Will Welsh planning policy now take account of public transport access?
The Welsh Government appears, at last, to have acknowledged that overlooking public transport when planning new hospitals and other facilities is incompatible with its aims to reduce car dependency and carbon emissions. Rhodri Clark reports
AWELSH Government minister made a surprising admission recently: that the £370m Grange University Hospital should not have been built in a place which is so difficult to reach by public transport.
The admission may not have surprised people who have experience of travelling to the hospital without a car, ambulance or patient transport since it opened a year ago.
What is surprising is to hear a minister acknowledge that new developments should be easy to access without a car. For decades, governments have known that land-use planning has a large bearing on car dependency or, conversely, enabling people to live without a car.
The Welsh Government’s Wales Transport Strategy, published in 2008, acknowledged the problem.
“Ensuring sustainable access – especially by public transport, walking and cycling – is an integral element of planning new services and facilities,” it said. “To avoid future access problems, it is vital to consider sustainable accessibility early in the planning process.”
Twelve years later, the same Welsh Government opened a 470-bed hospital – where 3,000 people work – on a hillside east of Cwmbran. The site is remote from the town’s railway station and bus services, with no shuttle bus. Newport Transport extended its hourly Newport to Cwmbran service to the hospital, but getting there without a car from the many other communities in the catchment area is not so easy.
From Ebbw Vale, for example, the journey takes nearly two hours, using three buses or two buses and a train. For a 9am appointment, you would need to catch a bus from Ebbw Vale at 6.25am, walk from Abergavenny bus station to the railway station for the train to Cwmbran, walk from Cwmbran railway station to the bus station, then catch a bus to the hospital. The return trip would cost an adult £16, with separate bus and train tickets. The journey home is even slower – well over two hours. The AA estimates 39 minutes by car.
When Deputy Climate Change Minister Lee Waters was asked about access to the Grange recently, he said: “I think the Grange is a case study of something we need to learn really and not allow this to happen again.”
He continued: “In this instance, it’s the Welsh Government itself, it’s the NHS planning, that is to blame for creating a large trip-generating site away from public transport networks. And never again, I think, we should say that this be allowed to happen.”
He said a new bus service direct to the hospital from key centres in Blaenau Gwent, Torfaen, Caerphilly and Rhondda Cynon Taf would be launched in the next six months, “subject to funding being identified”.
The caveat reflects the near impossibility of providing good public transport to all hospitals with the limited funding available. The continuing poor accessibility of mature hospital sites suggests that the car will always be much the easiest way to reach the Grange.
For a 9am appointment at Glangwili General Hospital, a patient from Ammanford would take the 7.10am bus to Carmarthen and wait 25 minutes for a local bus. If they had a car, they could leave over an hour later. Llandudno residents have a direct bus to Ysbyty Glan Clwyd but the journey takes about 80 minutes, compared with half an hour by car. Taxis are prohibitively expensive for such distances.
Providing good bus services to out-of-town or edgeof-town hospitals is challenging because the passenger numbers are too small to justify bespoke buses. Extending existing routes will often require an additional vehicle and driver, if the service is to remain at the same frequency. Diverting services into hospitals is cheaper but imposes a time penalty on all the other passengers, making the bus less attractive for town-to-town journeys.
The are clinical reasons for centralising hospital services. Ideally large hospitals would be close to railway stations or to bus network hubs, which would also make walking or cycling an option for some of the staff, visitors and outpatients. Instead, hospital planning decisions oblige many staff, many of whom are not well paid, to devote a large proportion of their income to buying and running a car. Staff determined to avoid car commuting will choose to work elsewhere, which does not help with recruitment at Wales’ car-based hospitals.
Poor accessibility by public transport could mean that some outpatients fail to attend clinics, tests and other appointments, and relatives rationing or foregoing visits to inpatients. It is unsafe to drive after certain hospital treatments, but outpatients are more likely to risk it if the public transport alternative is slow, disjointed and expensive.
Welsh hospitals divert considerable funding into providing large areas of car parking. Abolishing hospital parking charges in 2007 tipped the balance of travel costs even further in favour of using the car. Since then, public transport fares for journeys to hospitals have increased significantly.
Hospitals are just the tip of the land-use planning iceberg. Think of all the housing estates, business parks, supermarkets and retail parks built in the last 60 years without good public transport.
If the Welsh Government really has learned the lessons of the Grange, most future facilities will cluster around public transport hubs – but only if other bodies such as councils and the NHS fall into line. The legacy of past developments, and some now under construction, will entrench car dependency and disadvantage people without cars for genera
tions to come.
I think the Grange is a case study of something we need to learn really and not allow this to happen again DEPUTY CLIMATE CHANGE MINISTER LEE WATERS