Time for fast track solution

I FIND it hard to understand the assertion made by Cllr Gary Purdy reported in last week’s Ashbourne News Telegraph, that there has been ‘no delay’ in establishing an Air Quality Management Area (AQMA) in parts of Ashbourne.

It is revealing to compare the timescale for this latest declaration of an AQMA with one made by the same Council at Cubley in October 2009. For Cubley, the monitoring of air quality began on October 232008, lasted less than seven months and the AQMA was declared on February 22 2010 – 16 months.

For Buxton Road Ashbourne monitoring began in late October 2017, has continued uninterrupted since then and only this month was the recommendation to declare an AQMA made – three years later.

In addition a new ‘Fast Track’ route to declaring an AQMA had been made available following the publication by Defra in April 2016 of ‘Technical Guidance 16.’ Defra have confirmed that the Derbyshire Dales District Council did not use this ‘Fast Track approach’ for Buxton Road.

Air quality monitoring has now begun in some new locations in Ashbourne and values to date in one of these are very close to or exceeding the air quality objective of 40 micrograms per cubic metre.

I do hope that council officers will at least consider the ‘Fast Track’ approach as they monitor this location over the coming months.

Peter Dobbs

Ashbourne

● AS Peter Dobbs has done, I also have long urged through your pages that something be done about severe vehicle pollution in Ashbourne. Now it has been formally recognised by the District Council may I offer a temporary solution. Stationary or slow moving traffic causes greater exhaust problems.

We can reduce pollution by measures to keep traffic moving with three simple steps:

1) By re-designating the junction of St John Street and Cockayne Avenue as a mini ‘painted’ roundabout. All traffic gives way to traffic on its right.

2) By removing the traffic lights and re-designating the junction

at Compton as a roundabout with a painted outline of the central reservation. All traffic gives way to traffic on its right.

3) By removing all plastic bollards in Compton, Dig Street and St John Street, by removing the lines that purported to increase the size of pavements and by restoring the twoway flow of traffic in Dig Street and Compton.

In short, don’t jump the lights – give them the hump instead.

Charles Swabey, Osmaston

● IT will come as no surprise to Ashbourne residents to read in your paper last week that traffic in the town centre is a dangerous source of poisonous and life-shortening nitrogen oxide.

This problem goes back years if not generations and the proposed by-pass is as far away as ever. Like her predecessor, our MP Sarah Dines utters warm words but it is clear with post-pandemic belt-tightening and the priority the current government will give to more marginal Red Wall constituencies, that any Ashbourne bypass is way down the priority list. The problem clearly comes from the number of heavy goods vehicles that thunder through the town every day.

Now more than ever is the time to give serious consideration to a heavy goods vehicle toll bypass to rid our town centre of this life-threatening pollution.

Gordon Stewart Ashbourne