Welsh roads review hailed as a victory for cyclists.
Posted on in Business News , Cycles News
The Welsh Government has decided to scrap existing road building plans and to move instead towards encouraging sustainable and active transport over car use. As a result, all new road projects in Wales must now be aimed at reducing car use and encouraging active transport.
Road building projects in Wales will now have to meet four separate criteria which seek to reduce carbon emissions, encourage cycling, walking and public transport use, and improve safety.
Cycling UK's head of campaigns Duncan Dollimore called it "a marked shift from other UK administrations’ simplistic and outdated views of building more roads as the answer to all transport woes from congestion to poor air quality.”
He described it as “the most significant change in UK roads building policy over the last 20 years” saying that the proposals are “bold in principle and forward-looking as they realise the economic benefit of placing people and the environment at the heart of transport policy."
Sustainable transport charity Sustrans also welcomed the announcement and said that the UK government needed to take note.
"Whilst the Welsh Government is reviewing road building schemes to ensure they fit with the need to reduce traffic emissions, the UK Government is spending billions on major road building projects – this must stop," it said.
The announcement, by the Welsh deputy minister for climate change Lee Waters, comes off the back of the Welsh Roads Review.
Waters was reported by the BBC to have told the Senedd: "We will not get to net zero unless we stop doing the same thing over and over. None of this is easy but neither is the alternative."
Several major road building projects in Wales have now been scrapped adds the report, including the third Menai Bridge and the controversial Flintshire 'Red Route'.
The four criteria new projects will have to meet are as follows:
- Support modal shift (more journeys walked, cycled, or using public transport) and reduce carbon emissions.
- Improve safety through small-scale changes.
- Adapt to the impacts of climate change.
- Provide access and connectivity to jobs and centres of economic activity in a way that supports modal shift.
