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Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-53050801

Transport for New Homes

June 2020

garden-village-visions.pdf

Methodology

We chose twenty of the current programme of more than fifty garden communities to study in detail: our ‘core’ study garden villages and towns. These are listed in the previous section.

 

We also looked at more than a dozen other garden villages in less detail to ascertain their transport priorities and funding.

 

The core twenty garden communities were deliberately chosen to represent every region and a range of scales: they include one garden city, seven garden towns and twelve garden villages. They were also chosen to reflect different forms of governance – unitary authorities, county and district councils, metropolitan authorities, development corporations and so on.

 

We used seven metrics to determine the likely main mode of transport at each site. Our scoring on these counts was not done on the basis of visions and masterplans: we looked for something more definite.

 

This involved consideration of where the development was in respect to existing public transport, cycling and walking routes, and whether or not there was firm funding and commitment to build bus infrastructure, rapid transit routes, cycling networks and other elements of sustainable transport: aspirations were not considered sufficient.

 

For those garden villages not yet in construction we were able to draw on the evidence from visits to similar types of housing development that we carried out in 2018 and on Transport Assessments, Infrastructure Delivery Plans, funding streams (both government and developer funding), advice from the bus industry, experience with the rail industry and those involved in

promoting cycling and walking.

 

We looked for:

  • Whether good bus services were assured all day, all week
  • All day, all week railway services from a nearby station
  • Walking distance to the railway station (miles)
  • Typical trains per hour frequency
  • Walking distance to nearest town centre (miles)
  • Safe walking routes
  • Safe cycling routes

 

We expected settlements that exhibited most of these criteria to have sustainable transport as the main mode. We looked for places that genuinely would not be orientated around the car.

 

We also looked at traffic generation, the lists of new or bigger roads and junctions that were required and their funding. We looked to see if these were higher priority in infrastructure funding lists than public transport and active travel. New motorway junctions, larger motorway junctions and other major strategic roads needed to cope with garden communities were noted.

Findings

  • Car dependent. Unless action is taken, the twenty garden communities that we looked at in detail risk creating up to 200,000 car dependent households. The other garden villages that we looked at also appear to be following this model of unsustainable transport, even if their visions are often very good.
  • More traffic on our roads. Our garden communities are likely to contribute to widespread traffic jams on country roads and junctions, and on our motorways and other main roads as residents head for cities for work, and drive to out of town destinations.
  • Unlikely to be self-sufficient. All garden villages presented fine visions of ‘self-sufficient’ places, in line with the aims of the government’s Garden Communities Prospectus - walking communities where people had everything to hand on site. However with existing village shops, pubs and other amenities being closed or failing to prosper, the fear was that fine visions would end up as just housing estates.
  • Massive investment in road capacity. We found that nearly every garden village came with largescale investment in strategic and local road capacity to ‘mitigate’ thousands of new car journeys onto the road network. This went counter to the notions of ‘self-sufficiency’ and ‘self-containment’.
  • Motorway junctions for garden communities. About half of garden communities were associated with enlarging or adding a motorway junction or building a new one for a quick getaway.
  • We get a bypass! A number of garden communities were in locations chosen in part to finance a new bypass or link road that had been wanted for years.
  • Public transport very popular but unfunded. Nearly every garden town wanted excellent public transport. Equally the vast majority of garden villages put sustainable transport at the heart of their vision. Funding was however, very uncertain and pushed a long way into the future - there was little definite. We could find no garden community where the sustainable transport elements were costed and funded with delivery dates.
  • Rail too far; services too infrequent. Only one garden village (Aylesham) offers existing amenities and a railway station within 1 mile of every home. However, in common with many small stations in the countryside, trains were very infrequent.
  • Cycling underfunded. The number of completely funded cycle networks for garden towns was zero. Garden villages were on the whole too far away from towns to cycle or involved dangerous roads.
  • Tarmac or green? Place-making to give areas character and make them pleasant places to walk around was central to visions but not to funding. So many great ideas and so much enthusiasm to build better places to live, but when it comes to the crunch will it really happen? We were not convinced.
  • Garden village? Gardens risked being small or absent at the front of houses. Pavements were left out. We put this down to a need for so much parking to support a car-based life style.

 

Conclusions


The government Garden Community Prospectus explained that we should no longer build characterless housing estates – something better was required.
The new concept was the ‘garden community’ which promised something completely different. These new places were to be ‘largely self-sustaining and genuinely mixed-use’ with ‘public transport, walking and cycling’ enabling ‘simple and sustainable access to jobs, education and services’. Our research has shown that despite fine visions, the developments proposed are moving in a different direction from the Garden Communities Prospectus.


Rather than being centred on sustainable transport, it looks like garden communities are to become car-based commuter estates just like any other - exactly what the government wanted to avoid. Transport assessments submitted with planning applications for garden communities tell the story. They model the thousands of car journeys expected to pour into and out of garden communities in the future, with new roads and large junctions put forward as ‘mitigation’ to cater for all that
traffic.


Although the theme of the ‘local’ and ‘self-sufficient’ is the official line, the language adopted in the promotion of garden villages makes great play of their strategic location for long distance commuting, near such and such motorway junction or within easy reach of such and such fast road. The developments are generally in the wrong location for sustainable modes of transport. Land to build might be cheap in the middle of the countryside, with public money to ‘open up land’ by funding major roads. But we end up building in the wrong place and in the wrong way.

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