brentwood.gov.uk

A ground up rethink of the plan, starting from a realistic assessment of what development might have a transport and traffic impact that was acceptable and practicably capable of being resolved.

The council's selection of sites fails to adhere to BE16 (Mitigating the Transport Impacts of Development) A. "Developments should seek to ensure that they will not have an unacceptable transport impact and/or any significant impacts from the development on the transport network (in terms of capacity and congestion) and on highway safety can be mitigated to an acceptable degree." The truth of this is borne out by the failure of the council's Infrastructure Delivery Plan (IDP) (3.46, figure 3.10) to model all of the junctions necessary to assess traffic conditions in central Brentwood - the Sawyers Hall Lane/ A1023 Shenfield Road junction, which acts as a de facto bypass for the town's central, and most problematic junction, Wilson's Corner (the A128 Ongar Road/A128 Ingrave Road/A1023 Shenfield Road/A1023 High Street junction), being the most conspicuous example. It is also borne out by a Traffic Survey done by the developers at the time of the Highwood Hospital redevelopment (just off the A128 Ongar Road), in 2010, which had to assume that the then extant and approved version of a scheme for the development of the William Hunter Way car park site (R14 in this plan), would be built, and factor its effect in to traffic levels. That WHW scheme involved only 14 maisonettes and a retail development, but its effect, added to the proposed Highwood Hospital scheme, caused the Traffic Survey's figures for Ongar Road to exceed not just practical capacity, but theoretical capacity at all the junctions in Ongar Road at some point during the working week. Nevertheless that proposed Highwood Hospital scheme was built, and several further developments have added more traffic to this road since, but the current Plan will have the unavoidable effect of piling the traffic from R12, R14, R15, R16 and R17 (=628 proposed dwellings) (and, almost certainly, R07, R10, R11, R13, R18, R19, R20 and R03 (=1189 proposed dwellings)) onto either the A128 Ongar/Ingrave Road, or the A1023, and thus the Wilson's Corner junction. Furthermore, the IDP's Sustainable Transport Measures figure (figure 3.15 in the November 2018 Local Plan decision meeting version of the documents) shows no proposal for any Brentwood or Shenfield town centre road or junction improvements, and no junction mitigations in the town centre (figure 3.16). That despite the fact that, as the IDP admits (3.13), "What makes Brentwood different to many towns is that there has been no major relief, gyratory, or one-way system within the town centre. Therefore traffic continues to be funnelled into [a] road/ route system that has not significantly changed for hundreds of years. The narrowness of the roads in the town centre minimises the scope of local highway interventions." Starting with that last piece of evidence, no responsible council would propose the sites Brentwood's Local Plan does.