Apply the transport hierarchy 30

Put your money where your hierarchy is

Ifit’s agreed that walking, cycling and using public transport is greener, healthier and cheaper for society than resorting to the car, then why do we spend so much money on things that we want to discourage?

A case in point is the upcoming dualling of York’s northern outer ring road that will cost an eye-watering £65 million. According to the council’s own modelling, this near-sighted project will only have a temporary effect on congestion and will actually generate more traffic and further car use! Planners have jargon for this for this: they call it induced demand. We call it stupid.

If we ever get a strategy, it must legally incorporate a policy called the Transport Hierarchy. The Transport Hierarchy puts pedestrians and disabled people at the top of the pyramid, followed by cyclists, then public transport, with private cars right down at the bottom. Councillors and council officers often parrot that they are taking into account the needs of “all road users”, but they shouldn’t be. According to the transport hierarchy, all road users do not have equal needs. Pedestrians and cyclists must be intentionally given higher status when new planning decisions are made. The hierarchy supposedly exists to ensure that active travel is improved with every new development and every bit of road restructuring that takes place. But it’s not. It’s a policy that seems to have been all but forgotten by York’s transport planners, despite it being featured front and centre in that Local Transport Plan! City of York Council are failing in their obligation to put the most vulnerable road users first. We have a hierarchy, it’s in the plan, so follow it.

To put it into context, the city of Ghent implemented its Traffic Circulation Plan for just £3.4million! For the kind of money that York is spending on just one road , it could have all the cycling and walking facilities that the Dutch enjoy and we’d see 50% of trips made by bike. That would be money very well spent as it would have a far greater positive impact, touching the lives of just about everyone in this city, rather than just shaving a few minutes off some drivers’ journey times. So much, then, for the Transport Hierarchy.