town is gridlocked between 330 and 630 every weekday

[badtraffic]

The answer is to build more homes.

I could cry.

Turbo - get a better bike lock! I always lock up on the street, with no problems. Also agree with other pps, if everyone went to their nearest school, this would not be a problem. Why do people have to drive everywhere.

Very few people where I live actually give a shit about the buses. Only the old and the poor really use them, and who gives a shit about them? And yes, people drive the shortest of distances. I would say our local park is a 15 minute walk. I reckon I am the only local who owns a car who would routinely walk there.

And everyone sends their kids to the local school. Many still drive. It's a mindset.

DH bought me an electric bike - best thing ever!

Also moved from the country to a town to make travelling easier - do the shopping by bike, hoping to commute to work by bike

But PLEASE can someone sort out cycle paths/tracks toothing along nice and safely then wham! It ends! Back on a main bloody road! It's shit

Can I ask if you own your own home?

Is that to me? If so yes, I do now - but when I was younger I upped sticks and moved to find work when I was renting (25 yrs ago), no different to what I did this year, haven't found the job yet but I ride to interviews on my bike (hope the 2 aren't connected)

I own my own home, yes.

Proper designated cycle paths and decent investment in roads.... we've had very little of both over past 30 years.

No not to you Katy. Was just wondering cause we have a lot of people in our area that are against new housing and it all seems to be people who already have their house. Can be a little annoying because a lot of people are really really trying and any expansion comes with a big fat 'not near me'.

But PLEASE can someone sort out cycle paths/tracks toothing along nice and safely then wham! It ends! Back on a main bloody road! It's shit

^
This
We need a proper network of cycle paths, not a hitch potch of paths that startinf and stopping randomly across cities.

Just because you own a home wouldn’t mean you have to drive a car everywhere if there was alternative transport

Travelling by car isn’t very efficient, it’s slow and when you get to your destination there is no where to put your car

If infrastructure was similar to other countries in Europe people could get teams busses and use bikes

Children would cycle to school and parents to work by bike and train

It would save thousands on air pollution, luves and money. Millions on NHS

But people aspire to sit one person in a car made for 5 and queue for hours

Oh I am a bit of a nimby - but only is as far as houses should not be buily unless there are school, GPs, dentists and proper infrastructure for them

If that happens - I'm cool

Actually my dad wrote a piece of building new houses hang on

Here it is - he worked in social housing for many years

"Remove capital gains tax from land sold for housing and replace it with a new tax to be directly re-cycled into subsidising the building of affordable homes. I would start modelling around a figure of 75%. Then I would calculate how many homes were needed and where and restore the arrangement of instructing at the lowest level of local government that planning permissions be granted for the needed numbers and categories of homes for that location. If you want a really radical idea, don’t even buy greenfield building land; lease it. If an acre of agricultural land is worth £10,000 then most landowners would probably be very happy with a return of 8% for doing nothing. That equates to £800 per annum or £50 to £70 per house per annum. So buy the house and rent the land at £50 to £100 per year. Somewhat less than the mortgage on the £70,000 or so it would cost to buy the land at freehold building site price. You would need to provide for indexation and use housing associations to manage the leases but it’s feasible."

If anyone wants to run with the idea - go for it!

" Was just wondering cause we have a lot of people in our area that are against new housing and it all seems to be people who already have their house."

Yes we get that here, you get these people bleating on about building on some field somewhere and saying that there is a vital footpath used by literally dozens of people every year and green belt and blah blah blah, and then it turns out that they own a house on said green belt, so their attitude is 'it's ok for me to own a house on this nice bit of countryside but everyone else can fuck off and die'

local government funding has been cut by about 30% or 40% since 2010. How are councils supposed to deal with that and provide anything except a skeleton service?

If they make it a condition of providing planning permission, they can make the developers pay for it. They’ll try and wriggle out of it - or pay hefty get out fees - but ultimately this is part of the planning process. Lots of local councils don’t take full advantage of it though; they rely on the impact reports provided by the developers themselves. It requires joined up thinking provided by people who aren’t involved in these sorts of discussions or decisions.

Our town has been gridlocked for months. You can sit in a traffic jam for an hour to get through the town centre at seven pm on a tuesday, and yes we're apparently getting another ten thousand homes in our county... no mention of any new school, doctors surgeries etc though....
I drive. I know I'm part of the problem. But for those saying 'get the bus' this is not London, the buses are sporadic after 6pm and none existent after 7pm.

And bikes get stolen

@badtraffic I did wonder if you lived where I do as your post was after last night’s planning meeting. It seems you do! The traffic is something else and I can only see it getting worse. The tolled Runcorn-Widnes bridge opens this weekend, that’ll help. Not!

The bus service is worse than 20 years ago when I used to go into town after my shift in the pub at 11pm. No bus now at that time now. There also used to be 4 buses an hour into town, I think there are 2 now. Progress?

We have a major hospital which is inaccessible on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. The city council have limited the parking to encourage people to use the park and ride. The park and ride with the direct bus service to the hospital is full by 7am of cars belonging to London commuters who get the coach to London.

The hospital has no staff showers, very few lockers and parking for 20 bikes.

Hundreds of appointments are missed each month because people cannot get into the hospital, so the local district hospital 20 miles north is going to be downgraded to miu and more patients funnelled to the main hospital. No bus or train improvements are proposed.

That's before the 100000 new houses to be built over the next 10 years...

Britain needs more homes. A lot more. Unless you think there's nothing wrong in expecting 35-year-olds to live in one room in a shared house or still be living with their parents, and the current and future generations having not a hope in hell of ever owning their own home. Britain needs to somehow correct the consequences of decades of government policy hostile to homebuilding.

Of course more homes may create more traffic. The solution to that IMHO is properly placed services and amenities, useful public transport, and road networks capable of providing the mobility needed. Not deliberately choking the growth and prosperity of the country. If a shop had so many customers there were long queues at the till, the owner wouldn't say "Oh no, the shop is full!", they'd hire more staff, open more tills, open more shops.

In our nearest town the public transport is nigh on non existent. Money needs to be invested in proper decent cycle paths, sensible bus timetables and reinstate the branch railways.

It’s all well and good Londoners bleating on about public transport, tubes run every 2 minutes buses up here run every 90 if you’re lucky!

Same in our town. If only some of those buggers would walk their dc to school, problem would be solved. Nobody lives more than a mile away. You can really notice the difference in school holidays.

I have more sympathy for the people living in tents by the canal because they have no home myself. They don't have cars, funnily enough.

well yes "safariboot* but if the shopkeeper knew there was an influx of customers coming surely they'd hire the staff etc. not wait till the customers were piling out the door and getting cross. Whoever grants planning permission for 1000 new houses surely knows how many children are thus likely to need school places/playgrounds/ football fields and how many extra commuters are likely to be using public transport and the roads. So you plan ahead at the same time as building the houses - and in cases of private developments make the developer contribute to the planning and cost.

Surely peoples need for a home is more important than your need to drive your car through the city centre for a 3 hour window each day?

Oh, I totally agree People need houses. Let's build them in places where the infrastructure is already struggling to cope with the local population, with no thought as to how the extra people will compound an already untenable situation.

Eff all those school children who need to be picked up because they're too little to come home alone/the route is too dangerous/not logistically feasible for someone without a car. Clearly the solution is to pack more of them in so that it's HARDER to pick them up and there's more OF them.

Eff all those people who depend on public transport because they medically or legally can't drive. I mean, you get on a bus, you should expect it to take three times as long as the timetable states, and you should expect being late to work/school/doctor's appointments every time. Eff you for not thinking about that before you made the decision not to drive, and made the decision to live in an area where the public transport is struggling.

Eff those people who are already having to wait a week, two weeks, more, to get an appointment at their local GP. Build more houses! Who cares if that means more people want to use that same local GP? Eff the people who don't have the means to go somewhere else, basically. Or eff the GP for not working 24/7 to meet the demand.

Basically, in case this isn't clear, I think you're ridiculous for thinking that "need more houses" is a good reason to cram more houses in where the locality cannot support more people. Because unless those houses are built to remain empty (which they're obviously not), more houses mean more people. And even from the OP's brief start post, it's clear that the area is already struggling to support the population it already has.

I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that it isn't to cram more sardines into an already packed tin.

Another one coming on to say Colchester!

By far the worst part of living here, two sets of friends have moved purely because of the awful traffic and roads. Clingo Hill/Cowdrey/North Hill anyone