Western Orbital Motorway

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Six Reasons Why The Western Bypass Should Not Go Ahead

A Briefing by West Midlands CPRE and West Midlands Friends of the Earth

In November 2002 an Independent Government Panel appointed by John Prescott rejected proposals for Western Bypasses of Wolverhampton and Stourbridge. The bypasses had been proposed in general terms as part of the West Midlands Multi-Modal Study and a further more detailed Black Country Regeneration Study was undertaken to justify them, although it failed to do so. When confronted with the evidence the Regional Planning Guidance (RPG) panel agreed with residents and environmentalists that the bypasses would

• fail to regenerate the urban areas of the Black Country
  
• lead to Green Belt development along the route
  
• fail to improve overall traffic times into the Black Country
  
• have huge environmental impacts, which would be compounded by proposed dual carriageway link roads into the conurbation.
  
• encourage an overall growth in traffic
  
• compete for investment with Public Transport

This briefing sets out in more detail why we believe the Panel were right to reject the bypasses, and why proposals for a more strategic route aimed at reducing traffic on the M5/M6 leading to the resurrection of the Western Orbital Motorway wouldn't work.

Reason One : The Bypasses would fail to regenerate the Black Country

The relationship between urban regeneration and infrastructure is a complex one. There is clearly a need for a basic level of infrastructure provision for an economy to work. However, infrastructure on its own will not lead to regeneration and congestion on its own will not stop investment. The environment and social infrastructure of an area, the access to a good workforce, as well as hospitals, schools and housing, are all major drivers of how an area is perceived. Investment depends on people wanting to invest in an area. If people do not want to invest in an area, additional transport will not help.

The historic approach to economic regeneration and transport was to simply assume that new links benefit a poorly performing area. However, this was increasingly questioned and when the Government's transport think-tank SACTRA looked into it they found the issue was more complex and that weak areas could as easily loose out as a result of transport investment directing business away from them. Study of cases like Hastings confirmed this situation.

The Black Country Accessibility Study, funded by Advantage West Midlands and the LGA, sought to prove the regeneration case for the Western Bypasses, however they came up against a number of obstacles.

• The bypasses were not well connected to areas of need or areas of industrial potential within the Black Country. The only way to achieve those linkages was through an unrealistic approach of building massive new dual carriageways through the West of the Black Country.
• The bypasses could have acted as a catalyst for Green Belt development at the expense of the conurbation.
• The bypasses would have allowed the South and East of the region to capitalise at the expense of the Black Country
• The bypasses would have encouraged greater use of Merry Hill as a retail centre, potentially undermining other centres.

The only conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence in the study is that, at best the bypasses would have no impact on the Black Country and at worst they would positively encourage the forces of decentralisation undermining the economy of the Black Country.

Reason Two: Green Belt development would be encouraged along the route

The history of roads round towns and conurbations is that they attract greenfield development, and that, even if there are planning policies, such as Green Belt, to protect those areas they are gradually eaten away by development. The kind of development that results not only spoils the countryside, it is usually low density and poorly connected to public transport. It encourages longer journeys by car causing congestion on routes around and into the conurbations concerned.

The M42 has proved a classic example of creeping development, with business parks and housing gradually getting the go ahead until significant inroads have been made into the Green Belt. The Western Bypasses would encourage the process started on the M42 to continue and spread, particularly in the sensitive countryside close to the M5 end of the bypasses.

Regional Planning Guidance for the West Midlands restricts housing in the Green Belt, although there is pressure from house builders for what they call Urban Extensions. On the other hand RPG allows for a number of forms of industrial development in the Green Belt. This could take the form of business parks or new single unit operations. If more sites are identified in the Green Belt it inevitably undermines the case for redeveloping urban sites, especially where there are additional decontamination costs.

As well as business parks Wolverhampton Business Airport would seek to take advantage of the bypasses to promote its aspirations for passenger numbers equaling Birmingham, ensuring the bypasses were full of its traffic.

Reason Three: The bypasses would fail to improve overall traffic times into the Black Country

New roads around cities are often believed to have a much greater impact on traffic problems than they do. There are three principle reasons for this:

1. An additional road may have a huge environmental impact and cost a lot, but it often only represents a minute increase in the overall road capacity in a town or city.
2. Traffic times are determined by the weakest points in the system, so that a new road may speed traffic past one bottle neck, only for it to be doubly hampered at the next.
3. Many towns and cities have huge levels of additional potential traffic demand, so that the release of capacity may simply be taken up by people making longer journeys, for example to retail locations further from where they live.

In the case of M6 Toll Road, which is currently under construction, the traffic models at the Public Inquiry suggested that when all these factors were taken into account the new motorway would reduce traffic on the M6 in the Black Country by 1-4% and even that was likely to be optimistic given the suppressed demand caused by large traffic generators such as Ikea and other large retailers at Junction 9.

The Black Country Study modeled traffic across the Black Country and found that for most destinations the gain from the bypasses would be less than a minute, but since that study did not take into account the capacity constraints on many urban roads even these findings may prove generous. Ironically the areas which got the greatest time gains were those in or on the edge of the Green Belt, whereas the goal is supposed to be regenerating the Black Country urban area.

The clear need that emerged from the study is for improved access within the Black Country. In some cases this may be facilitated by some minor new road construction and or junction improvements where space allows, however opportunities to build roads at the scale and grade of the Black Country Spine Road or Dudley Southern Bypass will be very limited in the future.

The alternatives, many of which were explored in the West Midlands Multi-Modal Study are for significant investment in busses, light rail and heavy rail and for the introduction of Congestion Charging to significantly restrain the use of the car. That study demonstrated that of all modes the most significant was the bus with the potential to capture back, at a relatively low cost, a further 10% of the overall transport market, and to offer a service with the flexibility and reliability to meet the needs of all sections of society in the conurbation.

Having lost the main argument it is now being claimed by supporters that the bypasses could reduce congestion on the M5/M6 leading to benefits of accessibility to the Black Country and regeneration, even though such a case was shown to be untenable at the M6 Toll Public Inquiry. There is little evidence to support such a 'third-removes' benefit materialising. Any improvement would be likely to be eaten away by traffic generation.

Reason Four: The Western Bypasses would have huge environmental impacts, which would be compounded by proposed dual carriageway link roads into the conurbation.

The whole of the Western Bypasses route passes through the Green Belt, and through attractive areas of countryside. The landscape quality of the West of the conurbation is widely acknowledged with popular views from places like the Clent Hills. Many of the villages, such as Belbroughton Codsall and Wombourne, have well preserved centres and there are areas of importance to nature conservation such as the Penn Valley. The impact of the new roads and of follow on development would be severe as has been acknowledged in all the studies. Indeed, a key reason the former proposals for a Western Orbital Motorway were ditched by the previous Government was the environmental impact.

Attempts to mitigate such impacts, while they would be a necessity if the roads were built, could not remove the basic problem. In some cases insufficient work has been done to demonstrate the overall benefit of mitigation. For instance, plans to build a tunnel to the East of Hagley to avoid damage to the landscape would imply a further road was needed to make a junction with the A456, undermining the purpose of the tunnel.

And, as the Regional Planning Guidance Panel point out the additional link roads, deemed necessary to link the bypasses to areas of need in the conurbation would significantly add to the impact. In the case of the Dudley Link road, the biodiversity and landscape impacts close to the conurbation have proved no less daunting than in the countryside. Inevitably such routes would add their own environmental and social impacts, such as community severance. There is no point improving access into the Black Country if we destroy or sever its most attractive districts.

Reason Five: The bypasses would encourage an overall growth in traffic

For many years environmental groups argued that road building was self-defeating because the new roads simply re-filled with new 'generated' traffic. They pointed to the M25 filling up and to the exodus of commuters from the West Midlands conurbation to Stafford as a result of the availability of the new M6 in the 1970s and 1980s. This analysis was hotly disputed by the road lobby who claimed that traffic simply relocated. The Government's think tank SACTRA weighed the evidence in their report 'Road and Induced Traffic'. They concluded that new roads did generate extra traffic but that it varied from case to case. They identified criteria where a road would be expected to generate additional traffic and specific types of road where this was likely to happen. Roads on the edges of highly congested conurbations, not surprisingly turned out to be particularly liable to traffic generation. The analysis of the Black Country Bypasses to this date have failed to adequately take this problem on board. The opportunity for generating large amounts of traffic is clearly there. Many of the sort of developments that would generate traffic, such as Merry Hill exist, and more could be expected, not least expansion of Wolverhampton airport.

Reason Six: The bypasses would compete for investment with Public Transport

The Multi-Modal Studies were undertaken to examine alternative approaches to dealing with transport problems in particular areas other than road building. Unfortunately the methodology for these studies has not given them enough space to break with the past and where they have (such as on congestion charging) they have been sidelined. Instead programmes they promote have increasingly relied on traditional 'predict and provide' road building. The studies undertaken in the West Midlands have all advocated large scale road building, including proposals which were not considered before these studies started. What Margaret Thatcher called the 'greatest roads programme since the Romans' has not only returned, it has been increased. Even where congestion is relatively low, such as on the M6 in Staffordshire, road widening is proposed. And where the multi modal studies failed to recommend road widening, such as on the M6 in Warwickshire the Highways Agency is promoting its own 'predict and provide' study to justify widening. Overall this programme would lead to widescale capacity increases in the countryside of the West Midlands but, at the same time, more blockages in towns and cities.

The Multi-Modal Study process has failed to compare these road proposals against one another or to consider the total cost of the package and whether that money would be better spent on other modes of transport or on more direct interventions such as improvements in skills training or cultural improvements that help retain graduates to the benefit of the regional economy.

Inevitably there is not an infinite pot of money and such a large roads programme must come at the expense of other modes of transport. Given the clear evidence emerging from studies and from the Regional Planning Guidance debate that the Western Bypasses would fail to deliver regeneration there is a straightforward case for prioritising investment in public transport in the Black Country itself where the real problems are.

Conclusions
This short briefing has outlined why we believe the Western Bypasses should not go ahead. When the Secretary of State publishes his Modifications to RPG we are hopeful that he will support the Panel in opposing the bypasses. We will be urging interested parties to support him if he does, because other interests in favour of the roads will doubtless lobby for them to come back. At the same time we are keeping up the pressure to ensure that Black Country Study currently being 'visioned' remains in step with RPG and concentrates on the real needs of the sub-region, economic, social and environmental, rather than the white elephant Western Bypasses.

For further details contact:

Gerald Kells, Regional Policy Officer CPRE Tel: 01922 636601 Email: gerald.kells@talk21.com

Chris Crean: Regional co-ordinator FOE Tel: 0121 643 9117 Email: chrisc@foe.co.uk