Article published in Leicester Mercury June 26 2004
Leicester's Transport Plan is set to fail, warns Bob Ball. He suggests alternative options
Is Leicester's vision to reduce car travel in the city going to fail? Three years into the local transport plan, there is still an increase in cars coming into the city centre. Over the next two decades, traffic on Leicester's roads is predicted to rise by 20 per cent.
A major part of the local transport plan for reducing car travel and air pollution is a new park-and-ride network.
However, that aim is unlikely to be achieved because of plans to expand car parking, which will attract more traffic into Leicester.
Park-and-ride schemes will have a negative impact on the city and county because they distort travel patterns and disperse, rather than reduce, pollution from cars, which is a major factor in climate change.
With park-and-ride, unless we close some the city's car parks, we are simply expanding numbers and concreting over green spaces. In fact, across the city, there are plans to provide more car parking, almost equal to parking at the three new park-and-ride sites.
Along with the new Shires car park for 1,000 extra cars, there are plans for parking at the Granby Halls site, at the proposed office core at the rail station, on part of Leicester City Football Club's old ground and smaller schemes, which will generate more cars and undermine plans to reduce traffic and pollution.
We should abandon the three proposed park-and-ride schemes and cap car-parking at current levels with a five-year moratorium, and instead provide good bus services with low fares.
There is evidence from Germany to show there is no connection between the amount of retail activity and the amount of parking in a city centre.
Bus services could be improved by re-regulating them. At present, services are not co-ordinated or connected to other bus and rail services. A comprehensive network of bus-priority schemes needs to be established in the city and linked into county services, so services work in favour of bus users.
Leicester could reduce road traffic coming into the city with a workplace-parking levy, which is in the local transport plan, but the scheme will need the introduction of enforced residents' parking across the city, otherwise it will fail to reduce traffic.
Even so, many areas have rejected residents' parking schemes because of the cost (nearly £50) or because people could not park outside their home.
Nonetheless, it is not unreasonable to pay a smaller administration charge. Any fines incurred, along with the revenue from the workplace levy (£5 million a year from 7,000 parking places) would help to support a good level of bus transport and low fares to encourage bus use.
The Government should not build more roads. This would release £30 billion to spend on an integrated public transport system.
In Leicester, we need traffic-calming and more safe routes for children walking to school.
Of course, if people just stopped driving for one day a week or joined a car-share club, that would have a dramatic effect on traffic and air pollution.
But the joker in the pack, on how much people drive, is rising oil prices. Some analysis predicts oil could eventually double in price to 100 a barrel because of demand, the Iraq war and USA gas-guzzlers.