Battle lines over park and ride plans

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

New battle lines have been drawn over plans for a park and ride site at Bathampton.

Bath and North East Somerset Council will step up a charm offensive over its £58 million transport improvement plans - including the Bathampton Meadows scheme - over the next week. But parish councils representing people in the area and a new action group have issued two separate campaign leaflets attacking the council's choice of site and another key plank in the Bath Transportation Package, the £16 million Bus Rapid Transit scheme.

The council is attempting to tackle a public backlash over some of its ideas at an exhibition at the Guildhall on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. It has also invited business leaders to a conference to discuss traffic congestion next week. The council says the city will grind to a halt unless drastic action is taken to tackle traffic jams which currently cost the local economy £50 million a year.

It wants to build the 1,400-space park and ride site alongside the Batheaston Bypass at Bathampton Meadows, and expand existing park and ride facilities at Lansdown, Newbridge and Odd Down. This work will create an additional 2,500 spaces. And it wants to create a new dedicated bus route running between Bathampton and Newbridge through the city centre - a scheme which would eat into gardens in Lower Weston.

A council spokesman said: "The council expects the park and ride expansion to tackle the congestion problems caused by some 27,000 people travelling in and out of Bath by car for work every day, the £50 million annual cost of traffic congestion, and predicted 14 per cent increase in ten years of cars travelling through the city during the morning rush hour. "This could result in significant additional delays at key junctions in the city centre from anything between one fifth, and over double the time spent by vehicles already."

B&NES says existing Park and Ride sites at Lansdown and Newbridge are full by midday at the very latest, with demand outstripping the supply of car park spaces. Cabinet member for transport Cllr Charles Gerrish said: "The council's aim to improve transport and the public realm is undermined by limited overall park and ride capacity.
"Workers and visitors from outside Bath, including in our own communities of Keynsham, Midsomer Norton and Radstock, and the rural villages, must have better access to their jobs and local services. In turn, this will support the place the community wants Bath to be – one where the congestion is reduced and pedestrian and cycling access is improved, with space for public transport to move. The likely alternative is gridlock in a decade if these improvements, with others like better conventional bus routes and the bus rapid transit, do not go ahead."

The council has set up web pages which explain its plans at www.bathnes.gov.uk/stopgridlock, although one map places the Bathampton scheme at Bailbrook.

But the council's arguments have cut little ice with community leaders in Bathampton, Bathford and Batheaston, who claim the meadows is the wrong place for a park and ride site. They say the floodlights at Bathampton would be seen for miles around and that B&NES should build the facility on a disused airfield at Charmy Down off the A46. Its leaflet also attacks the thinking behind the BRT scheme. In a statement, Batheaston Parish Council said: "The proposed park and ride in Bathampton Meadows would ruin a large natural meadow, green by day and dark by night, which serves as a fitting introduction to Bath's famous townscape, recognised by the United Nations as a World Heritage Site. There is a less damaging, more convenient and cheaper site available at Charmy Down, which is almost entirely invisible to the public." It says B&NES's own publicity contains misleading information about the possible cost of developing Charmy Down, and the number of cars which would use it.

It points out that five official reports have in the past rejected the meadows option.

Meanwhile, the newly-formed Save Bathampton Meadows group has issued its own leaflet and will be staging a protest outside the Guildhall at 2pm on Saturday.

Its leaflet sets out the group's ideas for sorting out congestion and says park and ride is an outdated concept.
"B&NES' own figures suggest that, in the time it takes to plan, construct and open the proposed East of Bath park and ride (approximately three years), the growth in traffic would already have exceeded any reduction in congestion that the site might bring. The council would then presumably embark on building another park and ride in three years' time? And then another? Clearly, this solution is not sustainable.
"What will the periphery of Bath look like in another 10 or 20 years' time? Outlying villages will be consumed by car parks. Within a few short-sighted years, landscape that hasn't changed for thousands of years will be lost for all future generations."

Its website is www.savebathamptonmeadows.org.uk