Testun llawn:
This representation is about the land north of Milverton. I am a Fellow of the Insitute of Railway Operators, and am particularly concerned about the park-and-ride and railway station proposals, but also about wider transportation and infrastructure issues.
There is little evidence that much thought or planning has been done with regard to the wider infrastructure issues surrounding the proposed developments. How are adequate utility services to be provided? What is to be done to provide adequate provision for traffic, bearing in mind that the only way in which bus and train operators will provide services if they are profitable - most short-distance services will depend on substantial continuing public subsidy?
Dualling of the A452 between Blackdown and the A46 will in practice only serve to move peak-time traffic jams to the next bottleneck; any likely distribution of the desired destinations will reveal a large proportion of vehicular traffic which will want to go through Kenilworth or across Leamington Spa, and a very high proportion of these will be by car, simply adding to the current congestion and air pollution.
The mention of a park-and-ride facility is, particularly, a misleading example of ill-thought-out wishful thinking. Residents of the new development will not need to park at it; bus operators will not wish to extend journey time by diverting existing routes into it, while motorists already in their cars on the way to destinations in central Leamington, Kenilworth or Coventry, which have good on-street and off-street parking arrangements (unlike medieval York and Oxford), will have little incentive to incur additional journey time and expense by diverting to it. Buses from the park-and-ride to the town centres will in any case be caught in the same traffic jams; or do the planners wish to ban cars altogether from the town centres?
The proposed railway station at Old Milverton is even more of a pipe-dream. Even if one could be built at an acceptable cost at the proposed location - the railway is either in deep cutting or on relatively high embankment in this area - no rail passenger operator will be keen to provide a short-distance service which will require the movement of additional seats from main depots in Birmingham or further afield and extend the journey time of trains already on the line, leaving aside the inadequacy of the current rail layouts at Leamington and Coventry. In addition, consideration must also be given to the needs of freight operators, who have long-term contractual rights to use the line.
What makes park and ride work is frequency of service; there is no reason to believe that this could be provided at other than astronomical cost.
I have not seen any objective evidence about the Stratford Parkway scheme of park-and-ride. Observation does not suggest that it is successful.