Development will add to city’s congestion

AS anyone who has tried to gain planning permission for work on their property will tell you, it can be refused for multiple reasons.

With this in mind, can anyone explain to me why planning permission was given to build more than 6,000 new properties at the Plasdwr site in north Cardiff, seemingly without any thought given to the extra traffic generated?

When this development was initially mooted, it was proposed that the old Taff Vale/Barry railway lines towards Creigiau would be re-opened, and thus provide a new rail link into the city centre. This appears to have been quietly dropped.

The council and developers are now saying they are going to improve public infrastructure by adding bus lanes. However, the buses still have to get through the existing bottlenecks at Llandaff village, Danescourt and Fairwater.

It is also ridiculous to say that the two new cycle paths will alleviate the problem, as it’s very unlikely to result in a huge increase of people cycling.

Besides, cycling is not really an option for most people in winter.

Finally, the council says commuters can use the nearby train station at Radyr. While it’s true that, as the crow flies, Radyr station is very close, what seems to be forgotten is that there is a huge hill between most of what will be Plasdwr and the village of Radyr.

The result of this is that most of the people who will use Radyr station will commute to the station in their cars, resulting in even more congestion in an already congested village.

To sum up, it looks like we are going to end up with another 6,000 cars trying to commute on an already congested road system.

Surely this issue should have been the first thing that the planners should have tackled? Michael Holcombe Cardiff