Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Plan to tackle congestion in city
Contentious £70 million plans to ease traffic in the congested city centre with a series of slip-roads on its outskirts are set for county council approval tonight.
Canterbury’s draft district transport strategy suggests diverting motorists around the city’s congestion hotspots.
It proposes four major detours – but they will only see the light of day if funding can be secured from private developers.
The scheme, a blueprint for the city council’s transport proposals, forms part of the authority’s Local Plan, which envisions 15,600 new homes in the coming years.
As revealed by the Kentish Gazette early last year, the transport strategy tables several key additions to the district’s road layout. It suggests: A £25m junction on the A2 with roads connecting New Dover Road and its park and ride to Nackington Road, with a link for buses to South Canterbury Road.
£28m link road off Sturry Hill to Broad Oak Road and Sturry Road with a bridge over the railway line.
£1m link road from the A257 at Littlebourne Road to the A28 Military Road through the Howe Barracks site.
£5m sliproad off the coastbound A2 at Wincheap and new £2m road through the Wincheap Industrial Estate, coming out on the A28 next to the Maiden’s Head pub.
£3m link road through Herne. KCC is set to approve the strategy at a meeting in Maidstone tonight.
The county authority is recommended to agree with Canterbury City Council’s assessment that cash for the roads should be sought from private companies seeking planning permission for large-scale development.
Members of the Canterbury Society, a conservation pressure group, said the transport strategy was “not well thought through”.
Dr Geoff Meaden, the society’s transport spokesman, told the Gazette: “The one thing that Canterbury suffers is congestion.
“The city council has done traffic modelling based on the proposed sites for all these new housing developments in the Local Plan, and the results are pretty horrendous.
“They’ve not looked at how the traffic might behave with the developments in different sites.
“The Canterbury Society can only approve of a strategy that has been comprehensively thought through.
“With this we simply don’t know enough because the council has not done enough.”
Simon Cook, leader of Canterbury City Council, said: “It’s important we get approval from KCC as they control some of the roads.
“It’s not as if we can come up with whatever we like and they sign it off. We’ve been working on this jointly with KCC.”