Not even St Davids or Ely?
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Planning Rules Have Failed To link New Homes To Public Transport - study finds.
- Thread starter yorksrob
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Not even St Davids or Ely?
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It must be possible for planners to calculate bus usage based on density of the development and locations of stations and schools. Employment possibilities will influence, and be influenced by, where potential workers live- the days of workers flooding out of factory gates are long gone. Supermarkets and Amazon deliver. How many will use the bus will determine frequencies etc. Thus a Section 106 contribution can be determined, and the developer can decide if when that is added to the purchase prices of their desirable homes, and a suitably small number of 'affordable' or social housing 'units' hidden within or on then edge, they will sell ok.
My gut feeling is that the currently popular garden city/ suburban density does not provide enough potential custom for buses. How many homes are needed to support a rail station with adequate frequency by users walking or biking a 'do-able first or last mile, esp in the cold/ dark/ rain?
Whether new New Towns, or town fringe extensions, or urban intensification can satisfy the criteria for sustainable transport 'solutions' (whether primarily public or private) are moot points.
Working/ studying/ being entertained at home (with consequential effects on 'community') are already reducing travel and transport needs. Trains, buses, bicycles and IT were all innovations. Drone trains?
My gut feeling is that the currently popular garden city/ suburban density does not provide enough potential custom for buses. How many homes are needed to support a rail station with adequate frequency by users walking or biking a 'do-able first or last mile, esp in the cold/ dark/ rain?
Whether new New Towns, or town fringe extensions, or urban intensification can satisfy the criteria for sustainable transport 'solutions' (whether primarily public or private) are moot points.
Working/ studying/ being entertained at home (with consequential effects on 'community') are already reducing travel and transport needs. Trains, buses, bicycles and IT were all innovations. Drone trains?
Class 170101
Established Member
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I was told this was actually done so to not make that estate become a rat run for people trying to cut the corner off rather than the expectation of any buses using it. My folks reckon the roads on said estate are too small for a normal sized bus anyway.There are countless frustrating examples of limited funding being spent in a way that may as well have been setting wads of cash on fire.
BBC News - Unenforced bus gate in Colchester to be removed - BBC News
Unenforced bus gate in Colchester to be removed
The road has never been used as part of a bus route.www.bbc.co.uk
I agree with the sentiment. The overwhelming majority of development is house+garden (high rise having soectacularly failed and away from town/city centres medium rise is also of little interest to people) and I don’t think that is at all suited to public transport because of the dispersion. It’s also generally getting ever further away from railway stations as they were sited in the original (and much smaller) town footprints*. Hence the time required to get to a station is increasing (not helped by town centre road schemes designed to hinder traffic), whilst the sheer variety of destinations people are going to works against bus routes as they either require a time consuming “in then out” switch, or great way rounds in order to connect to as many pickup/drop off locations as possible.
It is increasingly hard to compete against the point to point advantages of a car tbh. This despite the wfh boom**, traffic appears not to have changed much.
Throw in that mobility has been punished via taxation for years (and they’ve just removed the freezes that had been present the last few) and households incresingly consist of adults with less freedom to be mobile (more in careers rather than “jobs” plus the unliklihood that both adults of a family can or could work near where they live even assuming one does) and the trend for increasing private vehicle vs public transport seems clear. Certainly I can see that where I am, huge edge of town growth with large estates where bus/train are largely irrelevent to the needs of the people there.
At least decentish cycle routes are now appearing however with these new estates.
*yes a lot weren’t as are some new parkway types etc, but they are a minority given even the classic “X Town/Road” had mostly been subsumed in development prior to the last few decades. Certainly if they survivied closures!
** being rolled back in some places I know, but my industry has embraced it, not least as shortage of skilled/experienced people means that wfh allows a vastly wider recruitment net without which we’d have a fraction of the people.
Therein lies one of the problems - 3 to 5 years being regarded as long term. The funding needs to be guaranteed (by someone) for the expected lifetime of the properties being built or 20-25 years at the very least.
Kite159
Veteran Member
How dare people want their own private garden area to make it their own, rather than having to share a little communal outdoor area with other residents.
Not everybody wants to live in high density housing within urban areas.
Actually, it isn’t the overwhelming majority. There has been an awful lot of non-house development in the cities - obviously London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds etc. In London I would be astonished if apartments of low, medium and high rise were not the overwhelming majority of the approx 300,000 new build in the last 10-15 years.
It’s the same in some smaller cities too. Locally to me well over 1000 apartments have been built in St Albans in the last 10-15 years (many more than homes with gardens).
Have you visited London or any major city recently? I bet developers and central government are pulling their hair out after so much low-rise low-value housing was built in the 80s and 90s on valuable sites after the reaction to the system build failures from the 60s and 70s....
And just what proportion of the 200,000 homes per year do those flats comprise?
Notably none of these places are trying to even come close to the “cities in the sky” of the past, whilst in many towns/small cities that were blighted with such things, they’ve come down and “normal” low rise development has replaced them.
After what Govt inflicted upon people in the past, nobody cares if they are tearing their hair out tbh!
There should be a law that architects and planners (and decision makers to boot) have to live in the places they design, the bigger the scheme, the longer the time to be spent there!
(works both ways, a relative designs houses for “high net worth” people…).
Most single decker buses in this country have quite low running costs, and low capacity. In other words perfect for serving the suburban areas in question really. The reason their economics are bad is because they're run deliberately on a shoestring, so they're as unattractive as can be. The rare English areas of medium sized suburbia which have quality offers (Nottingham, Brighton, Reading) have more than adequate patronage to support their bus services.
Baxenden Bank
Established Member
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A point which I meant to make in my previous post, but forgot.
Developers often submit as part of their application a transport study and statement along the lines that 'the site is served by sustainable transport'. The application gets approved on that basis. A look at the actual situation perhaps reveals an hourly bus 0800 to 1800 so technically correct but unlikely to be attractive.
A planning application local to me, on a green belt site allocated in the plan for 'premium employment uses' but sat on by the owner for years. Then along came the planning application for residential development (no demand for employment, honest guv) reckoned on 1% public transport share and that a walk of 900m to the bus stop and 1.2km to the nearest school / corner shop was absolutely fine.
The application also reckoned on 108 peak hour vehicular trips from a development of 220 houses. Yeah right. Each house on the estate had at least two parking spaces.
CORRECTION
The assumed modal split was 1% train use, 2% bus use.
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No doubt some would claim that the old brick shelters attract people loitering without any intention of catching a bus. I think the extent to which that happens depends on the area. The modern glass shelters tend to get vandalised instead. Plenty of shattered glass to be seen in some of the more dubious estates in Cardiff.
WolvertonWorks
Member
The original Milton Keynes masterplan, while assuming that the majority of households would have a* car, was also designed to have a decent public transport service. The grid roads were designed to have space for either a rapid transport service along the centre or on one side or there was space left to create bus lanes.
The size of the grid squares is such that almost every dwelling would be a maximum 5-10 minute walk from a bus stop on a grid road. It was envisaged that buses would run, at decent speed, along the grid roads making it easy to get from one side of the city to anywhere else in an acceptable time. We also have the redways linking grid squares but avoiding road traffic, for cyclists, pedestrians, (and horses - many redways follow old bridlepaths).
Firstly the government changed in 1979, when development was really just getting going, and buses were privatised - so the bus services nowadays rightly are cause for complaint, there are grid squares not far from the city centre grid square which have no bus routes running near or through them - and so wend their way slowly through estates with parked cars everywhere as this is the way bus companies think in terms of routes and gaining income from the most passengers.
Then the development corporation was wound up by the government before the master plan had been built, leaving large areas to be developed by "the market" with no coherent control. This has meant that the current expansion areas, rather than having grid roads have main routes wending their way through them. It also means that any possibility of extending the grid roads in these areas into further developable land has been lost. So it will be hard to retro fit a rapid transit system should something/someone come along and want to do so.
*ie one - which causes problems nowadays because parking was only provided for one and many households now have two, and more where adult children still live in the family home and each needs a car to get to work.
markymark2000
Established Member
I think the best example is Great Easthall Way in Sittingbourne.
The busway was designed in a stupid way which makes it single lane through the busway, that is the first issue. Then secondly due to lack of enforcement, it got used as a rat run and it became dangerous for buses to use as people were going through the red lights. What is the solution? Enforcement? Don't be so stupid, we just close the busway and deprive a whole housing estate of a bus service. This busway is still closed to this day with, as you'd expect, council staff and councillors 'committing to trying to resolve the solution' but as per doing sweet sod all to resolve the issues.
https://www.kentonline.co.uk/sittin...ce-after-cars-use-bus-lane-as-rat-run-197681/. I can't really quote too much as the page is just flooded with ads and rubbish. Here's the basics though.
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It looks rather derelict in the October 2022 Google streetview. Never underestimate the lengths to which a Council will go to avoid solving a problem. I speak from personal experience.
No-ones suggested that as far as I can see. What's your point?
Probably some more up to date information, but NHBC statistics suggest that the share of apartments vs total completions increased from around 18% in 2021 through to 23% in 2024.
https://www.nhbc.co.uk/binaries/con...w-home-statistics-review-q1-2024_08052024.pdf (p6)
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Well yes transport planning is a whole discipline and employs probably over a thousand people in this country.
Snow1964
Established Member
Excerpt from yesterday's (11 Nov) Parliamentary debate, which is relevant to this topic, giving outline timeline of linking housing strategy and rural connectivity to rail
parallelparliament.co.uk
Sarah Dyke (Glastonbury and Somerton) (LD) - View Speech - Hansard- - - Excerpts
Improved rail performance is of course welcome, but my constituents in Somerton and Langport are not served by the railway at all. A family in Curry Rivel recently wrote to me; they are over half an hour away from the nearest train station, leaving them isolated from the train line. Will the Minister outline any plans she has to connect my constituents in rural areas to the railway?
Louise Haigh - View Speech - Hansard - - - Excerpts
We will be setting out a long-term infrastructure strategy in spring next year, working with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and colleagues across Government to ensure that we are unlocking the transport infrastructure that will be of benefit and allow us to meet our housing targets but also improve rural connectivity. My Department is also reforming how we do appraisals to ensure we maximise our investment in transport infrastructure for economic growth and to tackle socioeconomic inequality.
Debate: Rail Performance - 11th Nov 2024
Mon 11th Nov 2024 - Commons - Rail Performance debate
parallelparliament.co.uk
Excerpt from yesterday's (11 Nov) Parliamentary debate, which is relevant to this topic, giving outline timeline of linking housing strategy and rural connectivity to rail
Debate: Rail Performance - 11th Nov 2024
Mon 11th Nov 2024 - Commons - Rail Performance debate
Quite a pertinent question as "reversing Beeching" used to be the mechanism to open stations on existing lines (as well as the new lines).
Need to get businesses back into city/town centres.
Demolish the office parks and replace them with medium density ‘villages’, and get the offices built within the city/town centres.
It’s then much easier to bus people to the offices - it’s not realistic to need people to get two buses to an office and directly connecting myriad suburbs with myriad office parks isn’t possible. And working in a town is much nicer than a soulless business park.
Also need to swing the balance back to the middle away from scrotes being a protected species. Clamp down on ASB on public transport, street crime, and bike theft, and let them lose the idea that no member of the public is going to thump them and the police/courts can’t hurt them. Then people might emerge from their protected spaces with four wheels…..
Demolish the office parks and replace them with medium density ‘villages’, and get the offices built within the city/town centres.
It’s then much easier to bus people to the offices - it’s not realistic to need people to get two buses to an office and directly connecting myriad suburbs with myriad office parks isn’t possible. And working in a town is much nicer than a soulless business park.
Also need to swing the balance back to the middle away from scrotes being a protected species. Clamp down on ASB on public transport, street crime, and bike theft, and let them lose the idea that no member of the public is going to thump them and the police/courts can’t hurt them. Then people might emerge from their protected spaces with four wheels…..
Fantastic bit of grade A word soup from the Minister there, they grow up so fast....Excerpt from yesterday's (11 Nov) Parliamentary debate, which is relevant to this topic, giving outline timeline of linking housing strategy and rural connectivity to rail
Debate: Rail Performance - 11th Nov 2024
Mon 11th Nov 2024 - Commons - Rail Performance debate
Also interesting to note that changes to appraisal guidance being talked up. This is hardly news, it's a continual process. Plus it's not much good having an uber clever economic case when all the Treasury cares about right now is net subsidy requirement.
Used to be a mechanism to deliver new stations on existing lines, even though the initial guidance and follow up clarification from the department at the time suggested otherwise. The New Stations Fund was probably the more pertinent funding source, at least for the schemes I was involved with.
Thanks for that, I only spent a few mins searching but couldnt find anything that broke types down, everyone seems obsessed on the total number and conversions etc.
It suggests the “trad house” does indeed form the majority of development as I suggested. Not least as apartments include low rise blocks.
If you live in a city then maybe you still see some high rise, but outside of such places it is mostly houses. I was at Wembley earlier this year, even a lot of that development was pretty low rise.
But how much of that low rise development in Wembley is new build, rather than 1930s onwards? Very very little I'd suspect, especially given the GLAs minimum density standards have been in place for a while now, and land values mean it's almost always worth delivering decent density
I'd argue (although I'll have to go looking for numbers) that there's a similar story in locations such as Manchester where almost all of the circa 50k increase in population since the turn of the century can be ascribed to high density development in the city centre. It has more in common with central Paris or Barcelona in this regard, than Tameside or Stockport.
I mean the Wembley stadium area btw - the new stuff. Can’t put a number on it, but a lot of low (5-7) and medium (7-10) height blocks rather than the 60/70s era 15 blocks etc.
Perhaps however that was special to prevent providing too many free viewpoints!
I suspect that modern high rise development if you see it might appear dominant, but that’s relatively few in number and only largr cities, vs virtually every single town and village in the country having new multiple low density house+garden developments. As the facts show, that accounts for 75+% of development so my original comment stands.
Not always. The 300 that was introduced to serve Broughton and Brooklands about 15 years ago still operates (now renumbered 3/3A). It was subsidised via s106/tarriff for about first 5 years. There was a trigger clause in the planning permission that said that buses should start operating when 100 (IIRC but might have been a different number) were occupied. Once that trigger point was passed I had to insist on the bus starting to operate. Essential that buses start operating early in development otherwise houses only really available to those with cars. That is what is now happening on west flank of MK in Fairfields.
Indeed - so the trigger number of occupied dwellings should be 1.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
The east west routes (3 and 8) have a slightly more complex history than that in reality, they are indeed ones that stuck but in part because of serving existing places and partly replacing other routes which were later withdrawn (e.g. the 7 and the old 3 plus a couple of two-figure subsidised routes), particularly the 8 which I recall started as the 200 (edit: or was it 250, I forget?) and took in some of the 3's present route (in particular the Coachway).
I very, very much doubt that the residential planning gain section of the 3 is what sustains it. If any planning gain section does it'll be the bit to the Amazon warehouse.
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Take a look along the commuter lines into London - there are big tower blocks going up all over the place, mini cities being built in the suburbs. Even Guildford is going high (7-10 is high, and they are going a bit above that….most places going higher still)
look at Canary Wharf, Embassy Gardens, Acton…..
I’m well aware of them, I pass them regularly. I just know they are not the majority. As again the facts show, they account for a small minority of developments.
It’s not as easy to see but there are 10s of 1000s of towns and villages all growing huge estates of houses and low rise development. Public transport is almost irrelevent to them.
Since WW2 the idea of ribbon development has been prevented through the use of green belt. From the point of view of linking public transport to new build, a better approach is to build along the main transport routes of rail, bus services and road or concentrated in selected urban locations. The countryside can then be left between these routes.