Traffic plan doesn’t consider all options (From Hereford Times)

Traffic plan doesn’t consider all options

2:00pm Thursday 2nd July 2009 in

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THE recently published ‘multimodal study’ for Herefordshire Council – its study of traffic options for Hereford – is plain daft, as well as incorrectly titled.

Rather than starting with an open mind, it starts by outlining only three road-based options, all of which are pretty dire.

Apparently our only options are to leave things as they are, build a bypass on the east, or build a bypass on the west. This is like offering someone with a grazed knee options of bleeding in the street, years of skin grafts or an amputation.

Quite why our respected local politicians are advocating further traffic growth as a solution – with complete disregard for their own climate change policies – is a mystery.

This, their own report, states clearly that such a bypass will at best leave traffic levels as they are today.

The additional road capacity is simply to deal with the extra traffic caused by new car-dependent housing developments – 18,000 new homes – which will pay for half the bypass. This fact is not well known, even by councillors. Hereford taxpayers are being asked to fork out for road space for the cars of people who do not even live here yet.

Evidence for the cost-effectiveness of a bypass is so flawed it is likely to be thrown out by the government.

This will be yet another example of a council leadership that cannot adapt or think outside its 1960s box.

It continues a long tradition of catastrophic errors: traffic reversals, too many supermarkets killing local trade, burying our Rotherwas Ribbon – Hereford’s Stonehenge – under concrete, the school closures debacle (did anyone resign over that one?), and now the bypass. Do they really believe their own illogical nonsense? Even their own documents contradict what they are telling the public.

Meanwhile, the public will continue to suffer the frustration of traffic problems as plans face inevitable delay and eventual cancellation.

For a fraction of the cost to taxpayers, we could significantly begin to reduce congestion in Hereford right now, with a sustainable travel plan, because we only need around a ten per cent reduction to allow traffic to flow freely. Definitely achievable.

Instead we seem determined to destroy what makes Hereford special with new roads and the resulting congestion, pollution, lower house prices near the road and ruined countryside.

Quality of life is a bigger factor than bypasses for business relocation decisions. We should be attracting higher quality, better paid employers that are less road-reliant, not those who just want to build another Birmingham.

Anyone for lower taxes, less pollution, and green business growth?

Not in Herefordshire it seems.

ROB HATTERSLEY, Park Street, Hereford