The Winchester Area Local Plan - Trust Annual Report 1983
The following is an abbreviated version of the Trust's comments submitted to the City Council last July.
In the Brooks Hampshire Record Office
The Aim of the Plan
The aim of the Plan should be to improve both the environment and the economic activity of Winchester. The draft Plan assumes, unnecessarily, that these joint aims are mutually antagonistic.
The City's Problems
Working Party discussions revealed no evident need for urgent action. No evidence exists that economic activity is falling behind that in comparable centres, that traffic delays are worse or that development in Winchester has been unduly restricted. There is time to plan sensibly and soberly for problems that may arise if current trends continue.
The most worrying trend is the apparent desire of people to move to an increasingly inefficient means of transport, i.e., more traffic with fewer people.
The draft Plan casually acknowledges this fact without attempting to elicit its significance.
We believe that there is not only a choice of principle regarding traffic problems, but three possible strategies.
The Choice of Principle
The choice is whether one adjusts Winchester to suit the demands of traffic or adjusts (restrains) the traffic to meet the environmental demands of Winchester. We believe the draft Plan is a clear choice of the former.
The Planners argue that widening North Walls would be environmentally beneficial. This is a question of subjective judgment on which members of the public clearly gave their view in 1979. On offer are reduced traffic in St. George's Street, Jewry Street and High Street, in exchange for demolishing a potentially attractive street, severing the north of the City from the south, imposing sizeable increases in traffic on several other roads and burdening Winchester with all the nastiness of a modern dual carriageway.
We believe that the benefits are trivial compared with the costs, and that representing the scheme as an environmental improvement in North Walls itself is preposterous.
Strategies
I. Highway and Parking Improvement. An historic city has very little room for acceptable roadbuilding, so any increased access can only be small, while relief of congestion is at best partial, and the cost in townscape is usually severe. The strategy is anti-conservation in principle.
More importantly it is self-defeating. If capacity is increased to cater for expected 'natural' growth (that is, growth of traffic, without corresponding growth in activity) this will lead to a system with greater access but as much congestion as the 'improvement' sought to relieve. Roadbuilding assists natural growth by encouraging increased use of inefficient means of transport and the type of activity that uses personal motorised transport. Increasing highway capacity defers the problem without solving it, and in the end large costs will have been incurred without lasting benefit. The Trust asks "Where is there an example of an historic town having solved its internal traffic problems by roadbuilding?"
II. Adapting to Congestion/Restraint. This option recognises sooner rather than later that highway and parking space must be restricted in an historic environment and accepts now the limits to Winchester's economic potential. Artificial restraint can limit traffic levels below those of 'congested equilibrium' and business activity would be expected to reach a limit commensurate with the imposed access level, though some extra improvement may be expected through evolution to a less car-dependent activity.
III. Improvement of Transport Efficiency. Whatever the relationship connecting access and economic activity, it is the access of people that is most important. The third option (the alternative strategy of the draft Plan) seeks to extend the successful High Street pedestrianisation (which works as a Park and Walk scheme) to a substantially larger area using a Park and Ride element. Only this option allows the objectives of Conservation and Activity to be simultaneously pursued.
Comparison of Strategies
Effectiveness
Ultimately all roadbuilding in towns becomes ineffective, but the proposals for Winchester offer little even in the short term. A proper inner ring road to service the shopping centre and conserve the historic core might produce a short term gain, but the Trust considers the cost to the rest of Winchester too great a price to pay. The Planners, too, rejected the old three-quarter ring road, but what they rejected in its entirety is the only logical consequence of what they propose incrementally. The North Walls scheme puts immediate pressures on other links which will eventually require further roadbuilding. The Easton Lane Link Road, designed to increase access, fails significantly because the major desire for access is from the south. It fails to relieve the southern approaches and funnels extra traffic through the Winnall residential estate.
The effectiveness of the restraint option cannot really be doubted. The effectiveness of Park and Ride is more uncertain because such systems are relatively new and untried. There are, however, no examples to our knowledge of relevant systems that have failed completely. The Trust believes that the reasons given in the draft Plan for rejecting the alternative strategy are contrived and mis¬leading. It is nonsense to suggest that Park and Ride presents special problems for the College area, that it will lead to major roadbuilding in the centre or that it would blight North Walls.
Reversibility
Uncertainty of the effects of planning proposals requires as much or more weight to be given to the reversibility of any proposed policy as to forecasts of potential costs and benefits.
The restraint option, working incrementally, is almost certainly reversible, while the favoured roadbuilding option most certainly is not. There would be few problems of physical reversibility with Park and Ride, at least at the end of an experimental period.
Costs
That the draft Plan compares strategies without any attempt to assess the costs is in our view irresponsible. In any Public Inquiry into options for Winchester an Inspector will examine the costs and benefits to society, and is unlikely to be influenced by whether those costs are borne by District, County or the State.
Conclusion
There are only two options which the City can responsibly take and neither has been chosen by the Planners. The Trust is opposed to the main proposals of this draft Plan and has asked for them to be reconsidered.
We believe that the treatment of alternative strategies has been superficial and misleading. It is absolutely essential to commission a full study of all the options, because the whole future of Winchester is at stake. In any case a Public Inquiry would need to know why such a study was not made.
Winchester could be a thoroughly delightful City, and an example to the rest of the world ; the strategy presently contemplated, which preserves an historic core in an increasingly nasty setting, is one of prolonged confrontation and blight.