The Link Road to Nowhere

[dippyhippy]

Also Jean, if you type "Southern Link Road Preferred Route" into the search box, you should find some interesting comments about the ancient woodland.

 

Hope that helps!

[SON OF GRIDKNOCKER]

Welcome Jean to the county's liveliest political forum.

 

Many of us here on The Voice believe that the topic which you have touched on -  the fatuous £25-million City Link Road (an urban motorway just 800 metres long with, as TWG has pointed out, will have five set of traffic lights) will prove to be the final nail in the last administration's coffin. 

 

It's time for a change, but whatever your views folks, make sure you vote on 7th May.

[Ubique]

Jean , you say that you log off - I never do and it appears I am back in straight away when I revisit HV , to date I have had no problems , if an HV geek tells me I am wrong and I should log off every time then I am wrong so ignore this bit if advice.

[megilleland]

Hello Jean. As the removal of trees will be carried out if the Southern Link road is approved you may like to read the Woodland Trust take on the General election 2015.

 

Get woods and trees on the agenda.

 

Trees and woods represent relevant, practical, cost-effective and long-term solutions to many of the major challenges facing our nation. We believe aspiring MPs have a responsibility to act as stewards of trees and woods, to help protect and expand these valuable national assets for the future. They also have an opportunity to make the most of them, as policy tools.

 

We know that Jesse Norman was in favour of an eastern route (see post 15) and the IOC don't want one at all. What about the others?

[jeanharris]

Thanks Megilleland.

 

Very interesting reading. I have been to see Jesse Norman but I don't think it did a lot of good to be honest.  I know he did support the Eastern route but in the SWTP he states he is happy with the route selected as long as the land and property owners are treated with a degree a sensitivity.  I suppose you could call it that when the council don't even bother to contact you  and inform you that the road is going through your garden and they WILL be taking your land, even though the field which they are going through is 4 acres.

 

If anyone hasn't seen the video yet - log onto Hereford Visions "Out on a limb". Hope you will find this interesting.

 

Thanks for all the support we are getting, please continue to support and hopefully May 7th will see a change.

[jeanharris]

Thanks Megilleland.

 

Very interesting reading. I have been to see Jesse Norman but I don't think it did a lot of good to be honest.  I know he did support the Eastern route but in the SWTP he states he is happy with the route selected as long as the land and property owners are treated with a degree a sensitivity.  I suppose you could call it that when the council don't even bother to contact you  and inform you that the road is going through your garden and they WILL be taking your land, even though the field which they are going through is 4 acres.

 

If anyone hasn't seen the video yet - log onto Hereford Visions "Out on a limb". Hope you will find this interesting.

 

Thanks for all the support we are getting, please continue to support and hopefully May 7th will see a change.

[megilleland]

If anyone hasn't seen the video yet - log onto Hereford Visions "Out on a limb". Hope you will find this interesting.

 

Here is the link

[greenknight]

Hello Jean. As the removal of trees will be carried out if the Southern Link road is approved you may like to read the Woodland Trust take on the General election 2015.

 

Get woods and trees on the agenda.

 

Trees and woods represent relevant, practical, cost-effective and long-term solutions to many of the major challenges facing our nation. We believe aspiring MPs have a responsibility to act as stewards of trees and woods, to help protect and expand these valuable national assets for the future. They also have an opportunity to make the most of them, as policy tools.

 

We know that Jesse Norman was in favour of an eastern route (see post 15) and the IOC don't want one at all. What about the others?

 

For me this is one area of the IOC ideals which I can't support.

 

We do need a bypass and for me the Eastern Route is best.In five years time there will be more cars irrespective of local ideals we will have more houses both on the periphery of the city and within the County. Government will need to find relief to the existing national road infrastructure and the A49 will feature.On top of all this the Heads of the Valley road will eventually be dualled all the way to Abergavenny from the other side of Swansea and this will provide an attractive option for some car drivers but they will have to negotiate Hereford first. Personally I think government will eventually force this upon the County if decisions can't be made.

[dippyhippy]

Hi Green Knight.

 

John Harrington has said that IOC will look at the Eastern Crossing. It's not off the agenda!

[greenknight]

Good ..thanks Dippy

[Amanda Martin]

This is an issue on which there is more than one view within the party at the moment.  We didn't want to rule it out at this stage (well I did but I was in a minority) because it was felt that it was better to keep options open and re-assess once we had access to information that would enable us to make an informed decision.  

My own view is that we should be looking at the lesson of history which is that  increasing capacity can only ever be a short term palliative (five years max)  to the underlying problem of too much local traffic and absence of alternatives and that the financial and human cost and environmental damage massively eclipse the miniscule benefits-  I've seen motorways justified for time savings of 5 minutes on journeys for working motorists.

The point is that road building does not solve traffic problems - it never has and it never will -  and if an eastern crossing would fail to solve the problem, then there's no point building it and in doing so squander money that is desperately needed elsewhere.

 

I hope that as we start to put in place the package of measures for providing alternatives to the car, enthusiasm for this crossing will dissipate but I'm distancing myself from this from the start.  We all have to remember that the A49 and the inner ring road were once, themselves, bypasses that people thought were indispensable to keeping Hereford moving.   

[greenknight]

This is an issue on which there is more than one view within the party at the moment. We didn't want to rule it out at this stage (well I did but I was in a minority) because it was felt that it was better to keep options open and re-assess once we had access to information that would enable us to make an informed decision.

My own view is that we should be looking at the lesson of history which is that increasing capacity can only ever be a short term palliative (five years max) to the underlying problem of too much local traffic and absence of alternatives and that the financial and human cost and environmental damage massively eclipse the miniscule benefits- I've seen motorways justified for time savings of 5 minutes on journeys for working motorists.

The point is that road building does not solve traffic problems - it never has and it never will - and if an eastern crossing would fail to solve the problem, then there's no point building it and in doing so squander money that is desperately needed elsewhere.

 

I hope that as we start to put in place the package of measures for providing alternatives to the car, enthusiasm for this crossing will dissipate but I'm distancing myself from this from the start. We all have to remember that the A49 and the inner ring road were once, themselves, bypasses that people thought were indispensable to keeping Hereford moving.

 

I understand what you are saying Amanda buts it's far more complicated in my view and not about local traffic solutions in fact really what's local in terms of definition. I would not be able to live in this County if I lost my vehicle. My work is specialist and I travel 800 miles a week and not by choice I can tell you because as you get older it gets harder. Dazza for example is a healthcare professional who regularly travels out of the County.

 

The A33 Winchester bypass was once a dual carriageway before ..in the end the hold ups got too much not just for local people but for those who just wanted to get by and be gone..so after The Twyford cutting wars the M3 was built and now it's stuffed already but that's how things are that's sadly life as it is today. I would love nothing more than to either use the train or canal boat to get to work and perhaps I might just witness teleportation or routine use of hydrogen fuel cells but sadly this will happen after my death in fact this old fossils carbon footprint might even be used to drive the next generation 22nd Century Porsche!

 

I don't like the building of roads anymore than you do but the bike saddle is literally a pain in the arse as my prostate tells me so sadly it's the Dacia for me!!

[Amanda Martin]

The confused thinking on this was very evident at last week's Dinedor hustings during which Peter Sinclair-Knipe stated that roads were necessary to stimulate "jobs 'n growth".     The bulldozer brigade do not seem to see the contradiction between wanting roads to stimulate development (not that it does by the way but that's another shibboleth) and, on the other hand, wanting new roads to deal with the congestion that stimulating development has brought about.   

 

By the way, when you build roads in peripheral areas, two things happen and neither involve the creation of jobs and investment:

Firstly, there is a centralising effect as businesses rationalise their supply chain logistics.   Economic activity is sucked out and centralised.  It has happened nationally and on a pan-European and global level.  Why?  Because cheap road transport over a publicly subsidised road network means it is more cost effective to produce where wages are low and have the mother of all distribution centres in the Midlands or Belgium and truck your stuff all over the place than it is to run local centres of production and distribution, which do require keeping stock and creating jobs.   Road building actually destroys employment in peripheral areas but the LEP will promote it anyway because the suits on the board want short term solutions that will favour their own businesses.  They are more than happy to spend public money on keeping the traffic moving for a couple more years whatever the collateral damage to local economies and quality of life.   

The second thing that happens is the induced traffic effect:  in congested networks, the congestion itself serves to suppress demand for road space. Build a new road and, immediately, all that latent demand is liberated. From the day a new road opens, the traffic starts to build with induced traffic and also because suddenly people can travel further for shopping or employment and make more numerous journeys to do the same things. The time savings benefits,  which inevitably form the main benefit element in the computerised cost/benefit software used by highway engineers, are quickly cancelled out.    Meanwhile, every new road we build will skew travel behaviour further in favour of car based development and prejudice cycling and public transport and so the vicious circle goes on.   

In America, we can see the extreme effects of this dystopia manifested in degraded landscapes and impoverished urban spaces deserted by all except those who have no choice but to remain.  Streets become deserted thoroughfares: noisy, uncivil corridors of movement in which no human activity is evident - think about Edgar Street, Victoria Street, Newtown Road and Eign Street: there is nothing inherently wrong with these streetscapes but they are hostile, bleak spaces that we pass through as quickly as possible.   Car culture accelerates social polarisation and isolation and  environmental poverty with the rich isolating themselves from the consequences of their own transport choices and retreating to gated and secure enclaves.   Communities break down, crime rises, children and the elderly become prisoners in their own homes.  This is happening already.  Our transport choices have a huge impact not just on how we travel but how we live and how we interact with each other and every new road we build is another nail in this coffin.   

 

We are never going to accommodate traffic growth and logic dictates that if we can't accommodate it, then we must start to reduce it and that means turning our backs on crude "predict and provide" solutions like this eastern bypass and any other scheme emanating from the LEP and its creature, the Local Transport Body.  

[Amanda Martin]

Funny you should mention Twyford Down, Greenknight.   I knew David Croker and  Chris Gilham and walked the cutting with Joan Bakewell for Heart of the Matter and I know all about the Winchester bypass.  The destruction of Twyford Down was an abomination and a turning point.  It sparked a massive anti roads movement without which many of our towns and cities, including London, would have been ruined.  My own group fought, and stopped, the M4 Relief Road in South Wales and many of us were involved in talks at shadow ministerial level for how we would be involved in shaping transport policy should New Labour find themselves in power.   We all believed what we were being told.  We went back to our ploughs and we were shafted.   All the progress made during the Nineties by all those groups of  ordinary people, from mums in flowery dresses to little old ladies in St Johns Wood to true blue Conservative councillors like David Croker and Barbara Bryant who swore they would never vote Tory again,  was lost and now, here we are, twenty years later, still having the same tired old debates about whether it should be the red route or the blue route or the purple route and how the new latest new line through someone's garden will solve the problem.   

[greenknight]

Winchester,St.Cross was my home at a time in the 70's when you could pop down to the water meadows and scoop out European Crayfish whilst water voles vie for territory. These days the crayfish have gone and ratty is in trouble but Otters are back.

Last week I went down to Southampton via M4 and not Swindon,Marborough,Salibury because despite the increased distance I save more than five minutes though at the moment I am cutting the corner at Newbury like hundreds of other cars driving through idyllic quiet Berkshire villages just going someplace else.

It's not about cars it's about population growth and your relief road in South Wales is back on the table.

 

At weekends you can sit at my old ladies window and view across St Catherine's Hill which sits over the Twyford cutting and watch people out walking with their families,dogs and bikes though there are so many there's a queue.

 

People or bypass..it does not matter the end result is the same we are but an island and pegging back population growth well that's another topic altogether.

[greenknight]

Thanks Megilleland and well done for getting it out there..it's a start.

Thanks for allowing us into your home Jean!

 

I do question the Highways Agency numbers in relation to through traffic. Are these numbers based on a snapshot through the recession period, do they factor in local increased housing potential and business growth and or predictions of future growth based on an increased traffic on our national roads network.

 

During 2008/9 it was quite possible to drive out of the County around 6am and see very little traffic whereas now its awash with trade vans and company Audis and BMW,s.

 

The video mentions the A4440 around Worcester well this was a development done on the cheap and should have been a dual carriageway from start ..this was simply not factored in and the road was swamped which incidentally presents in some parts as a raised platform not unlike what could be achieved at Lugg...just with a little more style.

[Cloudberry]

Well done Hereford Visions for telling us what is happening to Jean and her husband, and how Southern Link road plans are being made by people who haven't got a clue.

 

It seems that remote "consultants" do "desk-based" assessments as if they were playing a computer game, remember The Sims!  They don't take the real features of the landscape and wildlife into account, or understand the real needs of local people. And the consultants and their masters don't ever have to take any responsibility for what happens as a result of such plans, do they?

[Denise Lloyd]

Same with planning applications for housing 

[Amanda Martin]

Cloudberry - no they don't.  Traffic modelling is fun.  It's a great boys' game and the people doing it are attracted to traffic lights in more ways than one.

Greenknight I agree with your point about population growth but actually it vindicates my position on this:  the more people and cars we have, the more imperative it becomes to curb traffic growth.   The reason Holland went the way it did was that it is a tiny country with limited land and a growing population.  Public transport is by far the most efficient way to travel so they made it easy - easier than driving. 

 

It's seems counter cultural to us to think of large numbers of people going about their business with bikes and on trams and buses but this is everyday routine to the Dutch. As a result, people's shopping habits change:   instead of filling up the boot every fortnight, they take their trailers and frequent small, local markets and the resulting diversity in the local centres has to be seen to be believed.   We absolutely have to pull out of this American dive and get a handle on this problem.   Building roads to stave off congestion is like trying to keep a shark away by throwing it a chicken sandwich.  

 

The Southern Link Road is the road too far.   Jean and Michael Harris are the latest in a very long line of families who have lost their homes, their land and their livelihoods to futile, pointless roads that haven't and could never scratch the surface of this massive challenge we're facing but enough is enough.  We must not allow this scheme to happen and we should tackle the problem of local journeys in Hereford before we even think about yet another bypass or crossing.  

[Jimbo]

My partner works in Worcester but because of the traffic problems in our city and also in Worcester she has to go via the M50 and M5 which is a extra 13 miles one way door to door but a good 20 minutes to half hour quicker, this city regardless of anything needs more river crossings of which an eastern one would be the most logical.

[Amanda Martin]

By the way, green knight, i'm aware that the Welsh Assembly has resurrected the M4 Relief Road and there's no-one to stop it this time round.  Our campaign was of its time: it harnessed the zeitgeist from the campaigns at Twyford Down, Newbury, Batheaston and Wanstead and it fought the road on its own flawed economic terms.

 It was an incredible time and we so nearly made a breakthrough at policy level that could have changed the course of transport planning in this country.   Ironically, had the Liberal Democrats found their electoral support then, under Ashdown's leadership, instead of in 2010, we might have seen some real progress.   The  Liberal Democrats have completely forgotten their principles and what they used to stand for and I say that as a former candidate.  

 

I don't know  whether people would have the appetite and heart to do it all now.  The way those communities came together was phenomenal but in those days we had some civil rights.  Some of those security guys were seriously brutal.  Ordinary people stood side by side with the new agers to get beaten up, run over with machinery or sent to prison for breaching injunctions  but there was a lot of tacit support from the wider public because in those days the right to protest was respected.  

[Amanda Martin]

Jimbo, it won't solve the problem - see above ! 

[Denise Lloyd]

I think this link has got a bit muddled up - a lot of what is being discussed on here is to do with the link discussing the road crossing by Jean Harris' house - I might be wrong

[Amanda Martin]

It would appear so, Denise, although the arguments are the same. 

[jeanharris]

I have been told that the proposed decision plans for the SLR have gone in as have the CPO plans for the city link road. Everything hinges now on next Thursday!!!

[Denise Lloyd]

Jean I do not think that this is for the road outside your house.  This is for the link road in Hereford from Aylestone Hill (A465) to Edgar Street (A49).  This is causing confusion amongst people.  Yes the link road in Hereford city is going ahead but the other one has still some way to go.