined to think not but we’ll keep watching and waiting. And of course campaigning and commenting.
Footnote and references
*The ‘scrapped schemes’ listed were:
- Bypasses for the villages of Farthinghoe and Cold Ashby. These were never in the Local Transport Plan (LTP). Calls for bypasses during the LTP consultation were rejected, and proposals for an A422 Farthinghoe traffic mitigation scheme and changes to traffic management in Cold Ashby (under the umbrella of the Town and Village Traffic Calming Programme) stayed in the LTP.
- Deferral of the Northampton Northern Orbital. The paragraph in the draft LTP about this included these words:
Northampton Northern Orbital was deferred for later study as it performed poorly in the assessment on strategic alignment and deliverability. Notably the assessment was informed by the evidence that expanded road capacity is likely to lead to increased congestion through induced demand, with no clear indication this project would improve public transport or active travel modes to mitigate negative impacts.
So not scrapped then so much as off the table from the start. Though encouragingly there is recognition of induced demand. - Deferral of junction upgrades at the Great Billing Interchange and the A45 Wootton Interchange. This is accurate.