News
March 2012. Buried in the budget on March 22 was the news that £ 56 million will be made available to fund the Hastings-Bexhill Link Road. The road is expected to cost over £85 million according to estimates from the September 2011 final funding bid, 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, although shortly after that the scheme was, rejected for economic and environmental reasons by the then Secretary of State. One might speculate that that was a time when roadbuilding decisions were more divisive and dangerous ones for politicians than is now the case.
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News Focus
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Spring 2012: in his Autumn Statement a few months ago, the Chancellor gave a significant boost to roadbuilding at national and local level as a reaction to the unforeseen depth of the recession. In so doing he changed direction significantly from the position of relative caution adopted to transport projects a year earlier in the major post-election Spending Review.
With innovative "managed motorway" schemes once again brought forward, 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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Expansion may have slowed with budget pressures, but policing on bikes continued to make advances
at force, district, station and PCSO level in 2011. With cycling set to boom in 2012 on the back of Olypmic success, how compelling is the
case for police on bikes? |
Features
It's over 15 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
13-Apr-12
overcrowding creeps northwards
A couple of new experiences have become common in London in the last few years. One is not being able to physically get on to a tube train, since it's immediately apparent when the doors open that it's as full as it can get. Another is trying to get off a tube train in London and having to thread through a dense wall of people on the platform. The Tube is desperately overcrowded, and Londoners no doubt have similar experiences using mainline trains in the rush hour.
The redevelopment of New Street in Birmingham is now well underway, and this means ongoing loss of platform space: platforms are seeing the central area boarded off, forcing those waiting to crowd at the platform edges. When a full service arrives, and particularly where doors are limited to carriage-ends (Pendolinos for instance), the London experience of alighting passengers having no obvious dispersal route at the back of the platform has unfortunately become a Birmingham one.
27-February-12 what else could use the High Speed 2 coridoor?
A utilities company has drawn up plans for a giant water pipe to run alongside High Speed 2 to move water south and westwards. That raises the point that, should the rail scheme go-ahead, it would represent a unique opportunity to move things other than trains around the major population centres of England and maybe the UK, and, assuming the pipe is to go underground, it would be great to see full consideration of what else might go in a such a hole to make it more viable.
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