Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Alternative idea to ease gridlock
Your front page headline ‘Where will they go?’ [Gazette, February 24], referring to the city council’s preference to plan for 17,000 new homes, could perhaps have read, ‘Where will the cars and the sewage go?’
Majority councillors imagine that by sanctioning up to 10,000 dwellings on greenfield sites to the south-east of the city they will magic up developer funding for an eastern by-pass.
The reality is that this many new houses will create more congested roads, rather than solve our current congestion. Meanwhile, there is no funded solution in sight for the incapacity of the Stour basin to cope with additional foul water drainage. Thus not even the 4,000 dwellings envisaged for completion by 2030 in Mountfield Park, still on hold, can go back onto the drawing board, let alone a further 10,000 by 2040. Since an eastern by-pass, if it will ever transpire, is probably unachievable before 2060, in the absence of central government funding, a more realistic choice for the council in revising the Local Plan is to:
■ Implement immediately more radical sustainable transport policies, entailing the dedication of one lane of the ring road where it is dual carriageway to public transport, cyclists and pedestrians; a continuous Sturry Road bus lane; a bus gate on Military Road, extra on-street parking charges for nonresidents, and workplace parking levies
■ Agree a medium term sewage treatment solution with Southern Water and the Environment Agency
■ Focus future housing supply on brownfield land, especially part-empty office blocks, vacant shops and other sites close to railway stations and major bus routes, with a total ambition of less than half the mooted 17,000 across the district
■ Use financial contributions from housing developers to fund slow, cheaper relief roads for Fordwich and Barton within seven years, instead of dreaming of a fast by-pass in the distant future. Peter R. Styles
St Augustine’s Road, Canterbury
■ It seems to me that we are ignoring an obvious solution to our traffic and park and ride problems.
We have four transport corridors into Canterbury which are hardly used at all. The railway lines to Canterbury East and West provide four spokes entering and leaving the city and, as far as I can tell, only carry two trains an hour each in each direction.
This is a serious underutilisation of expensive infrastructure. Why do we not create a light tram shuttle service on each of these spokes from park and ride areas on the outskirts of the city (we must be able to find sites that will be acceptable somewhere along them) into the two stations that we have at present.
This service could run every five minutes or so in each direction. The level crossings could be converted to traffic light controlled crossings for the shuttle whilst retaining the gate controlled access for the mainline trains.
Couple that with road pricing for HGVS entering Canterbury to encourage them along the Thanet Way if going to London and via the M20 if going to Ashford and the traffic problem might be considerably reduced. There will of course be objections and problems but I suspect most of them can be overcome without too much difficulty.
John Atkins
Amery Court, Blean