Representation by Cycle Winchester (Cycle Winchester)
- Date submitted
- 1 February 2023
- Submitted by
- Non-statutory organisations
Cycle Winchester is a community campaign group based in Winchester. The aim of Cycle Winchester is to make Winchester better by bike, i.e. to create a better Winchester (the city and surrounding villages) by promoting cycling as a convenient, healthy, inexpensive and environmentally-friendly way to get around, as well as to campaign for improved provision that will enable more people to cycle. In so doing, we also hope to reduce traffic congestion and pollution in order to make Winchester a more enjoyable place to live, work and visit. We are an independent group but are affiliated to Cycling UK, the national cycling charity, and two members of our team are registered members of Cycling UK's Cycling Advocacy Network (CAN). We believe that the M3 Junction 9 redevelopment provides major opportunities to improve utility cycling, recreational cycling and green tourism in the area: - The cycle route across the junction to Easton Lane is part of National Cycle Route 23 provides a direct link between the city and the South Downs National Park, as well as to the villages of the Itchen Valley and the market town of Alresford, but the present crossing is woefully inadequate and unsafe and is under-used as a result. - The proposed new non-motorised route between Junction 9 and Kings Worthy would link Kings Worthy (a large and growing satellite settlement of Winchester) with the employment and retail areas of Winnall and beyond that to the city itself and the new sports and leisure centre, providing an opportunity for increased commuting, utility and leisure journeys by bike and e-bike. - Both of the above would link into the emerging Local Cycling and Walking Infrastructure Plan (LCWIP) network for the city and the surrounding district. - The proposed new bridleway would provide increased opportunities for recreational offroad riding, accessible from Winchester without the need for a car journey. Cycle Winchester was a member of a consultative group which met regularly with the National Highways project team to review the non-motorised user aspects of this project as they developed. We are happy with the level of discussion that took place with the consultative group: the project team were very open about the issues and the pros and cons of various solutions to them, and took on board feedback from ourselves and other members of the group. We are pleased with the progress that has been made towards improvement of existing walking, cycling and horse-riding routes and the provision of new ones. However there are still aspects of these that concern us: - Some aspects are not clearly-enough defined, especially in terms of the legal statuses and surface standards of the various routes. (This is of special concern as a historic failure to record the legal status of the original cycle route through Junction 9 led to a long dispute over the status of the route and whether NH's predecessors had to maintain it as a cycle facility or not. That ended up in a degraded path and a compromise solution that suits no-one, where half the route across the junction is now legally a bridleway while the other half isn't.) - Some are sub-optimal in their design (e.g. an insistence on shared-use paths, sometimes built to minimum allowable dimensions, where current DfT standards make it clear that segregated facilities should be provided); - Some could benefit from further improvement (e.g. the proposed new cycle route from Kings Worthy includes an at-grade crossing of a busy motorway link road which we think could be avoided). - NH could do more to fund cycling. walking and horse-riding improvements in the surrounding area as part of the scheme mitigation, for example expansion of the Watercress Way and/or improvements to the western end of the South Downs Way between the M3 and Chilcomb village.. We also have concerns about the construction process itself. Firstly, we want to make sure that diversions do not cause much higher traffic levels on other roads used by cyclists (especially the B3047, the B3420 Andover Road, the A272, Bar End Road and city centre routes generally); secondly, we want to ensure that any closures and diversions of the existing NCN23 cycle route are minimised and are discussed in advance and clearly notified and signposted. We are keen to ensure that NH lives up to its policies to improve non-motorised access across its network. While we are encouraged by progress to date, we wish to make sure that this progress is not lost (as happened once before in the early consultations for this project) and that NH continue to work on improving their plans to get the best possible result for non-motorised users.