Is York anti-car?

Ifirmly believe City of York Council is totally anti-traffic. For many years it has declared all-out war on the motorist and has squandered vast amounts of council tax payers' money in an attempt to cause as much hindrance as possible to anyone who has the unfortunate task of driving through York.

A close examination of the measures introduced over the last few years soon reveals that not only is the council anti-traffic, it also has total disregard for reducing pollution. In fact most of the so-called traffic calming measures actually cause more pollution than they prevent and in many cases cause added danger to road users.

There are plenty of examples.

The chicanes in Heslington Village cause long delays in both morning and evening traffic and increase journey time by at least ten minutes - meaning exhaust gasses being vented into the atmosphere for longer than necessary.

The way the roundabout at Stockton Lane/Heworth Green has been constructed with the ridiculous cycle lanes has only led to confusion, more traffic hold ups and much longer delays than before. The new bus stop in Fulford Road which extends into the carriageway is ridiculous and can only be interpreted as another deliberate attempt to disrupt the free flow of traffic.

Then there is the obstruction caused to emergency vehicles by road humps.

I have, since road humps were introduced, been totally opposed to them.

Their effect is illustrated by just one street in the city: Brockfield Park Drive in Huntington. It is almost straight and has several humps. As a driver approaches these, his eyes are drawn to the hump in an attempt to negotiate it as comfortably as possible. He uses his brakes to reduce speed (pollution from brake dust and heat), drives slowly over the hump and then accelerates to the next hump where he carries out the same procedure.

Each time he accelerates he is producing more exhaust gasses and by the time he has reached the end of the road he has probably produced twice the pollution he would have travelling at a constant speed.

His forward vision has been drawn to the road just in front of him and therefore he is not looking well ahead as the highway code suggests.

Travel down the same street at night and each time you drive over a hump your headlights will dazzle any oncoming car driver - and of course any car travelling towards you will dazzle you. In addition any car travelling behind you will dazzle you through your rear view mirror and by the time you have been over three or four humps your vision will be so impaired that if anyone walked out in front of you, you would probably not see them.

Road humps cause many more problems than they address and I believe they will go down in history as being more anti-social than the mobile phone.

No...says Bill Woolley, assistant director of development and transport at City of York Council

WE'RE not anti car, we're anti-congestion. What we are trying to do through our local transport plan is to reduce congestion and the impact of congestion. The majority of people tell us they want to see traffic levels reduced - it is at the top of concerns in our annual Residents Opinion survey.

Congestion is a major problem for all cities, but particularly for York. If you look at a map of York in 1600 and compare it with a map of York today, you will see that the street patterns are virtually the same.

We are dealing with what is essentially a medieval layout. We don't have the wide streets that some Victorian towns and cities have for things like bus lanes.

At the same time, we recognise that accessible transport is extremely important to York's economy.

So our key policy is to try to increase accessibility to the city centre and the services in and around York, but at the same time try to provide alternatives to the car.

If we could reduce car journeys by just ten per cent, we could all enjoy all the time the relative calm and tranquillity we get during the school holidays, when everybody says 'isn't it wonderful?'

That is why we have Park and Ride, and our attempts to encourage bus use and cycling.

York is recognised as perhaps the country's leading cycling city. About 17 per cent of people cycle to work in York, compared with a national average of about four per cent.

Nevertheless, we recognise that cars do make up the largest share of journeys in and around the city.

To demonstrate that we are not anti-car, we have plans to spend millions of pounds improving the capacity of the northern bypass and have recently contributed £2m to the A19 roundabout improvement.

We are also proposing a series of junction improvements at the A59, at Haxby Road and at Strensall to improve the capacity of the northern bypass.

We are doing this because surveys show that of traffic using Gillygate, for instance, 42 per cent of people are just trying to get from one side of the city to the other.

We have also taken on responsibility for monitoring parking in the city - not to penalise motorists but to target congestion which is often caused by illegal and inconsiderate parking - and have an on-going schedule of improvements to city centre car parks, including CCTV, reducing crime in car parks by 70 per cent.

The bottom line is that there is a finite limit to the capacity of York's road network. Car traffic is growing by one per cent a year nationally and in York we are trying to prevent further growth. If we allow it to continue, trying to get around York by car will only be more difficult.

Many people do not like the speed humps. But they are there for a purpose. In the last two years we have concentrated on improving safety outside schools.

Traffic calming works. Figures - obtained by monitoring accident levels before and after installing traffic calming - show that in York we have managed to reduce accidents by 30 a year.

Even more important, the number of serious accidents has dropped dramatically and we see that as something to celebrate.

Updated: 12:36 Friday, November 01, 2002