In the last mailing I commented that I wasn’t clear what had changed with the Mereham proposal which had resulted in it coming back to our parish council on Monday night. I’ve since had more documents from Jim the parish council clerk and I’ve had a briefing from Hazel Smith, one of our district councillors. My thanks to both of them. So for the benefit of new readers let me start from the top and try and explain what’s going on with Mereham and why it matter to us in Milton.
Background
Mereham is a proposed new community between the villages of Wilburton and Stretham further up the A10. The developers, Multiplex Stannifer (of Wembley Stadium fame) have a web site which has lots of information on this development. The proposal calls for 5,000 houses to be built on the site. For comparison we’re talking about a community 2.5 times the size of Milton so it’s a small town.
There is already a plan to develop a new town called Northstowe between Longstanton and Oakington. That was approved after a beauty contest between a large number of potential sites. Mereham wasn’t even on the long list, being ruled out in the first round, and the final choice was between Northstowe and Waterbeach (developing a new town on the airfield). Northstowe won and it’s now going ahead.
So that brings us to Mereham. When the planning applications were put in they were refused permission by all the local authorities involved. It didn’t fit their strategic plan and there were other, better options when and if another new community was needed. The developers have now appealed and there is a public inquiry going on at the moment.
Unsurprisingly there’s a lot of local opposition and they have a web site too which you can find here.
You can also find some of the documents lodged with the public inquiry
online although the site is incomplete and some links are broken.
How does this affect Milton?
The developers had a problem when it came to public transport. Unlike Northstowe (who had the guided bus) and Waterbeach (the railway line) they had problems explaining how they were going to get people in and out of Mereham. Their original proposal to solve this was in two parts.
Firstly they were going to widen the A10 to 10m (from its current 7m). This would allegedly make overtaking of slow vehicles easier. To those of us who’ve been driving for a decade or two it sounded distinctly like the three lane roads we used to have, only without a formally marked “chicken run” middle lane. There would be no other significant improvements to the capacity of the road. Moreover the increased volume of traffic on the A10 would make it unlikely that one would ever be able to use it safely. As part of this proposal they were going to remove the bridge to Butt Lane over the A10 replacing it with a ground level light controlled pedestrian and bike crossing.
Secondly they envisaged putting on a frequent bus service (I think it was six an hour in each direction, might have been ten) between Mereham and Cambridge. They planned that these buses would come through Milton and then go over a new bridge over the A14 which would be built to replace the Jane Coston bridge at the same location. This would have a single bi-directional bus lane over the bridge with traffic lights controlling the direction of flow and a foot/cycle lane as now. The proposal included replacing the “Tesco” roundabout with traffic lights to manage the bus movements at the bottom of the new bridge, making the southbound slip road at the north end of the village bus only, making the Ely Road/A10 junction light controlled (with bus priority) to get the northbound buses out onto the A10, and significant re-modelling of the high street to aid buses passing through the village. This last item they had worked up in some detail without any consultation with the village. At all.
The parish council objected to all of this, as did everyone else and the application was refused.
New Developments
Unsurprisingly at the public inquiry for the appeal against the refusal your local councillors spoke against these proposals.
Meanwhile the County Council, who had also objected to the developers previous proposals, had been meeting with the developers and as a result of those meetings they have now been allowed to submit revised plans to the inquiry. They now propose:
- two sections of bus lane. One starting just north of the Denny End junction (the traffic light controlled junction at the north end of Waterbeach) to help buses approaching those lights and a second in the form of a guided busway running from just north of Landbeach Road down to the A10/A14 roundabout around the Milton bypass.
- improving and widening the shared use cycle path from Milton to the Denny End junction.
- keeping the road at 7m wide along the stretch from Denny End to Milton.
- making all southbound bus movements be via the bus lane around the bypass rather than through Milton so that only northbound buses would use the new bridge over the A14 and Milton high street
- improving and widening the shared use cycle path from Milton to the Denny End junction.
- the “reinstallation” of a pedestrian crossing bridge across the A10 at Butt Lane.
- a prohibition on turning right off the A10 into the road through Green End to Landbeach (the road past Emmaus).
This is what is being discussed by the parish council planning committee on Monday night.
Editorial
What is now being proposed is an improvement over the original scheme in that it makes it easier for southbound buses to get down the A10 into the city during the morning peak and it also halves the number of buses coming through Milton but it is still dreadful. It makes no attempt at all to improve the capacity of the A10 for cars, so there will be even more cars trying to come down the A10 to Cambridge every day. We all know what happens when traffic backs up past the village: they start to come through Milton.
There are also some transitional issues which are very dangerous: the replacement of both of the pedestrian/cycle bridges out of the village will leave people having to cross very busy roads while the bridges are out of action. In particular the loss of the Jane Coston bridge for six months (as claimed by the developer) will leave cyclists and pedestrians trying to cross three lanes of traffic on the south side of the A10/A14 roundabout with no help from the lights there.
Outside Milton the loss of the right turn up at Emmaus will hit their trade and seriously annoy anyone living in Landbeach who wants to return home from the north.
The proposal in both its current form and the original also makes no attempt to extend the off road shared use path north from Denny End as far as Cambridge Research Park. Workers there who live in Milton and north Cambridge have commented that the prospect of having to cycle this last section on road deters them from cycling to work and an opportunity is being lost to correct this.
