Firstly the Kingskerswell Alliance would like to thank the editor of the Herald Express for allowing them the opportunity to express their views in greater depth in his newspaper. The paper has had its colours firmly nailed to the mast as to where it stands on the bypass and allowing the Alliance to present their views more fully demonstrates the success of their policy regards balanced reporting on local issues.

     The Kingkerswell Bypass is the most contentious transport initiative that faces local government in the area, with few people not having a viewpoint on the matter. Everybody, including the Kingskerswell Alliance, is in agreement that the present situation is intolerable and that something needs to be done. We are told that the only solution to the problem is the proposed bypass and it is this statement that the Alliance takes issue with.

     The Alliance has only one agenda and that is we seek a practical, economically viable and environmentally aware, solution to the traffic bottleneck on the A380 between Penn Inn and Kerswell Gardens. The supporters of the bypass at local and county government level have a hidden agenda namely the development of the green fields between Decoy and Edginswell. The hated CLS Laundry and the proposed Industrial Park at Edginswell being the tangible thin end of a very large wedge that they have in store for the area. The inevitable result of building the bypass would be the swallowing up of Kingskerswell into an unbroken ribbon of housing and industrial units between Newton Abbot and Torquay and all this in the name of clearing the A380 bottleneck. The matter would not end with the A380; if the developers were successful how long do you think it would be before they wanted to re-examine the extension of the ring road through the Westerland Valley that would open the door to unlimited expansion into the beautiful South Hams. Loss of the environment is an amenity lost to everyone, be they a bypass supporter or not, and also to their children yet to be born. Environment is not lost by a single cataclysmic action, but by the steady erosion from developers whose motives may seem honourable in isolation, but whose actions taken in total are rapidly destroying this beautiful area we live in. It is also a highly contentious issue that building more roads is the way to deal with traffic problems and most experts now concede that road building only attempts to treat the effects of traffic congestion rather than address its causes. The M25 was going to solve London’s traffic problems but went on to become the Britain’s largest circular car park, however the introduction of congestion charges in Central London have shown a dramatic improvement thus clearly demonstrating that alternative strategies can work.

      The business community would have you believe that the lack of a bypass is stifling economic development in Torbay. The truth is apparent to any observer in that the morning commuter traffic is predominantly tying to get out of the Bay to get to work with the opposite situation in the evening. This is because the same business community has failed to provide stable well paid employment for workers within the bay, which would negate Torbay residents having to travel to Plymouth and Exeter and beyond. The road capacity that would be freed up by less commuter traffic would easily cope with the additional goods inward / outward traffic such employment improvements would make.

      So, if we do not have a bypass what shall we do to address the situation? There are, of course, other options and one of them is to make smaller, cheaper improvements to the existing road that would allow traffic to flow in an uninterrupted manner. If traffic was to flow at 30mph then the journey time would be less than 6 minutes from Newton Abbot to Torquay. The provision of a flyover / underpass at Penn Inn and a modern “clover leaf” type junction at Kerswell Gardens would have a major impact on the A380. In addition the implementation of a pedestrian footbridge at Jury’s Corner in Kingskerswell along with filter roads for joining traffic would mean the elimination of the traffic lights there. There are those who believe that there is room for three carriageways along the bulk of the existing route where the lanes could be prioritised according to prevailing demand. We are told by DCC that these options have been fully examined and found to be impracticable but after over a year of asking on behalf of the Alliance no one at County Hall has been able to produce the study document for scrutiny. Of course there will be protests from people living along the existing road, but if living next to a busy road is a problem then one has to wonder why they chose to buy a property there in the first place. The A380 was built before the houses that line its route and is itself an example of the inevitable ribbon development that takes place when new roads are built.

     In addition to physical improvements to the A380 there are other complimentary actions to be taken that together would mitigate the current situation. The current St Marychurch road is an underused resource and would only require widening at a few points to allow traffic to flow safely and could be made to join into the existing Barton New Town / Willows road network rather than the already congested Barton Hill Road.

     Calls for improvements to public transport, which would have a major impact on commuter traffic, repeatedly fall on deaf ears. A return to the days when public transport policy fulfilled a social need rather than an accountant’s profit and loss sheet would benefit the country as a whole let alone the A380.

     Anyone using the road on a regular basis will have noticed the dramatic reduction in traffic during the school holidays. Why do we not have school buses like the yellow ones in America, and why can’t our increasingly obese children walk to school if this is a distance of less than two miles? If safety concerns are the reason then why can we not have dedicated walkways for schoolchildren, similar to cycle ways, that have seen successfully implemented in cities like Manchester? While on this subject is it really so difficult to have a dedicated rural cycle way between Torbay and Newton Abbot where users can breathe fresh air rather than exhaust smoke?

     The demographic of employment is due to see radical changes in the near future. When workers nationally were polled as to whether they would prefer to have flexible working hours or an additional £1000.00 in their pay packet they voted overwhelmingly for flexible working hours which would have the effect of smoothing out the morning and evening rush hours. The advent of broadband technologies will mean that employees who work on a PC all day will have the option to do at least part of their job from home further reducing commuter traffic.

     The proposed Kingkerswell Bypass has been offered to the community as the only solution to the problem, which is untrue, but its proposal has had an even more insidious effect. County hall has gone on record as saying that improvements to the existing road similar to those outlined above are not possible, as they would compromise the introduction of the bypass. They then go on to say that assuming that there are no hold ups with the planning process (by no means a given) the earliest that a bypass could be in place is 2011 and that also assumes that they are able to find the £50 million plus which at the moment they do not have. So here we have the classic Catch 22 situation, we cannot have improvements because of the bypass and we can’t have a bypass for another eight years earliest for which they have no financial backing. Given that DCC have a track record of over 30 years of procrastination on this issue local people have no guarantee or faith that 2011 is realistic either.

     If you have a blocked drain surely it makes more sense to try and unblock it before going to the expense of laying a new one? The good people of Torbay and Teignbridge are fed up to the back teeth of the blocked drain that is the A380. However they are even more fed up with the endless promises from County Hall that they are going to have a bypass one day. After over 30 years of promises do they really expect us to believe they will deliver a solution in the next 10 years? What the people of this area really want to see is the implementation of some or all of the above proposals and they want to see it done now, not in 2011 or some other pie in the sky time but right now!

     So how do we move forward? The time has come when even the most ardent bypass supporter has to accept the likelihood that his road will never be built. Surely it is time for all of us who suffer the daily misery of travelling on the A380 to combine our forces and demand these improvements that are affordable, workable and could be started next year. The Kingskerswell Bypass has ceased to be a realistic goal and has now just become an excuse for delivering nothing. Perhaps if the ardent environmentalists were to concede that there has to be some road improvements, and if the confirmed bypass supporters were to concede that these should be tried before laying a new four lane highway then between us we may actually accomplish something.