Latest Herefordshire Council evidence that the ‘No Road’ option will perform better than the “Western Relief Road” .
Here for Hereford held an Open Forum on Transport Options in September 2012 at the time of the Council’s Consultation on their interim Local Transport Plan 2012-15. It was noted then that the Council’s SATURN Transport Model utilised a 2008 base year. One of the recommendations from the Forum was that there should be no further traffic modelling until the model had been updated to something less out of date. After various delays, this has now been done, and the ‘refreshed’ model was used in the latest Local Plan Core Strategy Modelling (Amey, February 2013): https://www.herefordshire.gov.uk/media/7020236/summary_report_of_core_strategy_modelling.pdf
The new Summary Report ¹ states in its first paragraph that the modelling project ‘sets the way forward for the Local Plan Core Strategy and its supporting transport strategy for Hereford‘. Study this document, to find out what the 2013 modelling project reveals, and to try to understand how a ‘transport strategy for Hereford’ can be built on a Local Plan Core Strategy for Herefordshire (2011-2031) when the only Local Transport Plan (LTP) available is one that terminates in March 2015. Former Councillor Russell B Hamilton, in a letter published in Hereford Journal 9th Oct 2013, bemoans the time it takes to get things done, but fails to acknowledge the delays that have arisen because the introduction of a proper Local Transport Plan (No.3) missed its target date, and an ‘interim’, short term plan had to be rushed through so that Herefordshire actually had a Transport Plan of some sort.
The Core Strategy Modelling in this summary report does not attempt to make sense of this mismatch in timing. Nor does it follow the specification set for it. The actual specification document (Cl. 1.1.1) states that the modelling should identify what the likely impacts on the Hereford transport network would be, were the Core Strategy to be implemented, and to determine any necessary remedial action arising from these impacts. The Summary Report of the actual modelling (Cl. 1.4) indicates that somewhere along the line a new objective had been set for it, namely ‘to test that a ‘with road’ option in 2032 [the Western Relief Road(WRR)] will deliver journey times on the new A49 WRR that are a significant improvement over journey times on the existing A49 without the WRR in 2032‘. The ‘new A49’ is an invention of doubtful provenance, given the unambiguous refusal of the Highways Agency to confirm whether or not it would adopt the Western Relief Road (WRR), if built, and de-trunk the existing A49T through Hereford, especially if the road is just running through the new housing estates proposed in the Core Strategy.
The results of the modelling show that both options (with or without the Western Relief Road in 2032) fail to deliver the key transport objectives of the Core Strategy to reduce congestion, reduce carbon, reduce noise, and encourage active travel, although on all of these, the “No-Road” option performs better than “With-Road” option. The Summary Report appears to attempt to divert attention from this conclusion by coming up with a spurious aim to confirm the obvious, that journey times on a relief road would be faster than journey times in and out Hereford. For people driving in and out of Hereford the bad news is that under either option the Core Strategy proposals result in adding at least 15mins to current journey times, even with spending over £150million on a new relief road to the West of Hereford ².
What does the Report have to say about the ‘Belmont Transport Package’? It features in the interim Local Transport Plan, and it includes the recommendation to build the A49-A465 southern section of the proposed relief road. There is no specific mention of this in the modelling Summary Report, but its overall conclusion, that the only substantial beneficiaries from a Western Relief Road are ‘through drivers’ in terms of journey times, calls into question some other claims that have been made for the proposed Western Relief Road, such that traffic congestion in Hereford will be alleviated, and the number of car journeys themselves reduced. Table 3 of the Summary Report shows that at peak times the “No Road” option actually reduces vehicles crossing the River Wye from the base year 2012, whereas the “With Road” Option actually results in a 20%-27% uplift in the number of vehicles crossing the River Wye³.
What will the Council do to acknowledge the new Summary Report findings and amend their transport strategy for Hereford accordingly? Watch this space.
¹ The full detailed transport report is not yet available on the Herefordshire Council website but requests are currently being processed so that Here for Hereford and other organisations can check the accuracy of the Summary report to the Full report.
² Table 1: page 4 – Combined direction Journey Times (minutes)
³ Table 3 page 4 – Two-way Traffic flow crossing the River Wye
