M3 J9 Rears Its Ugly Head Again
It's been nearly four years since XRW took to the streets about the M3 J9 plans but they haven't gone away, in fact the scheme is closer than ever to being implemented.
For too long we have been told that building roads solves problems but the reality is it just creates them. There is a plethora of evidence that expanding road capacity creates Induced Demand, journeys are made that simply wouldn't have been made previously, even the Department of Transport acknowledges this. This means that within a few years additional capacity fills up and emissions increase proportionately.
For too long we have been told that building roads solves problems but the reality is it just creates them. There is a plethora of evidence that expanding road capacity creates Induced Demand, journeys are made that simply wouldn't have been made previously, even the Department of Transport acknowledges this. This means that within a few years additional capacity fills up and emissions increase proportionately.
For every pound we spend increasing road capacity and subsequently our carbon footprint, we could have invested it in sustainable transport such as bus and train networks that would actually reduce congestion and carbon emissions without the need to increase capacity. The M3 junction 9 scheme may cost up to £160m which could, for example, buy over 300 electric buses or build 100 miles of segregated cycleway. This would literally transform travel in Hampshire, reducing road congestion and most importantly reducing our carbon footprint, of which a staggering 60% (in Winchester) already comes from transport. Moreover, if money like this was diverted from road schemes up and down the country, we could fundamentally transform travel across the whole country, making a huge contribution towards reducing our carbon emissions.
The plans from Highways England comprehensively fail to address the urgency of improving our natural environment, instead, they will erode both Winnall Moors and the South Downs National Park. This will inevitably result in damage to wildlife and further increase pressure on our chalkland streams.
It would take 15sqm of forest, a forest the size of our city, to sequester the additional 8 kilotons of co2e. Trusting Highways England to deliver mitigating measures of this magnitude is ludicrous. They have consistently failed to even calculate the true impact of road schemes from a climate perspective let alone mitigate them.
Read more about why M3 J9 plans are such a bad idea here.
To get involved in our campaign against M3 J9, click here.