The Big Picture

What to do with all the cars?

Of the districts surrounding Nottingham city, Rushcliffe has the highest percentage of car use and over 30% of households have two or more cars. These numbers probably reflect two aspects of life in Rushcliffe; first the residents are comparatively affluent and secondly parts of Rushcliffe are quite rural and a car can be the only means of transport. On the Rushcliffe ‘big picture’ website is a proposal to develop the land to the east of Gamston that includes plans to build up to 4,500 houses - based on current Rushcliffe practice this would add approximately 6,000 cars to the traffic on and around the A52. Anyone who spends the early morning or evening, for that matter, sitting in their car on the A52 will know that traffic congestion is already very high. In the five years that I have lived in the Gamston area, I have seen the traffic both increase significantly and change in pattern. For example, early morning congestion at the Wheatcroft roundabout used to be confined to the A606, but now it’s a regular feature of the A52 as well. With the addition of many thousands of extra houses, either in Gamston or in areas that have roads feeding into the A52, such as the A453, the level of congestion can only increase unless drastic action is taken. Since much of the current morning and evening traffic on the A52 is passing through rather than originating from Gamston, any improvements will have to address problems that extend well beyond either Gamston or the Clifton Bridge. Given also that 29% of CO2 emissions in the U.K. come from transportation, and mostly from private cars there are compelling reasons for reducing the amount of traffic on and around the A52.

One of the benefits of my work is that I get the opportunity to travel, quite often at the expense of other research organisations. So at the moment I am typing this blog from a hotel room in Tokyo trying to overcome the effects of jetlag. From my experience of travelling in Japan, there are aspects to life here that have some resonance with events unfolding in Rushcliffe. Probably most relevant for this blog, is the fact that no one is allowed to own a car unless they can prove they have some where to park it. The most obvious reason for this policy is that many of the minor roads in towns and cities are very narrow and so traffic would grind to a halt if they were blocked with parked cars. However, there are benefits to such a requirement – almost all households have just one car, bicycle ownership is high, and most children walk or cycle to school; this is despite the fact that many Japanese drivers see traffic lights as a challenge rather than as a mechanism for controlling flow.

So the question for Rushcliffe is ‘how do we even begin to take control of the traffic?’ One possibility might be to adopt the Japanese approach and restrict car ownership on the new development; however, that would be extremely unpopular unless some very user-friendly alternatives are proposed. Studies have shown that people are willing to walk 300-400 metres for a bus and 600-800m for a train. So ensuring new housing developments have good connectivity to public transportation is a vital part of future sustainability. Unfortunately, a close examination of what is proposed for the Gamston site reveals a serious credibility gap on the ‘public transport connectivity’ front. Admittedly, there are plans for some nice cycle paths and walkways in the direction of the City, but this is England and it’s a cold, wet January morning so what are the alternatives? Well the plans propose that a bus will run from the housing development into the City every 3-5 minutes – hopefully you’re ahead of me on this one, but 4500/50 (est. of the bus’s capacity) means that anybody at the end of the bus queue will reach work just over 6 hours after leaving home!

If the fall-back position is to try and accommodate the additional cars then the plans proposed for Gamston do indeed include a few (cosmetic!) alterations to the A52 - some of the roundabouts will be converted into ‘split-level junctions’ and the duel carriageways will be extended. However, such changes will merely deliver the traffic more quickly to the next bottleneck and nowhere is there any mention of the cost. A survey of traffic problems on the A52 (Regional Transport Office, 2004) estimated that each roundabout, Wheatcroft, Knight etc, would cost upwards of £26M to modify and that if all the improvements deemed necessary for the A52 were undertaken, the total cost would be close to £150M. Add to this the estimated cost of an additional river crossing - £102M, and it can be seen that a lot of (public!) money will have to be spent even before the first house brick is laid - and these are 2004 costs!

What is hopefully very obvious is that a sustainable solution to the additional traffic problems created by building thousands of houses to the east of Gamston is going to need more than just a few buses, cycle tracks and modified roundabouts. Catering for the needs of all the new occupants (4500 houses each with an average of 2 adults and 1.9 children) is going to take a very significant investment in either a rail or tram network. None of what has been said so far takes into account the requirements of the proposed new football stadium, but I can confidently bet that on a wet Saturday evening in January, 20,000 spectators will not be skipping along 2.8 miles of country walks to reach the City Centre.

Paul Randle, Deputy Chief Executive of Rushcliffe Borough Council, has responded to this blog post below

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