Newsletter March 1998

CATTLE MARKET LEISURE CENTRE MORE TRAFFIC CHAOS ?

Turnstone, a development company that has already built the Clifton Road commercial estate off Cherry Hinton Road. has been negotiating with the City Council to build a huge leisure development on the neighbouring Cattle Market site. They expect to put forward a planning application in the spring. In the meantime, they have held a small exhibition of their plans. These incorporate the Junction in the centre of a set of other buildings, a multiplex cinema, a bowling alley, two restaurants, a hotel, a few small shops, a video game arcade 28 dwellings and a multi-storey car park for 800 cars. There are also several hundred outdoor car parking spaces on the site. Cambridge doesn’t have many facilities like this, and if it does not go ahead, the chances are that a more damaging development would be built on the edge of town, only accessible by car. On the other hand, housing is the biggest need, and to allow a big area like this without some arrangements for significant amounts of housing related to it would be a mistake. The developers argue that they have taken on board the need to attract people to the site other than by car. Yet, the site is laid out wholly with cars in mind- it has some interesting architectural proposals, but the layout is very people unfriendly. They know exactly how many car parking spaces they want and how to make them pay when they are not used so heavily during the day. Yet they can’t say how many cycle parking spaces here should be, do not have a bus station, have not made arrangements with bus operators to service the site. and have only tentatively talked to Railtrack and WAGN about access to the station. Also they have not offered anything at all around the site to limit or compensate for the increased traffic (especially in the evening). For example. there is no proposal to get cyclists safely across the Clifton Road junction. No doubt the Park & Ride site (which will move to Babraham Road beyond Addenbrookes some time soon) will demand bus priority measures on Hills Road, and the development should be part funding these.

Dave Earl

Please look out for the planning application, due in late spring, and make your views known to the City Councils Planning Department.

COLDHAMS LANE MCDONALDS DRIVE THRU

It’s not too late to make. your objection! Decision on 1 April! The City Council’s Planning Sub-Committee has deferred consideration of this application several times no doubt you will remember my request before Christmas to members living in Cambridge, to send in objections. In the meantime, representatives of McDonalds, the City Council Planning Department and the County Council’s Environment and Transport Department have been talking. The potential traffic increase which would be caused by siting this development, whose raison d’etre is the convenience of motorists,. on a very congested main road is clear to every-one. However, there is an existing planning permission for a hot food takeaway for the site, so the only way McDonalds’ plans can be stopped is by showing that the Drive Thru would create even more traffic than the existing permission. To me, this seems common sense, as a Drive Thru is not intended to serve anyone other than motorists. How-ever, we should not be complacent, McDonalds are in discussion with the County Council about providing cycle parking spaces and making a contribution to the sorely-needed widening of nearby Coldham’s Lane rail-way bridge, in order to accommodate cycle lanes. And the County Council hopes that this could be the start of an ambitious new cycle route linking Coldham’s Lane with a new cycle bridge over the river, via Coral Park industrial estate and the gasworks site, both the subject of current planning applications. Much as Cambridge FOE supports the continued development of cycle facilities, we do not want these if they can only be provided with financial contributions from developers who are building yet more traffic-generating developments. So, I would urge you to write once more to the City Councils Planning Sub-Commitee, stating that you object to the proposed McDonalds Drive Thru, principally because of the extra traffic, and hence also the air pollution which it will cause. There are also problems of land contamination and drainage at the site You should quote reference numbers: c/97/0704/FP and C/97/0810/FP in your correspondance.

NEW SETTLEMENT ON THE A10

Another proposal has been made for a new settlement between Cambridge and Ely this time near Stretham. Although there have been a number of previous similar applications,. we had hoped that the current Structure Plan. which rules out any new settlement in this area would put an end to these. We have made a brief objection in principle. and Elizabeth Morris is working on a more detailed submission.

OTHER SITES

Dave Earl writes above about the leisure and mixed development proposed for the Cattle Market site. A new application has been made for office development on part of the Fulbourn Hospital site. This follows a previous application which was turned down. We feel that this area is being saturated with traffic-creating developments (Tescos the new business park being constructed on Fulbourn Road) and intend to object. We have heard rumours that the plans for a supermarket (Waitrose) at Anstey Hall in Trumpington have been called in by the Secretary of State. The City Council decided to grant permission for this last Autumn. Following this we and many others lobbied for it to be called in by the Secretary of State under the Town and County Planning (Shopping Development) (No 2) Directions 1993. under which a call may be made. If this happens, there will be a public inquiry into this proposed development. The planning inspector considering the proposed housing in Glebe Road has come to a decision. This is a relatively small site, zoned in the Local Plan for housing, but an important point of principle was at stake. The Local Plan requires developers of sites over I hectare to make some provision for social housing, whereas the relevant government circular only requires such provision on sites of over 2 hectares (shortly to be reduced to I hectare). Given the tremendous need for affordable housing in Cambridge rather than in the surroundings villages, to minimize in-ward commuting, we wrote to the Council in support of its requirement that the developers (the Perse School) should provide some social housing. The inspector ruled that the government circular should prevail over the Local Plan, so that there is no need for social housing to be provided. We have been advised by the County Council that Anti-Waste. the company hoping to build what has been described as Europe’s second biggest landfill site at Kennett, to which we had objected. has withdrawn’ its application. although it is still proceeding with a much smaller application for the centre of the site. Those readers who are more computer literate than your Campaigns Co-ordinator may be interested to know that Cambridge City Council is now publishing its weekly planning lists on the lnternet at:

http://www.cambridge.gov.uk/planapps.htm

BUS CUTS - AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW

Cambridgeshire County Council has cut a quarter of its subsidies for bus services in the County, amounting to. £220,000 (see Bus Cuts - The Implications Page 5). Money is very tight at the County (so what’s new?). The increasing population of Cambridgeshire without a commensurate increase in central Government funding, the large increases in waste disposal costs (more people are throwing more away - itself an environmental problem), and a disastrous year in social services means the Council is very short of funds. I think it is unfortunate that the Council has made these cuts - it sends a bad signal so far as public transport is concerned. But, I pose a controversial viewpoint: was this money actually achieving anything for public transport? Do these services help the environment? I argue that no, they don’t. The services the County funds are by definition the unprofitable routes. They are subsidised to the extent of about £4 per passenger per journey - about 3 or 4 times a typical fare paid by the passenger. They provide a connection for people who have no other choice, and are therefore a social loss. But environmentally, I argue that the services do not help. The services are far too infrequent to be of interest to any but those who cannot make alternative arrangements, and the numbers using them demonstrate this - many services carry less than a handful of people. I have travelled on the daytime buses from Cambridge to Barrington and late night buses from Cambridge to Fulbourn when I have often been the only passenger. This often on 70 seater double-deckers, which we all know are less than adequately maintained and produce significantly more pollution than a private car. (It also takes three times as long as a car would, and twice as long as on my bike, my usual journey). If we want to make real inroads into the traffic problem (and the consequent environmental impact), subsidising rural services is just not the way to do it. The biggest gain would be on addressing commuter services properly. Now, the money cut is being lost from public transport altogether. But I think what there is, is being spread too thinly to have any environmental gain at all. Indeed I don’t think that is the aim; the aim is social, not environmental. Environmentally beneficial public transport subsidies are not possible under present legislation. This is because although not many people use them, enough do to make the existing services profitable. The law does not allow subsidy of profitable services. The council’s contribution can then be only in terms of infrastructure, such as the bus priority system now being installed on the Newmarket Road. Buses are not attractive to commuters for many reasons, among them the cost, which is outrageous when compared to the marginal cost of a car (especially for more than one person); the relative discomfort; and the hopelessly inadequate frequencies. I think there is a critical mass when buses become viable. At half-hour frequencies. buses will be used by some. but won’t be popular. But if the frequency can be got up to about 12 minutes (certainly not more than 15), then it is a much more attractive prospect for commuters. At that level of service, you don’t have to worry much about the actual times, or a bus being late or not turning up at all. It can work like the London Underground where you just wait for the next available vehicle. Also, at this frequency it becomes viable to change buses. Of course, one should be able to buy zoned or transfer tickets that don’t penalise you if you have to use two buses for your journey, since short journeys charge much higher fares than long ones. Secondly, services must run into the evening. Cambridge has a flexible working population which doesn't work just from 9 - 5. If the last (regular) bus is about 6 (and for most services this is the case), then you immediately cut out a large part of your potential users. I feel very strongly that tinkering with minor changes to the bus system in Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire will not have any effect whatsoever on reducing car use. Only an order of magnitude change in frequency, fares and ticketing systems would attract people who do have an alternative to use them - and that would have to be accompanied by big increases in car costs and restrictions on private car use. For 85% of South Cambridgeshire’s population, buses are an irrelevance: they effectively have no idea that some bus services exist, and do not care. Campaigning for a connecting service at Kennet on a Sunday afternoon is a total waste of our valuable time in this context. In the mean time, those who don’t have an alternative pay through the nose for a wholly inadequate and shabby service. The private bus operators in our area, principally Stagecoach Cambus have failed us. It’s not just their fault, though their failure to learn from European and American ways of running effective bus services is shameful. The legislative framework has also failed us (indeed, I believe it was intended to promote cars and reduce public transport as part of Thatcher’s Great Car Economy in 1985). If limited public money is to be spent on buses for environmental reasons (your money - you effectively pay me £4 each time I choose to go to work on the bus), I think it should be spread much less thinly. If it is spent on making one route a super route, with very frequent, extended, cheaper services, with proper information systems and bus priority, this would have far more impact than re-routing the only number 37 for two hours either way, or adding a special Thursday evening only bus from Little Plodding to Bassington. So as an environmental group, I think we are wasting our time trying to defend subsidised rural bus services, indeed we may be harming the environment by doing so. We would be better employed doing other things.

Dave Earl

BUS CUTS - THE IMPLICATIONS

Our County Council in its wisdom has decided that although it is spending more than ten times as much in maintaining roads than in maintaining bus services. It is the latter which has to bear the brunt of the cuts, to the tune of about 24%. This will place in jeopardy 30-40 contracts. The hit list, based on those services which on the Council’s (rather arbitrary) measure they consider most expensive, are of all types, from evening and Sunday inter-urban services to journeys providing essential links to work, school and shops, from major inter-urban routes to deep rural services. In some cases we believe that the Council can secure savings by efficiency measures, such as tighter timings for evening buses, better use of school buses and provision of rail/bus connections. We have in fact been arguing for such measures for longer than we can remember But there is no question that such measures can possibly yield the savings the Council are demanding and it seems as if many services may disappear without us ever having had the chance to see whether an efficient bus network could offer better value for money. We believe that part of the reason for the decision is that the Council has never had a coherent strategy for bus services, other than to maintain the network as it was prior to de-regulation (in fact it has got steadily worse). One can argue a certain amount of money is necessary to provide for minimum standards of maintenance to roads, community education, social services or whatever, but with no standards worth speaking of for bus services there will be every temptation to cut them to fill any financing gap. Especially as people are hardly likely to storm the Shire Hall in protest, if they haven’t the transport to get there. By any rational measure the amount the council was spending on bus services has always fallen far short of what is needed. For example, shire counties spend less than a fifth of what metropolitan transport authorities spend, even though the needs are, if anything, greater because services are less likely to be commercial. One can argue that the service has been so depleted by constant cuts that further cuts will have little impact in terms of the amount of traffic people have to put up with. However, the cuts go right against the Council’s Environment policy, their support for the Road Traffic Reduction Bills (including the national targets of 10% by 2010), the Structure Plan and so forth. They completely undermine the Council’s participation in consensus building exercises like Local Agenda 21 and the Rural Forum. They also undermine the Travelwise project, designed to encourage people to use modes of transport other than the car, as people are hardly likely to put their trust in bus services when the Council sends a signal that it does not consider them important to maintain even at their pathetically inadequate level. However, central government is also at fault. While it has been planning for the longer term by building an Integrated Transport Policy, it has neglected the need for an interim policy. People are being forced into cars by bus cuts across the country, and it will cost a lot more to coax them back. New car dependent developments like edge of town super-stores are continuing to mushroom as if developers expected traffic to continue to increase into the indefinite future and were confident that they would be able to beat back any moves by government to tax private non-residential parking. Old railway formations which may need to be reinstated in future are continuing to be built on. Even if the forthcoming White Paper lays the foundation for a change of course for the future and this is far from certain, especially in the minds of the ruling group on the County Council, the failure by both central and local government to tackle our immediate problems is causing immediate hardship to lots of people and will considerably increase the costs of dealing with our problems later.

Simon Norton, Coordinator Transport 2000 Cambs & W Suffolk

TRISHAWS V COUNCIL ROUND 2

Our front page article in the last newsletter was subtitled "Reprieve for Trishaws - we hope". This was unfortunately a forlorn hope, as it appears that City Council officers are making renewed to tie the trishaw service up in red tape. The current operator sees operation from the station as the key to success and has secured the agreement of WAGN management at the station to this end. However, even though the Council has agreed in principle to allow trishaws to operate as far out of the city centre as the station. Officers have been refusing to provide a letter confirming this as requested by the station. The Council also appears to have gone back on a promise to give the first operator, Simon Lane, three years in which to develop his business. Instead, it is being proposed to open the operation up to anyone interested for this year’s season. Although Cambridge FOE does not support any particular operator any more than any other, we are concerned that so many obstacles appear to have been placed in the way of the operator which invested last year in the very expensive vehicles needed to set up Cambridge’s first trishaw service. We feel that he deserves the chance to succeed and begin to make a profit this year, as his business is so much more environmentally friendly than the other modes of public transport available in Cambridge. We therefore urge you to do your bit: tell your City councillor how much you approve of trishaws and, once the new season begins at Easter, take a trishaw instead of a taxi if you can.

Elizabeth Arndt

ROAD TRAFFIC REDUCTION BILL

The Road Traffic Reduction (UK Targets) Bill 1998 received its Second Reading in the House of Commons on 30th January, following the Government's agreement to give the Bill its support. in return for this support, the specific targets laid down in the Bill were dropped, but the Secretary of State will still be required to set targets under the revised version of the Bill. The Bill is already being mentioned by local government transport planners as something which must be taken into account (eg in connection with the proposed McDonalds Drive Thru) which shows how much impact the campaign led by national FOE, Plaid Cymru and the Green Party has had. Many thanks to any of you who lobbied your MP. Locally. you will not be surprised that, just before the Second Reading, the onty MP who had declared support for the Bill was Anne Campbell (Cambridge City, Labour). with Andrew Lansley (South Cambs, Tory), James Paice (SW Cambs, Tory) and Richard Spring (West Suffolk, Tory) keeping silent.

Elizabeth Arndt

HOUSING BREAKTHROUGH

In last September’s Newsletter, I lamented that nobody had quite had the courage to question the validity of the Government’s estimated need for 4.4 million new houses by 2016, de-spite growing doubts about the methods and motives that had produced such a whopping target. Since then, the whole debate unexpectedly leapt into the headlines with the news that the Government had jettisoned policies on which the huge forecast had been based: if not a volte-face, it at least showed that Ministers had become aware of flaws in the system. For those who are not up to speed with the story, my desk diary lists the count-down as follows. I had assembled the facts behind my scepticism of the official forecasts and, in search of higher wisdom, passed them on to our MR. Anne Campbell. With her usual alacrity, she replied with a statement from Richard Caborn, the Minister in charge of the subject at the Department of the Environment, who robustly defended the methodology used for producing household projections. In response to my suggestion that the policy men had confused the need for new houses with the aspirations of those who merely 'wanted' to move elsewhere, he replied that the projections ''do not differentiate between 'need' and 'want', they reflect real-world social and demographic trends''. He enclosed detailed papers that spoke of the undoubted expertise of the statisticians; but I still wondered if they had not been predicated on some untested assumptions. These ponderings were overtaken by a centre feature in the Times by Simon Jenkins (21st January), who took up the cudgels in the most uninhibited fashion and with amazing effect as it turned out. A central paragraph puts my own tender scepticism to shame: ''To ask how many houses are "needed" in any community is as half-baked as to ask how many rooms are needed, or how many cars, or nannies. or holiday," homes The five million figure, naturally beloved of the budding lobby, comes from a demographic model of spurious objectivity called "household formation". This collates forecasts of deaths, cohabitations, divorces, immigration and the desire of single people to live away from their parents. These forecasts are deftly turned into needs, which planners must then "supply" at any cost, including the countryside''. He backs his outrage with specifics about the housing targets forced on each region which he describes as ridiculously high and the policy as economically illiterate. Detailing six unacknowledged factors that invalidate housing forecasts, he says that the mind boggles at the concept of "total need for affordable housing" -- and that a more reputable profession than statistics would have Mr Prescott’s planners "struck off’ by now: "yet these are the ghouls abetting the rape of the landscape". But his main thrust came against Richard Caborn's superior at the DoE, John Prescott, for allowing the ravage of the Green Belt around Stevenage without public inquiry: this is a precedent, he says, that cracks open the estab-lished defences of the Green Belt countrywide. During all of the recent housing debate, the media have uniformly reported the 4.4 million housing target as a given truth:

Simon Jenkins appears alone in having publicly rumbled the housing bureaucrats. And apparently with lightning effect. Five days after his article appeared, John Prescott hurriedly announced the abandonment of the "predict and provide" policy on which housing targets have been based, and writing in the Times, declared that ''The Green Belt is safe with us". The episode released a spate of sudden doubters in the media: with a useful excess of hindsight, suddenly it had become safe to say what . ''Critics have questioned" one writes how such huge figures can be reached and whether the presumptions upon which the forecasts are base may be flawed. Which critics one might ask? There is added irony in a DoE announcement, made a few days before the John Prescott affair, that its 4.4 million forecast had been found to be wrong: it should have been 5 million, and a few hours later this had been inflated to "perhaps" 5.4.million. It was then that Jenkins sounded off Among the letters to the Times that followed his article, was a complaint from a villager in Lancashire speaking for protesters against planning consent for new housing. The Council claimed the exceptional need for new houses based on plan ning statistics showing 81 dual (i.e., two-family) households. The villagers did a door-to-door survey and found only two dual households and neither family wished to live in the proposed new site. Although anecdotal, the planners’ credibility factor of 2 out of 81 is indicative when set against Richard Caborn’s "real-world social and demographic trends". A trend based on a hunch, it might be agreed, is still a hunch. With one known exception, Councils seem to have accepted the 4/5 million national housing target without question. It headed a Cambridge City Council discussion paper at a meeting about building on unused allotment sites (see Allotment watch, page 10), arguing that this imperative "will be reflected locally". Only West Sussex seems to have publicly refuted the figure set for its region (and is taking the Government to court to have it reduced). But that was be fore Prescott’s change of policy. And now that Government decrees about housing targets have come under serious challenge, more planning authorities may be encouraged to follow the example of West Sussex. But the housing forecast remains unsettled. The great countryside debate now rides a confusion of issues and aims that make it hard to detect consistent policy. On Feb 15, the media leaked Prescott’s new windfall tax on owners of greenfield sites (perhaps with added VAT on such developments) and foretold that he is scrapping the target of 44m homes by 2016 far fewer homes would be built. And 3 days later, ministers withdrew legislation designed to give regional development agencies greater powers to develop greenfield sites. But by the time Prescott made his major statement to the Commons on 23rd February raising the percentage of new houses to go on brownfield sites from 50% to 60%. any revision of the total 4.4m estimate got no mention. Both National FoE and the CPRE sought a 75% brownfield target, both doubting that the Commons statement did much to prove that the countryside was in safe hands. Next day the Times leader took Prescott to task., saying that his targets were unreal while the 4.4 million figute remained unquestioned and "unless his Department liberates itself from these numbers". Let’s drink to that.

Patrick Forman

CAMBRIDGESHIRE CAPACITY STUDY - THE NEXT 20 YEARS

The County Council and all six District Councils within its area have launched their public consultation on where to put Cambridgeshire’s share of the 4.4 million houses we are supposed to need under the above title (see Housing Break-through, page 7). If you live in Cambridge, and your newsletter is hand delivered, you should receive a copy of the glossy and simplistic brochure, with which members of the public are being consulted, with this newsletter. Further copies are available from libraries, and south Cambridgeshire District Council has already delivered a copy to all of its residents. The brochure presents six options, five of which provide for 45,000 new homes to be built in the County. It is only when you read the small print that you realize that these are in addition to the 16,000 houses already built between 1991 and 1996, and the 35,500 already planned under the various Local Plans. Of the 45,000, it is anticipated under all five options that 25,000 will be built on green-field sites. A sixth option, entitled "minimum growth" only provides 13,000 houses (in addition to the 16,000 plus 35,500 already built or permitted), none of which would go on green-field sites, but this appears to have been virtually ruled out from the start. My first reaction to these mammoth figures was; all this in only 20 years! Then, on reading the brochure more closely, I realized that it is, in fact, all this in only 18 years, as the period under discussion is clearly stated to run only up to 2016. The Transport and Planning Campaign has only just begun to formulate its response to this consultation so, at the time of writing, we do not yet feel able to make any definite recommendations as to what you might write when you complete the questionnaire attached to the brochure. Clearly, the "minimum growth" option would be the least environmentally damaging, but I would suggest that you do not simply state a preference for this, but rather take the opportunity to make your views known on the importance of preserving green fields, only siting new housing where they can be conveniently reached by public transport, and ensuring that homes are within easy reach of jobs. But before such specifics are men-tioned, I think the assumptions behind the figures should be challenged; just when it appears that the government may be beginning to rethink the number of new houses needed nationally is surely not the time that councils should commit themselves to destroying more green field sites. You should feel free to pick and choose different aspects of the six options; they have only been presented as six self-contained proposals for the purposes of consulting the general public. and the full strategy document is considerably more wide ranging As for the government’s shift in favour of having a greater proportion of new housing built on brownfield sites. this may cause difficulties in Cambridgeshire. Although John Prescott would now like to see 60% of new housing on brown-field sites. the Councils consultants estimate that under 40% of Cambridgeshire’s "requirement" could be fitted onto such sites. However, since we believe that requirement to be far too high, maybe more modest growth could be accomodated mainly on brown fields. But even this is little cause for comfort, as Cambridgeshire’s ‘brown' fields include disused military airfields such as Oakington and Alconbury which, although partially developed, certainty include large tracts of relatively green fields The public consultation runs until 13th April 1998. Copies of the full strategy document can be consulted at local libraries, and we have a copy ourselves. You can learn more about the issues at a number of public meetings, all at 7.30 pm: 10th March, Swavesey Village College; 19th March, John Paxton Junior School, Sawston; 24th March, Hills Road 6th Form College, Cambridge. If you would like to find out more about Cambridge FOE’s response please contact Dave Earl or Elizabeth Arndt.

Please remember to return your questionnaire to the County Council by 13th April.

Elizabeth Arndt

E-mail:camfoe@telinco.co.uk

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