'Move away from road building fetish' say anti-Shrewsbury relief road campaigners
"The time is now to move away from the out-of-date road building fetish." Those are the words of campaigners calling for Salopians to object to the Shrewsbury North West Relief Road.
Better Transport Shrewsbury believe plans for the £87 million, four-mile stretch of road running from Churncote roundabout to Battlefield should be shelved due to environmental concerns.
An application for the road was been lodged with Shropshire Council’s planning department last month and a consultation live. The application is made up of more than 600 documents. More than 90 comments have been made so far, with most objecting to the project.
Mike Streetly, spokesman for Better Transport Shrewsbury, said: “Our team of volunteers has been ploughing through the thousands of pages of consultants’ reports issued with Shropshire Council’s recent planning application and we are shocked at what we’ve found so far.
"When the outline business case for the road was signed off, we were told that the road would help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and, in 2019, the council said that one of the key objectives was ‘To align fully with Shropshire Council’s 2019 resolution to reaffirm support for tackling climate change’. We were sceptical about this claim at the time and now the council has done the sums which show that, instead of reducing emissions, building the road will lead to a massive increase (a ‘significant adverse’ impact according to the consultant’s report).
Emissions
"Instead of reconsidering their support for the road in light of this new evidence, the council now says that these increases are not important: how can the council promote a scheme which increases emissions when we have a climate emergency and a government target of net zero emissions by 2050? Reductions have to start now!”
Herefordshire Council recently shelved a similar road scheme. Transport expert Professor John Whitelegg, said: “Recent decisions by Herefordshire Council and the Welsh Government to cancel road schemes that have been on the drawing board for many years were based on the realisation that it is not possible to build new roads and claim that we are dealing with a climate emergency at the same time. Road building is very expensive and adds huge amounts of extra carbon which makes the climate emergency worse: the time is now right to substitute non road building polices for the discredited, out-of-date road building fetish. If we are concerned about climate change we must object to the planning application for the North West Road.”
Shropshire Council leader Peter Nutting believes the road will "help greatly to reduce the through traffic through town and will reduce the congestion on Smithfield Road," and will offer "huge improvements" for many villages to the north and west of Shrewsbury.
To view and comment on the application visit bit.ly/3bWYQR3.
