Skip to main content

Every town an eco-town

Every existing town should make the transition to being an eco-town, not just a handful of new towns - which may be far less green than they at first appear.
 
One of the Government's planned 'eco-towns' is on the outskirts of Norwich. The plans are generally quite good, mostly on a brownfield site - but the scheme as it stands is dependent upon building a massive new dual-carriageway road around the north side of Norwich, if it is to work.
 
This is completely ridiculous - you cannot have a genuinely eco-town that is highly dependent upon a major road-building scheme. By definition, a true eco-town should be designed to maximise the use of public transport, cycling etc, as are the existing eco-towns in other countries that provided the original inspiration for Britain's 'eco-town' plans.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Post-Growth: A new vision for a fairer and more sustainable Britain

Post a Comment
Read more

More on why 20's plenty -- without need for any further 'trials'...

There are a number of reasons for setting a default speed of 20mph throughout the 'unclassified' road network in residential parts of a city such as Norwich. Most important perhaps is that of driver recognition as to what the speed limit is. If you have 20 mph as the default then you not only establish this limit clearly, but you also adjust the driver's recognition as to what is the "normal" speed in such residential areas. The most important aspect is that drivers set 20 mph as the norm with those 30 mph areas or roads being seen as 50% faster, rather than seeing 30 mph as the norm with 20 mph as 33% slower. The psychological adjustment of normal speeds in residential areas is key to the success of reducing speeds and therefore danger to pedestrians and cyclists. Therefore any trial, pilot or whatever, that only implements 20 mph in a tiny proportion of the city is not modelling 20's Plenty in any realistic manner.   When considering the val...
2 comments
Read more