Lancaster Bypass Protests

Activists and local green campaigners are kicking off yet another series of anti-bypass protests as the council tries to resurrect its plans. For over a decade Lancaster City Council and the County Council have tried to push for a bypass road, due to percieved congestion in the city. Time and again the local green and transport campaigners have beaten back their plans by pointing out that new roads cause more traffic, and that the money the road would cost would be better spent on non-road transport solutions (e.g. a tram running the Heysham-Morecambe-Lancaster-University corridor). We heard nothing about research into the environmental and economic impacts of two proposed routes for 2 years.

We would have heard nothing at all, I suspect, if there weren't a Green County Councillor with links to activists via email groups. We discovered that the Councils were planning meetings for next week, without properly releasing the impact assessment results. Not surprising as the Western Route (through miles of countryside, estuary, across the canal and river etc) was a no-brainer from the start. The Council's own lawyer describes a decision to push ahead with the Western Route as "extraordinary to the point of perverse", so it looks like we'll be fighting the Northern Route in years to come.

There is a Critical Mass bike protest tomorrow (Fri 27th) meeting at 4.30pm at Dalton Square, then presumably taking to the one-way system. So that's the M6 on the rush-hour start of Bank Holiday weekend. We expect the resulting hoo-hah in the papers to help bring attention to the council's underhand deeds. The Road is now budgetted at £92M, or around £1650 per head in the district, to cut 10 minutes of (car) journey.

Next week the City Council meets at Morecambe Town Hall at 2pm on Tues 31st, the County Council Cabinet meets to make a binding decision at 10.30am Thurs 2nd Sept. A road protest camp is expected to materialise at the latter meeting, and anyone who also expects this should come and help...