It’s important to listen to people, but policies and evidence are important too

There aren’t many laughs in council documents. Yet the consultation version of the new Devon and Torbay Local Transport Plan going for approval by Devon County Council’s Cabinet this week induced a chuckle.

A key statement in the draft plan is:
“People’s access to reliable transport remains essential. An affordable, sustainable, and well connected transport system can help improve the quality of life for Devon and Torbay’s residents. This transport strategy and plan for future investment aims to accomplish this by developing transport infrastructure that:

• maintains an efficient and reliable network
• supports active travel
• reduces the negative impacts of transport such as congestion and pollution

Among the relevant evidence findings cited in the draft plan are:

• During stakeholder consultation in 2023, congestion was identified as the top issue of concern in Exeter and improved public transport provision as the number one priority action (officer report)
• “Data suggests that traffic conditions are unchanged in the morning peak hour. However, travel demand through the day has increased and congestion has risen in the afternoon peak hours. This reflects the growth in the appeal of the city for shopping and wider trends of increasing leisure travel and less commuting.” (p20)
• A Citizens Assembly showed level of public support of 70%-80% for action to “reduce traffic emissions in Devon by discouraging car use while ensuring continued mobility.” (p10)

Included in the draft plan are the following commitments:

• We will use Devon’s Bus Service Improvement Plan (BSIP) funding to implement bus priority measures on those corridors with the most frequent services to help make buses in, and travelling into, the city quicker and more attractive. These corridors include Cowick Street, Heavitree Road, New North Road and Pinhoe Road. (p24)

• Attractive urban bus networks — Measures to enhance bus priority on key corridors, including Cowick Street, Exe Bridges, New North Road, Pinhoe Road and Heavitree Road. (p28)

• Innovation and Invention — Allow trials and testing of new measures and/or network changes to accelerate processes for decarbonising the transport network. (p28)

All good stuff. So why the chuckle?

The draft envisages an ideal world, where political decisions are taken in line with agreed political policies. It does not recognise the serious loss of backbone at County Hall, particularly in the Exeter Highways and Traffic Orders Committee (HATOC) which is the body of councillors that authorises Traffic Regulation Orders that are legally necessary to make changes to the road network including bus lanes. Somewhat traumatically for some, Exeter HATOC was forced in June by a combination of public misbehaviour and a volte-face by county council officers to back down and prematurely halt the Active Streets Heavitree and Whipton Trial Scheme (aka the Low Traffic Neighbourhood, or LTN).

So when, at its meeting on 23 July 2024, the committee was invited to give final approval to implementing the scheme for enhancing bus priority on Cowick Street, councillors looked at the reported level of public opposition to going ahead and promptly scrapped the scheme. All but two councillors – the Labour chair and the sole Green Party member – decided that all the council’s policies, all the evidence put forward in support of the scheme and their own decision in January 2024 to greenlight the making of the Traffic Regulation Order counted for nothing when set against a petition objecting to the proposals because of the presumed effect on local businesses.

Let’s just pause a moment. The officer report to the committee stated that a petition of 759 names was received. The grounds of objection were that the change would “impact upon businesses and that it may increase traffic speeds and make Cowick Street less safe”. There were only 19 individual objections to the scheme, many objecting to the new parking restrictions, even though alternative nearby parking remains available.

A further focus of the objections was that the proposal to prohibit loading from 7am to 7pm was excessive and damaging to businesses. Accordingly the officer report proposed that the loading ban should be from 7am to 10am and from 4pm to 7pm, the same periods as the increased hours of operation proposed for the bus lane.

So where are the problems? What made every Tory and Labour councillor, other than the chair, on the committee vote to throw out the whole scheme, and in passing waste the tens of thousands spent to date on developing it?

It does stretch credulity to think that every one of the 759 petitioners had given the matter careful thought. We know, from his own statements to the committee, that Mr Clarke from Clarkes Electrical in Cowick Street had collected many objections. Were these from people who popped into his shop and acted on the basis of Mr Clarke’s own views? And was there any repetition of the manipulation of objector numbers as occurred in the Heavitree and Whipton LTN trial?

It’s not as if there is evidence to back up the claims of damage to businesses. When the Magdalen Road traffic restrictions were consulted on in 2021 and 2022, the same claims were made. Today the St Leonard’s Neighbourhood Association comments: There was, for some time a period of intense disruption for both the traders and the shoppers, but the loyalty of the customers kept them going.

Is all this important? In an Exeter Observer interview with me last year Peter Knight, the boss of Stagecoach South West, highlighted traffic congestion in Exeter as a major obstacle to running a decent bus service. At a meeting of the county’s Bus User and Stakeholder Forum in May this year he said congestion, from traffic and road works, was now “the biggest challenge”.

Last Friday at about 4pm I was on a bus which took a quarter of an hour to travel the quarter mile from the foot of Fore Street to the junction of Haven Road and Alphington Road. That’s an average speed of 1 mph. Most of the time was spent on New Bridge Street waiting for traffic ahead to be able to access the northern side of the Exe Bridges gyratory. This is not an uncommon experience.

If councillors are so worried about public objections to implementing policies they’ve said they support, perhaps they should start to redeem their credibility by pushing for bus priority measures on the Exe Bridges gyratory, where no one can complain about loss of parking (there is none to lose) or impacts on businesses (there are none to be impacted).

Meanwhile we await with interest what decisions Exeter HATOC will take when the proposals for the next stages of the Heavitree Road and Pinhoe Road traffic management schemes are brought to them later this year.