Through traffic must be diverted from city

This is a response to the letter from Councillors Warren and Rigby (Chronicle, August 5) and I commence with a part paragraph from my recent previous letter.

“Bath is essentially in a U-shaped valley with river, canal, railway and a road from east to west, the A4. There are a number of other heavily used roads all carrying large volumes of traffic A46, A36, A367, A431, A39. The city does not have an arterial ring road and consequently massive volumes of traffic including very heavy lorries complete with trailers with two/three rear axles are forced into the city centre. There are also no dual carriage ways in the city centre and its immediate area” (Letters, June 10).

Clearly Bath is a World Heritage City and its roads have never been constructed to take this huge volume of traffic. The key factor of this total volume of traffic is that a large portion of it is not here to service Bath’s needs. It is merely passing through to get to its destination.

Into this situation we have now got an exclusion zone (a CAZ) and the proposed Liveable Neighbourhood schemes (LNS). Both of these projects have obvious issues that need to be taken into account, especially having regard to the present capacity of our so-called main roads. Fundamentally the effect of such schemes is to make people look to find a road which is already near capacity but better than their present route. The whole area becomes unstable.

LNS create problems for disabled people, the police and ambulance and tradespeople who charge more for their trouble. Furthermore it creates unforeseen and unpredictable traffic congestion. Your proposals are likely to increase the overall total pollution and merely move the problem from one location to another. The geology, geography and its heritage status all mitigate against LNS.

There are already signs of what is to come in the Chronicle (“Residents say CAZ pushing ‘horrendous traffic’ into area”, August 5). Contrary to your letter, to properly run a CAZ system you need a professional company with a lot of equipment to monitor the results of pollution of a sizeable number of roads all at the same time. I would not ever be prepared to accept your readings.

Fundamentally the only way to start to really make a difference to the pollution problem is to stop traffic not serving Bath from coming through. That means a major civil engineering programme to put a dual carriageway ring road around the city. There would need to be an electronic automatic monitoring system 24/7 on the main road junctions of all roads linking into the ring road. With stiff penalties for breaking the rules.

I understand that you are following government suggestions and you have money from the Government to pay for LNS matters. I strongly suggest that it would be wiser to tell the Government that B&NES would prefer to use this money to enable it to stop breaking the 2010 Equality Act and discriminating against disabled people – see my letter in the Chronicle on July 15 (“Council disregards disabled people”).

David Layton

Bath