Good to see that the
Lewes Road scheme keeps collecting awards, the latest being the Excellence in Cycling and Walking category at the National Transport Awards. The Lewes Road scheme, which links Brighton
city centre with destinations along Lewes Road, has provided better
connectivity for cyclists and walkers, and also provides improvements to speed
buses along the way. The £6.4 million project saw nearly three miles of dual
carriageway changed into a single carriageway with a new bus lane, widened
cycle lane, and revamped bus stops and traffic signals. All of which makes it
much easier to travel between the centre of Brighton, the universities, the
American Express Community Stadium and Stanmer Park, as well as residential
areas.
What is amazing is the amount
of fuss caused by such schemes when they are being planned and installed. Travelling
(by bus) along the Lewes Road in the peaks last week, I’d observe that everything
seems to be working pretty smoothly. It is hard to believe the brouhaha about the
Lewes Road scheme, which some seemed to
think presaged the end of the world as we know it. But, as the endowment effect,inertia bias and the status quo bias from behavioural economics show, people hate
to have things taken away from them – even when what replaces it is better.
 |
| Before: Lewes Road at the Vogue Gyratory - note cyclists |
The Lewes Road scheme is
one of a number of sustainable transport improvements around Brighton and Hove,
which
have included investing in better bus services, installing cycle contraflows
and 20mph zones, as well as upgrading public spaces. These schemes, designed to
change people’s transport behaviour by making it easier to take low-carbon
options, have featured in a recent approving blog post by a staffer at the ClimateChange Committee. The post notes that, against a worrying national trend
towards increasing carbon emissions from transport, developments in our city
like the Lewes Road scheme and others,
“make walking, cycling and taking the bus a much
more attractive option. Car ownership in Brighton is currently the lowest in
South East England, cycling to work doubled between 2001 and 2011, as did the
number of bus journeys between 1993 and 2013.”
With the change in administration that took place in May 2015, and the
switch to a Labour-controlled council, another long awaited scheme, for Valley
Gardens, has been put on hold pending further work on traffic modelling. Let’s
hope that this doesn’t mean that the long overdue improvements to the City’s
main gateway, from St. Peter’s Church to the Palace Pier, has been kicked into
the long grass, never to be seen again. Because if it has, it’s the worst
possible news for pedestrians and cyclists, and anyone one else who believes
that Valley Gardens deserves a better fate than being a congested and
fume-laded traffic corridor, a river of vehicles which currently divides our
city.
No comments:
Post a Comment