Active Travel neglected as cars continue to rule in Hastings

It’s government policy to encourage Active Travel – walking and cycling, allied with greater use of public transport and reduced use of the private car – and the changes to road and traffic arrangements to facilitate this. Progress in Hastings however has been glacially slow, says Anna Sabin of Hastings Urban Bikes, who reports on the group’s latest efforts to speed up the process.

Hastings Urban Bikes (HUB) put questions to ESCC (East Sussex County Council) and HBC (Hastings Borough Council) at each body’s latest full council meeting, both of which it attended in person to ask follow-up questions – because we’re not getting the safe cycle networks we need.

The written question to ESCC was: ‘By what date do you intend to have a comprehensive safe cycle network in every East Sussex town?’ followed by a supplementary question to Cllr Claire Dowling, lead for Transport and Environment: ‘Why is it all taking so long and why, when your department does spend money, is it spent on traffic measures, not cycle routes?’

Reply, summarised: ‘We have our polices in place and will implement them as funding becomes available.’ To which HUB said – ‘But there are still cars everywhere’ and a chorus of voices from all over the room said, ‘No – you can say no more.’

The written question to HBC was: ‘How is the 2014 Hastings Walking and Cycling Network Strategy being fulfilled and what is the £9m Hastings and Bexhill Movement and Access Programme being spent on?’

The written answer from Cllr Andy Batsford, lead for Health, Leisure and Culture, included, you could say consisted of, a link to a SELEP (South East Local Enterprise Partnership) and Team East Sussex 3 July 2023 meeting report on the Hastings and Bexhill Movement and Access Programme. This tells us the following:

• What it has given us so far:

4 new pedestrian crossings
1 new VAS (vehicle activated sign) crossroad signage
RTPI (Royal Town Planning Institute) infrastructure to support the bus service
40 accessibility improvements to bus stops
10 better bus stops on The Ridge (you’d not know unless told)
Wayfinding improvements in Hastings (including tall column information boards blocking your path on the seafront)

• What it’s in the process of giving us:

2 T-junction conversions to mini roundabouts in Bexhill

• What it still hopes to give us:

1 improved pedestrian crossing at the top of Havelock Road, Hastings
1 improved pedestrian crossing at the bottom of Albert Road, Hastings
1 new cycle route in Bexhill

• What is now being considered for being scrapped and having their funding reallocated to other projects, possibly just to cover rising construction costs:

Hastings Western Cycle Route – Silverhill to Crowhurst Road
2 x Bexhill cycle routes

• What has disappeared from it altogether –

1 shared cycle route, Queens Road to Silverhill via Alexandra Park – cut because, by one vote, HBC refused permission.

And Hastings Greenway?

Distressingly, the programme, even at the outset, didn’t have much of the Hastings Greenway in it. The Hastings Greenway has for years lain dormant in the Local Transport Plan. If built, it would reach all four corners of town plus the Conquest Hospital – very traffic-free and beautiful. It has long served as a dream and a Government-compliant nod to walking and cycling in the Local Transport Plan…even if raising the money, negotiating with Network Rail and removing on-street parking for cycle lanes has, so far, not been a mountain our County Transport Authority has been minded to climb.

But, going for the easiest first, ESCC Transport Authority, with the agreement of HBC, did put the beginning of the Hastings Greenway in the Hastings and Bexhill Movement (HBMAP) and Access Programme. Indeed, they spent four years designing the Alexandra Park shared cycle route and were going to build it this year followed by its Silverhill to Crowhurst Road continuation to the A2690 greenway section. Now neither will be built, which has undermined the logic of building the next section from St Helens Road to Conquest Hospital. Which is all a total disaster.

For the projects still in the HBMAP, SELEP, Team Sussex and ESCC are looking for a benefit:cost ratio of over 2. But they don’t seem to be calculating the cost right. The benefit of turning multitudes of car journeys into safe bicycle journeys would be worth sinking all the money we can find into. And the cost of not doing it will be ruinous.

Yet the Hastings schemes which SELEP, Team Sussex and ESCC consider 2:1 are not schemes that deliver safe cycling networks. None of the ones they are progressing will achieve ‘modal switch’ from private car transport to Active Travel.

Of course crossings are good – but the two new ones in Hastings are of the sort to corral people on foot to cross streams of car traffic with a minimum of inconvenience to car drivers. Bus stops are good – but Hastings’ improved ones aren’t proper comfy places with live accurate information you’d give up a car journey for.

Yet, as well as the benefit:cost consideration, the business case assessment criteria brought to bear by SELEP for projects seeking LGF (Local Growth Fund) grants include:

Deliverability
Affordability
Value for money
Strategic fit

On that last one – if the strategy were to provide a safe cycling network for every East Sussex town, then safe cycle routes would be a strategic fit. They’d take priority over enhanced town centre pedestrian crossings – which, with lights, bells and whistles, are budget-crushingly expensive.

Why are safe cycling networks not a howling priority for the County Council, Team East Sussex and the Local Enterprise Partnership in 2023? Transport needs decarbonising, detoxifying and making accessible to all before the planet gets any hotter.

News from ESCC leader

Keith Glazier, ESCC leader, wrote to me at HUB presenting a slightly more optimistic outlook. But was he just keeping us off his back by feeding us false hope?

‘The report to the South East Local Enterprise Partnership Board meeting on Friday, 16 June, confirmed that an updated business case for the Hastings Bexhill Movement and Access Package would be presented at the 22 September, 2023, Accountability Board. The business case will consider the schemes still to be progressed within this package and will not introduce any new schemes. The Hastings Western Pedestrian and Cycle Route between Silverhill and Crowhurst Road is in consideration to be progressed, however if it is not feasible within this funding package then the County Council will look to seek alternative funding.’

Will funding be sought to build the Hastings Greenway walking, wheeling and cycling network? Will work and imagination go into designing complementary cycle routes which are affordable and doable in the very near future? You write to them and ask what their ambitions are. Coincidentally rather than by design, I am sure, September 22nd is World Car Free Day.

So far ESCC has failed to wake up and smell Active Transport. Instead, it’s clinging to the idea that private car travel is the successful adult’s way to get about. They are behind the curve.

Bus improvements?

In the same vein, ESCC has recently published its BSIP, Bus Service Improvement Plan – which is both very welcome and predictably disappointing. It extends existing bus services to run earlier in the morning and later into the evening. On several routes it will be newly possible to take the bus both ways…obviously you don’t take the bus if it doesn’t get you there in time or can’t bring you home again. But most of the routes will remain heroically long which results in distressing unreliability and late-running services.

We welcome, in principle, the information boards on bus arrival times installed at many bus stops. But Stagecoach has told HUB that when it cancels a late-running service to enable the bus to start its next journey on time, it doesn’t inform ESCC – and, as it’s ESCC controlling the information boards, would-be users are given to understand that a bus is about to arrive which isn’t. No wonder unreliability is among users’ major complaints.

According to informal surveys, bus users themselves, and hundreds of potential bus users, say they’d like short reliable services delivered as shuttles or loops. But the County’s idea of improved buses is to subsidise extra services and cap fares. Stagecoach’s idea of their business is to scoop up as many passengers as possible from the limited pool of people with no access to a car. They say short routes would take customers off long routes so, if the authority, ESCC,  in charge of the roads, street parking and the existence or non-existence of park and rides, doesn’t increase the bus customer pool, we’ll be stuck with long-route-unreliability for ever more.

And when the £41.4m BSIP subsidy runs out, it’ll be back to square one. No bus-only routes will have been created and buses will still have no advantage over car traffic.

So far, ESCC has not understood the transition we need to make. They could take road space from cars and give it to buses and bikes – but very little has happened yet.

Cars are good, useful, fun, a constant danger, a blight on urban public space (roads and pavements) and, including taxis, accounted for more than 12% of domestic carbon emissions in 2020, according to government statistics. Bikes, e-bikes, cargo bikes, pedalecs, buses and trains can do most car jobs and are good, useful and fun without the downsides…especially if they have free-from-car routes.

Can our current leadership change or do we need a change of leadership? Wanting to give them a chance, we’re going to be pressing Cllrs Andy Batsford, Claire Dowling and Keith Glazier to look with urgency for funding for the long-promised Hastings Greenway, pedestrianised shopping streets and easy-flow public transport. You write to them too.

Reason to hope

For the moment HUB has a new reason to hope. We were, of course, at the the last Hastings full council meeting and put a rather cross supplementary question to Cllr Batsford, whose vote against the Alexandra Park cycle route lost us the approximately £560,000 allocated for that project plus a similar sum for the Alexandra Park-to-Crowhurst Road section which won’t now be built: ‘You’ve lost Hastings £1m worth of cycle paths. Now what are you going to do to get us safe cycling?’

Reply, summarised: ‘Not my fault, ESCC has been sitting on money for cycling for 10 years and not spent it. I’ve set up a new cross-party transport group and invite you to join our next, the third, meeting.’

!!!!!! Progress?

A second HUB questioner pressed Mr Batsford on what we see as his obvious distortion of events leading up to the loss of our £1m but got the same response as the first questioner.

But….taking whatever manna falls, the immediate hope is that the cross-party transport group will waste no time in devising and adopting a radically more appropriate-to-our-times transport plan for the Borough – appealing to our public and businesses, acceptable to the current administration in Lewes and willingly implemented.

Pedestrianising Kings Road

On August 11th HUB did attend its first Hastings Cross-Party Transport Group meeting, in lovely Fika, Kings Road, to discuss the road’s pedestrianisation! Four councillors – one Tory, two Greens and one Labour plus a HUB representative looked at designs for using Western Road and Warrior Square for car access to Warrior Square Station and Crystal Square car park off Western Road for cars currently parked on Kings Road.

The group responded positively to a mockup picture of a car-free Kings Road showing acres of extra space for cafe tables, benches, play equipment, plants and much more footfall for the road’s businesses and agreed to take the idea forward.

The next step will be consulting with the businesses on the road. And the step after that – getting ESCC to help us make the businesses’ and residents’ preferred scheme happen.

Hastings Cross-Party Transport Group (HCPTG) also resolved to re-designate parking on Bexhill Road. The triangular car park between Keats Close and West Hill Road is currently reserved for TKMaxx customers – anyone who parks there and then makes for the Victorian parade of shops on the other side of the road is liable to have a fine slapped on their car by the money-making maintenance contractors responsible for the car park, which means it’s left empty most of the time.

However, of the approximately 120 parking spaces around the TKMaxx building and between Keats Close and West Hill Road, 20 spaces were at the time the TKMaxx building went up allocated to the old shops on the south side of Bexhill Road. Somehow since then, the company contracted to manage the car parks has been operating on the assumption that all parking is TKMaxx parking. Now the group wants to see the car park made available to southside shop customers again – leaving TKMaxx customers still with a generous 100 or so parking spaces behind and in front of their building.

So, on first acquaintance HCPTG looks full of common sense vigour. They all said these two small improvements will just be the start. They all want to get our shopping streets and public transport back and to see safe cycling all over town. Will our County Transport Authority work with it? Will they together be radical enough to make our streets safe and sociable again?

We at HUB will keep you informed.

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