News
April 2013. Secretary of State for Transport Patrick McLoughlin approved the Final Funding for the Hastings-Bexhill Link Road on April 3 2013, although clearing
the route of this major new road is well underway.
Buried in the budget on March 22 2012 was the news that 56 million was to be made available to fund the road. The road is expected to cost over 93.8 million according to estimates in October 2012, and the vast majority of the difference will come from the East Sussex County Council. The road was the final major road scheme awaiting a funding decision from the Department for Transport from those originally in the Department's "Development Pool", one of the transport project groupings with origins in the 2010 Spending Review.
Proposals for the road date right back to a dim and distant MultiModal Study carried out around the turn of the century, and have survived rejection not long after that by the then Secretary of State for economic and environmental reasons.
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News Focus
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Summer 2013: the Highways Agency finds itself busier than might have been anticipated as a result of the Autumn 2012 Statement by the Chancellor. Like its 2011 predecessor, the Statement gave the go-ahead to major road projects as a reaction to the unforeseen depth of the recession. The Statement confirmed the change of direction from the relative caution adopted to transport projects in the major post-election Spending Review in Autumn 2010.
With innovative "managed motorway" schemes once again brought forward, and plans shelved since the 90s being dusted off, LS8 looks at some of the larger road schemes, focuses on the current planning framework for roads and discusses the finance. |
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Analysis
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Policing on bikes is continuing to make advances
at force, district, station and PCSO level as 2013 progresses. In London, significant initiatives were announced by the Mayor in March. How compelling is the
case for police on bikes? |
Features
It's over 17 years since
the first Reclaim the Streets party (and that's our parasol in
a bucket of sand stopping the records melting in Pershore Road,
Birmingham).
The movement baffled the media, broadening to take in striking dockers, went global, then turned on capitalism itself. Its end as a victim of its own success was probably inevitable, but we ask a few questions anyway. With lots of flyers you won't find anywhere else. |
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LS8 Sidelines
28-Feb-13
station forecourts
The renaissance of the railways has extended to station approaches in many cities, perhaps with a view among planners to the conceived importance of first impressions of a city. The familiar experience of the 70s and 80s was to be dumped on a generally clogged up main road on exiting a station. Some station exits now offer a very different and traffic-free experience. At Liverpool, one drops into a large open square called The Concourse with great views of some of the major buildings. At Sheffield, the climb into the city from the station now starts with an open-space containing dozens of parallel fountains. Birmingham is on the way to adding to the list.
13-December-12 King of the AA
Edmund King has been President of the AA (Automobile Association, a UK roadside assistance and motorists' club), for many years, and his press-releases, which had a knack of making it to the national press, tended to portray motorists as hard done by and put upon. We quite often challenged them, and he once told us to "think before we mouth off". It's a sign of change, then, that last week he said drivers who refuse to share the road with cyclists were "absolute idiots". He continued that, "A lot of drivers have to look at their own habits first" [before criticising cylists]. Most remarkably, nowhere did he seem to add anything about cyclists jumping red-lights or riding on pavements, something which supposedly neutral commentators like to equate with the crime of speeding in town or overtaking a cyclist dangerously close. He does seem to have had some prolonged Road to Damascus type experience over the last 3 or 4 years.
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