Testun llawn:
The SA consultation considers "Likely Effects of the Local Plan Modifications" (pp 21-25) on Transport & Accessibility, Air Quality and Climate Change. It acknowledges in each case the "potential to increase the significance of negative effects". It then comments on "a range of mitigation strategies ... which will contribute to reducing the extent of these negative effects" but will not eliminate them.
The SA also shows extensive colour coded charts featuring numerous question marks in the various boxes. Thus we are offered a verbose, shuffling, imprecise narrative, which suggests the outcome may not be all that bad.
In the infrastructure planning there are hopeful suggestions of bus services to all these new developments. Yet well-established professional experience indicates that at low densities of 30 - 35 dwellings per hectare there is little prospect of effective bus services to provide a genuine and attractive alternative to the car. There is therefore no doubt that these proposed suburbs will be highly dependent on the motor car. Road planning, such as for Europa Way, confirms this expectation that the Local Plan is car-dependent and continues unreformed highway policies giving priority to motor traffic, largely in disregard of the NPPF clauses quoted above. This attempt to facilitate ever increasing volumes of traffic means that the extra flows along Europa Way will impact heavily on Warwick or Leamington or both. In mitigation we are offered schemes like the South Leamington gyratory, where the impulse to force through more traffic is most unlikely to "give priority to pedestrian and cycle movements". On the contrary, shoppers and visitors to the intended Creative Quarter will face an intimidating traffic circuit together with more air pollution.