Whittlesey Relief Road

In the leaflet I am currently putting out, I have said that I would support proposals to investigate a Whittlesey relief road.  

That doesn't mean I am 100% sold on a relief road, but I would say I lean in favour.

The reason for this is that Whittlesey has a problem coming.  This document highlights

the issues, it is quite a long read but in short it basically explains that the Local Plan that was under development before the Conservatives abandoned it, had Whittlesey put forward as a growth town, which basically means more development and more traffic along the A605. In truth, I can’t see any local plan coming forward without growth in Whittlesey as a big part of it, but the local plan desperately needs to happen, because not having it won’t stop housing, what it will do is leave us in the position we are in now where housing development happening in a totally unplanned and unstructured way, without any ability to use the infrastructure funding that is received from development in a planned way.  We have suffered this since 2014 and the only way of getting more control is a new local plan.  It is a serious mistake for the Conservatives to cancel/suspend the local plan.

Anyway, back to the relief road.  The document I referred to above says that growth in Whittlesey is going to continue, meaning more traffic along the A605.   

The traffic survey in the document highlighted that 19,438 vehicles drive into Whittlesey every day, of which 8,122 drive all the way through and leave.  That suggests that a relief road could reduce the amount of traffic going through Whittlesey by about 40%.   

That reduction makes the investigation of a relief road worthwhile.    However, one of my big criticisms of the Conservative administration at Fenland is that they are not open enough with residents and there is a reality about the relief road that needs to be stated - which is that I cannot see how it can be funded without a huge amount of housing and business development; this is a tough message, but community leaders should be willing to say tough things.

For me, it is all about how you plan that development.  We need to know the exact proposed locations of new housing and new businesses, which I hope would allow traffic to have direct access onto the relief road so that it doesn’t have to go through the town centre. 

It goes without saying that growth also needs to be planned to include other infrastructure such as schools and health centres - but good local plans do enable this. 

There are also issues related to this around public transport and active travel (walking and cycling) where Whittlesey is just not good enough.  But that will feature in another blog post.

But, to summarise, we will only ever know what the possibilities are for a relief road if we do,the work to plan it.   But your politicians need to be more honest with you; it is only likely to happen through housing and business growth and it is how that growth is planned that is crucial.