Question 9

Not at all

Lovell Road has increasingly become used as a place to park cars for non-residents. It also used as a traffic cut through. This will only increase as nothing is done to increase space on Milton Road or protect Lovell Road

Yes, completely

All good!

Mostly yes

If limiting car parking spaces for residents, it must be made mandatory that there are at least 2 dedicated bike parking spaces per house or flat

Neutral

I'd like to see a large number of fully-pedestrianised streets, or streets with only bike lanes.

Not at all

No answer given

Neutral

No answer given

Neutral

The fact that this question is phrased in this way, and the consultation gives no way of disagreeing with this aim, is typical of the arrogance on this matter which Cambridge City Council so regularly displays. I also note that no opposition to the anti-car travel priority was mentioned in the Council's summary of previous consultations - I find it hard to believe that no-one voiced opposition, or at least concerns, over this. A quick look at the comments on any social media post about these plans, or similar plans throughout the city, will show you that this is something many Cambridge residents do not agree with. The majority of comments I have seen on every post are of this nature in fact. To give my opinion directly, I do not think car travel should be discouraged, at least to anywhere near the extent it is, in these plans. Cycling and walking is great in many ways, and we should build, particularly when we have a relatively clean slate to work with as in this plan, in ways that make cycling and walking easier. However, this should not be at the expense of making the area in accessible by car, leaving nowhere for residents or visitors to park, or building road layouts with little concern for congestion (in fact, I think the most cynical amongst the council want to build-in congestion). Overuse of traffic calming chicanes, 'Dutch' roundabouts, floating bus-stops, cyclist priority junctions and traffic junctions that are otherwise built with an obvious lack of concern for likely congestion are a menace. I am sure consultations return many positive views on these topics, but I would argue these views are exaggerated by the sort of demographic that responds to consultations. I think a vastly different view would be found if a truly representative view of those living in and around the city were taken - but I will not expect the council to do this, as I am sure they are happy to work within this democratic gap while it suits their personal ideology. I will not get into a wider argument about the use of cars and motor vehicles more generally, this isn't the place and I know it will fall on deaf ears as this is an idealogical crusade for many on the council, not one based on any sense, practicality or proportionality. However, I will say this, these developments will quickly turn into slums if more parking is not provided at the very least, no one who can afford to live anywhere else will choose to live there while they can't own a car, as very few want to live a cycling/walking only lifestyle in a place so far from the city centre - even if 'communal spaces' are created in the new development. Of course it goes without saying that no one will visit the commerical spaces of the new area from outside, but I believe the current plans will also create a traffic black spot even for those trying to simply come in and out of Cambridge from a North and Eastern direction - denying even the centre from commercial activity. Please with the council wake up to the actual desires and realities of most people in and around Cambridge, rather than the utopian visions of a small clique of idealogical city dwellers.

Not at all

You are not discouraging car travel and certainly not stopping increased traffic along Milton Road. You are discouraging people from living in the area. Many residents will probably be happy to cycle to work but they will want cars for leisure activities they wish to enjoy elsewhere in the area and particularly at the weekends. There must be an allowance for a minimum of 1 car per flat/home. If that is not provided in the development residents will park in neighbouring residential areas, villages and country roads

Not at all

No, you are presenting aspirations 'we want'. Nothing concrete is proposed. There will be too many cars with that number of dwellings.

Not at all

You are creating an area in which only the poorest people will choose to live.

Mostly yes

No answer given

Neutral

You will not discourage car travel. Having a development that depends on cycling and walking presupposes no-one gets old or infirm. It does not allow for elderly or infirm visitors by car. It does not allow for tradespeople to have vans close to their homes. No parent is going to struggle getting a couple or more children through driving room to go to school - they will want to hop in a car.

Mostly yes

No answer given

Neutral

Need more details on how deliveries will be minimised. You cannot claim no increase in traffic if there will still be some spaces. Milton road cannot take this additional traffic. particularly as Waterbeach development continues.

Not at all

Creating homes with a maximum 0.5 parking space per home is ridiculous. The planning committee must recognise that home owners will continue with car ownership regardless, and this risks exacerbation of the currently very troublesome on-street parking issues in the surrounding areas. Creating new walkways between the Science Park and Kings Hedges road will encourage those without allocated parking at the Science Park and CRC to continue (and increase) using local residential parking around the Kings Hedges/St Kilda Avenue area, where on-street parking is already at full capacity. Making the pedestrian route easier to reach these areas will guarantee that on-street parking in the Kings Hedges area becomes completely unmanageable, where currently even occupants with off-street parking are impacted by uncontrolled on-street parking. Note: yellow/white lines and new (revenue-generating) residents' parking schemes are not the answer: sensible planning is the only way to mitigate this. Train and bus routes into Cambridge Central from Cambridge North and the surrounding area are already over-crowded at peak times, and it's naive to assume that the majority of new residents will walk or cycle into their workplaces. Central Cambridge is not within reasonable walking distance (c.1 hr from the planned development site). Insufficient effort has been made to assess the impact on local transport infrastructure and insufficient commitment has been made by this development to increasing capacity. Given that this will also be on the same route as the new Waterbeach Barracks development, and both may deliver to similar timescales, local transport will be completely swamped with over-crowding.

Mostly yes

It is not just about car travel, but also about the type of vehicles that are being used. Electric car charging points (both public on street and private for homes and flats) should be considered essential, and a low emission zone created, so that vehicles that do enter the area have to be electric (E.g. taxis and buses serving the station). Really, that goes for the whole of cambridge! It is also not enough to require such measures in planning, but incentives and loans to allow both residents and businesses to transition to electric vehicles or active transport are essential.

Neutral

No answer given

Not at all

No answer given

Mostly yes

However, what about the elderly and disabled who may not be able to access public transport? What about tradespeople who need a vehicle for work? By limiting their ability to live here you, create a very specific sort of community. Is there communal parking planned, in case visitors have not been able to access public transport?

Mostly not

No consideration for the needs of rural residents, with little access to public transport, and it is too far to cycle.

Mostly yes

Traffic on Milton Road is already really bad and it is good that, in theory, this will not add to that load. Any development in Cambridge should make walking, cycling or using public transport the easiest option - this is the only way to reduce car use in Cambridge. As a city renowned for cycling, the council should be doing everything they can to make us a flagship city within the UK, and even Europe, for green transport. To me, it seems a no brainer to introduce a congestion charge to enter Cambridge - there is no excuse for driving within the city centre. I think it is great that this development is doing so much to encourage a greener way of travelling.

Not at all

The Community Forum submission to the Issues and Options consultation on this topic was as follows: Cars Whilst the vision of low car ownership is to be applauded, doubts remain that it will be possible both to respond to the current car ownership needs, and to avoid adjacent residential areas being the reservoir for parking ‘illicit’ cars owned by occupants. The danger is that measures to reduce car use will not be sufficiently thought through, robust or enforced to stand up to human creativity. The idea that not providing parking would reduce car usage at Orchard Park has just resulted in cars being scattered around the development. Adequate electric car charging provision is required from the outset. Transport. If the residents of the new development are going to be prohibited from having cars the poor state of public transport will be a threat to the development’s viability without a sea change in the quality of public transport. It is difficult for outsiders to grasp the inadequacy of Cambridge buses. A rule of thumb is that if a complete bus trip to the centre is even as fast as walking you are doing well. Central government wants London levels of development without enabling the London style control and operational finance of the buses which is essential for this to work. Cambridge must be fairly unique in having quite a few bus services not remotely designed with the actual inhabitants in mind. We welcome the concept of a trip budget for cars, however, it is an approach not a solution. Extra trips due to Science Park densification, the A14 upgrade and the many new developments such as Waterbeach and Northstowe will soon swallow this up. The plan suggests a reduction in the proportion of car trips of about two thirds to cope with this. The question is, How feasible is this? Are there precedents around the world for such a dramatic change and, if so, is it applicable to this case? The option of re-installing the railway line on the guided busway should be considered. It would have far more capacity and reach and it would be the fastest way of getting to the central station and the biomedical campus. A route will be needed for the Varsity Line anyway. The planners have our sympathies in grappling with, sometimes, conflicting transport strategies which may, or may not, materialise or have any hope of working. This is even if they are politically feasible and affordable. The danger is that we will commit to an unfeasibly high level of development before we have a realistic plan to deal with the transport. Many key factors are outside the control of the planners and the result could be gridlock. End of CF Submission The question should really be, "Does the transport strategy for the area make any sense at all? The item that stands out is the claim that there will be “no additional vehicle movements on Milton Road and Kings Hedges Road”. Although there are parts of the plan which there is scope for debate it is, at this point, that it completely disappears down the rabbit hole. The proposals last year showed a potential for car trips to increase by a factor of three. This was only reduced to the current, barely acceptable level, by simply wishing away two thirds of these trips. The evidence simply does not support this assertion which can only be considered a complete fantasy. Except ofr Covid and major wars there has been a relentless increase in car traffic for the last 100 years. There has to be some cast iron evidence to show a mofor reduction in use will happen and it does not. It does not even have to be completely wrong to cause a major problem. Even 20% more traffic would cause gridlock. On page 220 of the plan it argues that there is more flexible working, but firms are not going to buy office space for 20,000 people to keep them half empty. This is a fallacy. It will just be, say, 40,000 people in the office half the time. It should also be considered that with the increase in WFH more people will want to live in rural locations. This may reduce some trips, but they are more likely to be made by car due to lack of transport in rural areas aver being viable. If more offices are built then they will be full, just with more people using them less with just the same trip problem. The other problem is that if this fantasy policy fails there is no good plan B. The area will be completely choked with traffic. The original proposal had a number of measures to limit car use on the developments: 1. A ban on residents owning cars. 2. Access out of the development only onto the A14 to make travel into town more difficult. 3. Car not allowed to be parked on the development but only at car barns at the edge. 4. Green bridge across Milton Road The problem is that these have been watered down to rather vague and unfalsifiable assertions about discouraging car use. Again, the devil is in the detail, for instance, 20mph limits are not an innovation for residential areas. The police in Cambridge do not enforce them anyway. Local residents will be unpersuaded by the assertion that if displaced parking becomes a problem then something might be done about it once it becomes a serious problem. Putting in measures to avoid it at the outset is surely the minimum that should be done.

Mostly yes

No answer given

Not at all

One obvious way to do this is by establishing the city-wide residents' parking schemes already promised, but surely the aim should be to ENCOURAGE shifts to other forms of transport? Such as improved, subsidised public transport.

Neutral

What are Car Barns? If multi storage or below ground, great, if covered parking sealing even more land and being an eyesore, not good. If you want to encourage bike usage in apartment buildings, you have to provide plenty of safe and convenient bike storage, e.g. dedicate most of the ground floor to it.

Yes, completely

I'd also appreciate a regular bus route from Milton village to Cambridge North station for those days where I'm too lazy or it's to rainy to walk or cycle. I'll admit to having driven to the station from my house in Milton, but I'm not proud of it

Not at all

The plan completely ignores the transport revolution that we will see in the next 10-20 years through the use of electric and autonomous vehicles. The stated aim - 'this is important for tackling climate change, and for health and wellbeing' will quickly become a non-issue and we will be left with completely inadequate facilities to cope with the desire of residents to own and/or use green electric transport. The plan also ignores the fact that, while many residents will work on or near the area, many will work in other parts of Cambridge and the surrounding area. Experience tells us that in traveling to work, people want a commute that commences as close as possible from their front door and finished as close as possible to their place of work, and take little more than half an hour at most. For many the only viable option is to use a car.

Not at all

The plan completely ignores the transport revolution that we will see in the next 10-20 years through the use of electric and autonomous vehicles. The stated aim - 'this is important for tackling climate change, and for health and wellbeing' will quickly become a non-issue and we will be left with completely inadequate facilities to cope with the desire of residents to own and/or use green electric transport. The plan also ignores the fact that, while many residents will work on or near the area, many will work in other parts of Cambridge and the surrounding area. Experience tells us that in traveling to work, people want a commute that commences as close as possible from their front door and finished as close as possible to their place of work, and take little more than half an hour at most. For many the only viable option is to use a car.

Mostly yes

I think that the limits on cars are still too high and even less should be planned and designed for. And it is very difficult to see how having thousands of new homes (many with cars) will result in no new net car journeys on Milton Road. I like the idea of car barns and would like more information provided about how they would look and work.

Not at all

The development acknowledges that there will be an extra 4000+ cars throughout the planned centre. These cars will inevitably clog up already congested roads to/from the A14 and into the city centre and neighbouring areas (Arbury, Green End Road). This is not a discouragement of cars, it is simply a weak attempt to minimise the inevitable grid-lock.