Date published: 2007/03/27
The Cambridge Evening News says:
Houses should not be built on Marshall's airport until traffic problems have been sorted out, say Labour councillors.
Cambridge Labour Party has launched a campaign to Save Our Open Spaces and is petitioning Cambridge City Council and Cambridgeshire County Council demanding they sort out congestion and examine other sites before building homes on Marshall's airport.
At least 10,000 homes will be built in Cambridge East on the airport, land north of Newmarket Road and north of Cherry Hinton.
Transport bosses want 60 per cent of journeys to be on foot, bike or bus by 2021. A Cambridge East Transport Strategy has been drafted in a bid to get the development's 30,000 residents to leave their cars at home with 21 buses an hour going into the city centre.
But Labour councillors fear the scheme could make the gridlocked Newmarket Road even worse, and suggestions of a direct transport route across Coldham's Common have sparked concerns that green spaces are under threat.
Coun Ben Bradnack, city council Labour group deputy leader, said:
"The plans we have seen depend on a 60 per cent switch from private car to public transport use. So far as I know such a switch has never been achieved anywhere before."
Traffic problems will never be "sorted out". For one thing, pretty much everybody in any city on the planet complains about traffic, no matter how much or little there is of it. For another thing, the Cambridge ruling elite hate cars and actually want to make the traffic bad to justify yet more anti-car measures. The 60 per cent figure is just a random number made up by the Cambridge so-called planners in order to claim that their housing plans make some sense.
Of course the real issue in closing down the airport is not the traffic, it is that Cambridge is asking one of its biggest and best employers to get lost, and with the hundreds of jobs to be replaced not with other jobs but with houses. And where are the residents of these new houses going to work? There is plenty of effectively uneconomic land on the edge of Cambridge which can be used for housing (and indeed some of it will be), we don't need to close the aiport down.
Cambridge is already way too heavily dependent on the university for jobs and the situation is going to get worse, thanks to the Lib Dems who currently lord over Cambridge. They seem not to have a clue about urban planning or the economy. Have any of the Cambridge Lib Dems, including the city's MP, David Howarth, spent even a nanosecond trying to encourage any company of any note to move to Cambridge? Their only passion in life is to screw car drivers. (And more recently, airplane passengers. Heaven forbid that the peasants have the mobility the Lib Dem ruling elite has.)
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