Rat runs fears of air zone charges

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Residents who live on roads that will inevitably become rat runs when drivers attempt to dodge the new clean air zone in Bath are fuming. Councillor Richard Samuel said Bath and North East Somerset Council needs a comprehensive plan for dealing with routes that will be used as diversions, potentially making the entire Bath road network “unmanageable”. The zone boundary has been altered since it was first proposed adding some new areas and removing others. Speaking at Monday’s communities, transport and environment scrutiny panel, Cllr Samuel said: “There will be high levels of diversions from drivers trying to avoid the charge. That’s going to cause problems all over the city. “It will create a lot of unhappiness. People have already worked this out for themselves. “The council has to produce plans that could stop that. It’s a major defect of what’s being put forward.” He said roads outside the proposed clean air zone - many of them narrow and packed with parked cars - will suffer “massive” and “unmanageable” displacements of vehicles trying to dodge the charge, as he would do himself. Among the streets he cited was Belgrave Crescent, where it is “impossible for any volume of traffic to go down”. “Residents there are extremely angry,” added Cllr Samuel. “That’s likely to be repeated all over the city.” He said the council needed to analyse how the displaced traffic would affect different communities at a road-by-road level. “There needs to be an effective alternative to the private car,” said Cllr Samuel. “That has to be buses. The issue is about rural communities not having access to services at all. Within the city, whole areas simply aren’t covered by the bus network. Some journeys are impossible - there’s no east-west service to the RUH.” Since the zone boundary has changed after it was first proposed some residents said they wanted to be included, others were certain they did not. The council said it wants to set a boundary that works for the Bath community. Environmental protection and licensing manager Cathryn Brown said: “We’re under no illusions about the significance of these proposals. “We recognise the impacts both positive and negative to people who live, work, commute and run businesses in bath and the wider North East Somerset area. “We need feedback from the community to get answers.”