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news
Signs campaigning against plans for new relief road in Watlington (Oxfordshire Roads Action Alliance)“It beggars belief”: Council slammed for raiding active travel funds to build “unnecessary, damaging” new road in small town
A council’s plans to plunder its active travel budget to build a highly contentious and “unnecessary” relief road have been condemned by local campaigners and politicians, who say it “beggars belief” that the authority would spend the bulk of its active travel funding on new roads, instead of “investing properly in walking and cycling”.
In the first draft of its new proposed budget, set to be finalised in February, Oxfordshire County Council says it will take £11.1 million from its £13.62 million cycling and walking fund, earmarked for schemes which “encourage and facilitate active travel and improve market towns”, to build a new relief road in Watlington, a small market town with a population of around 3,000.
According to the council, the bypass will “reduce congestion and noise and air pollution” in the town, while connecting existing and proposed housing developments around its northern and western sides, and providing access for motorists in south Oxfordshire to the M40, A34, and B4009 without the need to travel through the centre of Watlington.
Watlington High Street
The plans also say that the road will include facilities for cycling, walking, and travelling by bus. However, engineering consultants have said that these “basic” facilities are “unlikely to see significant levels of use” – prompting local campaigners to insist that the project is “not an active travel measure and should not be considered as such”.
Last week, the Oxfordshire Roads Action Alliance (ORAA), a community-based campaign group which promotes sustainable transport across the county and opposes the creation of new roads, wrote to councillors last week calling on them to vote against the Liberal Democrat and Green Party-controlled authority’s proposed budget.
“At a time when the county council is seriously short of money it makes no sense to be pushing this unnecessary road,” the ORAA’s co-chair Chris Church told the Oxfordshire Herald.
“What money is available should be spent on fixing potholes across the county rather than a damaging new road round one small town.
“This proposed road is not an active travel measure and should not be considered as such. A track for pedestrians and cyclists beside a large new road does not meet current standards for such schemes.
“This is a questionable use of public money and misrepresentation of its purpose.”
Meanwhile, Labour county councillor Charlie Hicks was also scathing of the local authority’s failure to meet its cycling and walking targets, while being seemingly set to raid its active travel coffers for new roads.
“While there is a pothole black hole of hundreds of millions of pounds in Oxfordshire and the council is on course to miss its own walking and cycling targets, it beggars belief that the Lib Dems would take millions from the walking and cycling pot and spend it on building new roads, rather than fixing the roads they are already meant to look after or investing properly in walking and cycling,” he said.
National engineering consultants Hydrock also pointed out that while the proposed scheme would provide “basic pedestrian and cycle facilities”, these are “unlikely to see significant levels of use” due to the nature of the road.
However, the council has insisted that the plans would “meet the needs of existing and future communities” by reducing congestion.
“The proposed relief road will help to ensure that Watlington is able to meet the needs of existing and future communities by significantly reducing congestion through the heart of the settlement,” a spokesperson said.
“It includes facilities for walking, cycling, and travel by bus, as well as delivering connectivity to the wider network through proposed active travel improvements at Pyrton Lane and Shirburn Road.
“However, we will always ensure that safety, the climate, maintenance considerations, and measures to facilitate active travel are at the heart of any new road design and construction programmes.
“Pothole repairs and facilitating travel on foot and/or by bicycle have always played, and will continue to play, a key part in the overall budget setting process for this administration.”
Meanwhile, the council’s cabinet member for infrastructure and development strategy, Judy Roberts says that the plans will benefit cycling and walking in Watlington because they will help reduce congestion in the town.
“Its aim is to alleviate congestion, noise, and air pollution in the town centre and enable future housing developments, by offering more sustainable modes of transport including cycling and walking,” Roberts said last month when the plans were officially submitted and a consultation process agreed.
While the use of active travel funds for new roads has provoked consternation in Oxfordshire, a similar uproar occurred last month in Northern Ireland, where the Department for Infrastructure (DfI) was accused of potentially misleading reporting of its active travel spending, after telling the public that it is spending £2.6m on a cycle lane project, only for it to since emerge that a major part of the supposed “active travel” investment is for “resurfacing of the carriageway”.
In a report published by the Belfast Telegraph, the newspaper said it wanted to question why the DfI described the entire £2.6m allocated for the project near Ballykelly as coming from its active travel budget “when most of the work relates to a road for cars and lorries”.
The newspaper stated that it “also asked whether this is the way in which DfI regularly apportions expenditure, describing road building as ‘active travel’,” a habit that also seems to have caught on across the Irish Sea if Oxfordshire County Council’s new plans are anything to go by.
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
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31 comments
This would be a terrible decision, if it were true.
The funding for this scheme (which several local developments have been designed around) was going to come from Oxfordshire Growth Deal funding, but due to the time limits on that, will come from the general capital budget. (I have no idea where Charlie Hicks got that idea from, but I bet he can't evidence it.)
No money has been taken from the active travel budget at all.
The new bit of road will have good active travel infrastructure as part of the scheme, and will enable improved bus services.
Equally importantly it will remove heavy through traffic (Watlington is on the route south from the M40 junction) from the town centre, making it a much better and safer environment for walking and cycling. There are plans in place to improve the town centre to support this.
Oxfordshire County Council is regularly attacked by critics for moving forward too fast on active travel and public transport measures, usually on the basis of lack of understanding, conspiracy theories and/or right wing pro-car ideology.
I suppose this is a change from that.
Do you have a link for the budget? Road.cc say the info comes from the council, in their draft budget - a quick Google can find that but not the information they're citing (or that you say is mistaken).
As you say this does seem to be from an "internal" budget at least rather than direct from e.g. Active Travel England.
(Obviously it would be better if road.cc provided their source, but guessing they just got this 2nd or 3rd hand... OTOH this seems to be cited by paper, Councillor and the Oxfordshire Roads Action Alliance)?
I suspect the confusion has come from here.
That framing makes it sound as though all of the following schemes are primarily for active travel, with town improvement as a secondary benefit, and consequently easy to assume that it's all active travel budget. But presumably should be read as an 'or' rather than an 'and', at least as far as the primary aims are concerned.
To show just how you can't please all of the people, all (or any) of the time...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9wlk45lvn7o.amp
I'll pre-empt this by saying I have enormous sympathy for councillors who need to decide where to cut services to balance the books due to years of budget cuts and officers who have to come up with options. BUT, I've been looking at proposed possible areas of savings at Dundee City Council.
Most of the options under consideration are of value to the community, and one is to cut the budget for the support of sustainable transport - saving £37k. Another option is to cut the subsidies to the Dundee - Heathrow air service when the contract expires - saving £133k in 25/26 then £320 the following year. There's also an option to cut subusidies for weekend and evening bus services that would save £134k each year.
I find it remarkable that this subsidy to promote unsustainable travel for the benefit of a handful of wealthy individuals has survived years of cuts to services that are of value to the local community and our environment. There will no doubt be claims of the value to the local economy, as if sustainable transport and bus services are not used by people who go to work or to shops and restaurants etc.
As a bonus, ending non-statutory work on accident investigation and safety could save a further £47k.
The Watlington bypass will turn Watington into a ghost town, and a lot of shops will be put out of business, it will also make it easier for motorists to rob shops and get away. How many trees will be cut down for the new road and when will the tree-hugging record attempt be made?..........All irrelevant, it's a new road.
I have mixed feelings about this - whilst the decision to raid the active travel pot is appalling there really isn't much need to spend huge sums on cycling in Watlington - I know it well and there are some absolutely brilliant cycling routes from the North and South, and Oxford Condors regular TT route is just north between there and Stadhampton.
The current road is a rat run between Henley/Reading and the M40 and the proposed road may aliveate some of that, whilst causing minimal harm (or benefit) to existing cycle traffic, as the bulk are on long rides and its too isolated from other villages for occasional cyclists.
So plundering the wrong budget aside I dont think the road in general is a bad idea.
But plundering the wrong budget is the central issue.
The council is proposing to spend 82% of its cycling and walking budget on new facilities for motor vehicles.
No it isn't.
I have no idea where the idea came from that the funding for this came from the acyive travel budget, it's simply not true.
You can be reassured then, the money IS NOT coming from the active travel budget. It was going to be funded by the Oxfordshire Growth Deal funding, tied to the housing developments, but is now coming from the general capital budget.
No active travel budgets are affected at all.
When active travel funding was first being allocated to local authorities in pandemic times, it had to be spent on active travel or be returned to the government. LAs that spent more on active travel, received more in the next tranche.
That's obviously no longer the situation if they're allowed to spend what should be a ring-fenced budget on another new road.
I suspect this is their own active travel pot rather than central Govt money.
It's neither.
Oxfordshire has been very activein bidding for Active Travel funding from the national pot and has delivered a lot from it. In fact we get heavy criticism from the 'pro-car' lobby for it.
We also spend significant amounts of our own funds, S106 and CIL on it.
The funding for this scheme is not coming from either of those pots and I have no idea where that accusation came from.
Can't say i'd heard of this previously but having looked at the map of the proposed road on the council website i notice that it links up a lot of housing development sites around the outside of the town and with further sites further along the road at Benson and Wallingford being built at the moment the road through the centre of Watlington is currently the only viable route to the M40 which is very narrow and not really suitable as it is.Taking the traffic away seems a good idea to me and would leave the centre open for more active travel options like cycling and walking.This area is not exactly well served by public transport options the nearest rail lines are Princes Risborough to the north and Cholsey to the south.It's all well and good being against road building but buses need them too for providing an efficient service between towns/transport links as a viable alternative to driving and car ownership.
The centre may be open and improved for the possibility of active travel measures but they won't have enough money left to pay for them
What would there be to pay for? The town like just about every village/town in Oxfordshire already has a 20 mph limit, very limited parking and to be honest not a lot there really(there is a cycle repair shop) the majority of active travel would be local the only hindrance at the moment is the through traffic heading to the M40.
Plans are also in place for improvements in the town centre to improve it for pedestrians and cyclists.
At present it is a truly dreadful environment due to the heavy through traffic.
Same thing happened in Gloucestershire in 2021. They used money earmarked for a cycle route from Cheltenham to Bishops Cleeve to put an extra lane in at a set of traffic lights to ease congestion at peak times. The excuse given to me was that the toucan crossing, which was part of the work, needed to be put in for the cycle route and obviously the cycle path could not be started until it was finished. The toucan crossing remains to this day, going from nowhere to nowhere, it is yet to be activated.
The latest news is that they are fixing some subsidence on the road the cyclepath will run next to. Not sure where the funding for that is coming from. Obviously the cycle path can't be built until the subsidence is fixed.
The only other work they have done is to move an established hedgerow so the cycle path can be built right next to the road. In my opinion they should have left the hedge in and put the cycle path on the other side. Less noise and less pollution for cyclists. I guess they know best though.
More details here on the local cycling group web site. If you go to the home page you will see that the group paused operations as the county council never listened although I did attend a meeting recently as they are thinking of restarting if the May elections go a certain way.
https://www.cyclecheltenham.org.uk/wp/gcc-raids-bishops-cleeve-cheltenha...
Just found this. Another example of a Gloucestershire cycling scheme that was delayed/cancelled. It looks like the new Lib Dem Cheltenham MP is behind the scheme which bodes well for the future if they are successful in May.
Shocked! Shocked!
People should be familiar with creative definitions such as "sustainable travel" - or frank grabbing such "free" money for "things that ordinary people urgently need" like ... fixing it for drivers and filling pot holes.
If not already you will be over the next few years - because "bankrupt councils" and "black hole in finances" and general tough times.
Eventually it may be that we do genuinely need some extra road-building to facilitate less private motor-vehicle travel - as the Dutch have done by building ring roads and upgrading a few distributors. The up side of that is it's been done specifically to keep much motor traffic out of towns - allowing buses and trams to be more efficient. It is also done to make some "short" car journeys less direct and so less attractive, relative to direct short journeys by walking/cycling.
That is exactly what this scheme does. A new link road around the town, with good active travel as part of it PLUS frees up the town center from what is currently very heavy through traffic, with measures to improve it for active travel.
Are they even allowed to do that? Presumably their active travel fund is supposed to be somehow ring-fenced?
It isn't true that active tarvel funds are being used for this scheme.
Oxfordsire has a good record of successful bids to the national Active Travel budget and for investing its own own money in active travel.
This scheme IS NOT funded from either.
It's quite startling that active travel money could be raided like this. I know Watlington quite well, having often cycled and driven through it, and the narrow east-west road through the centre is often slow which is no doubt annoying to residents. If they build the new road, which I've read is contentious just in itself, it will instantly be busy and fast and for sure I will not want to cycle on it. Any claim that the new road will benefit active travel directly is likely to be false.
It isn't true that active tarvel funds are being used for this scheme.
Oxfordsire has a good record of successful bids to the national Active Travel budget and for investing its own own money in active travel.
This scheme IS NOT funded from either.
WTAF? I thought Oxford CC were the good guys? sigh.
It isn't true that active tarvel funds are being used for this scheme.
Oxfordsire has a good record of successful bids to the national Active Travel budget and for investing its own own money in active travel.
This scheme IS NOT funded from either.
I wonder if traffic in Watlington was a significant campaigning issue for the new LD MP?
“It includes facilities for walking, cycling, and travel by bus, as well as delivering connectivity to the wider network......"
So why not just construct the public transport, walking and cycling bits then? That really would fulfil their obligation to use Active Travel funding for the purpose for which it was intended and deter car use.
I wouldn't even mind if they did the road, then allocated a certain proportion in keeping with the costs of the bike lane to active travel. Maybe even let them have the costs of the pavement, at a push.
I live near new flood prevention works, which has included the addition of a decent cycle path and upgrading the pavement. The work inevitably included resurfacing of the adjacent road on completion. But if you believe social media, the council spent the whole budget for the project on 'bike lanes that no-one wants, while refusing to fix the roads.' To add insult to injury, when the road was closed for the resurfacing, the council were still in the wrong.
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