Ben King writes...
Back in 1996 I spent a week of my vacation at the anti-road protest camps in Newbury. I got dragged out of a treehouse by a crane, arrested for sitting in the wrong place, and saw a lot of beautiful trees torn up by diggers.
I wasn’t much of a student radical - my visit to the site was mainly to check out what the whole protest against the bypass was about, and see some friends. But it happened to co-incide with the mass evictions, and it was impossible not to take sides.
Halfway through breakfast on my first day the police moved in on our camp. Before I knew it I was up in a treehouse, besieged by hundreds of cops and security guards. The next day, I was arrested for sitting in the way of a crane heading towards a patch of ancient woodland, now with a house in every tree.
But after the fuss had died down a bit, I found myself at a party in Newbury itself. I was surprised to hear that some of the residents were in favour of the road.
Most people living near the route of the proposed road had been supportive of the protest, supplying vegan food and showers to those who wanted them. But the town had a serious congestion problem, and the town’s motorists thought that tarmacing some ancient woodland was a price worth paying to ease those jams.
And you could see their side of the argument. A democratic government had decided to build this road, but a load of unelected hippies from outside the area had decided to override that decision and (in many cases) break the law to prevent the road being built.
There were questions about the fairness and openness of the decision making process, not to mention the wisdom of the whole scheme, which could justify the decision to resort to direct action. But I could see the local petrolheads’ point of view.
Well, it turns out that we were right, at least as far as the traffic goes. A report out today from the Countryside Agency gives the bypass a dismal writeup:
"In towns with bypasses, such as Newbury and Polegate, the new roads did significantly reduce the town centre traffic levels. However, these reductions are not as great as originally forecast and there has subsequently been re-growth in traffic levels on the bypassed roads. The net effect in combination with the new road is generally a considerable overall increase in traffic."
Whoops! Perhaps they should have left those beautiful old trees alone, and bought bicycles instead.
A brief summary of report is here.
(The picture is a 1996 map of Newbury. The green is ancient woodland, the pencil line is the route of the bypass).
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