Mill Road 4 People opinion: Why we should welcome the Mill Road bridge bus gate

Opinion | Liz Walter, of Mill Road 4 People campaign group, shares her view on the proposed traffic order that would close Mill Road bridge to most private motor vehicles,

What do you do with a problem like Mill Road? Newspaper cuttings and political leaflets going back more than 50 years testify both to residents’ unhappiness with high traffic levels and to our politicians’ woeful lack of action in tackling them.

Over the decades, more and more vehicles have been piling up and down our residential and shopping street, reaching levels of around 14,000 vehicles a day, according to council traffic counters. Failure to deal with the situation means that an unsuitably narrow ‘C’ road has to all intents and purposes been allowed by default to become a major route to and from the city. Nobody voted for this to happen!

Cambridge is a city full of intelligent, creative people. Where is the vision for Mill Road? Why aren’t we creating an environment that encourages active travel, that reduces congestion and pollution, allows buses to run freely and our children to walk and cycle in safety? Why aren’t we acting on all the data that tells us that low-traffic streets benefit local businesses, that pedestrians and cyclists spend up to 40 per cent more on the high street than drivers? Why are we lagging so far behind innovative cities such as Ljubljana, Strasbourg, and Copenhagen?

The issue of safety is paramount. In 2022 Cambridgeshire police reported that Mill Road had been the most dangerous road in Cambridge for three successive years. Members of Mill Road 4 People have spent time with local police officers on the bridge, and the number of drivers speeding, close-passing cyclists, and overtaking on the brow in the bridge was absolutely hair-raising.

We believe the county council has an urgent duty to act, and the safety work that forms part of the current Traffic Regulation Order (TRO) is long overdue. In addition, lower traffic volumes resulting from the modal filter will reduce collisions along the whole length of the road.

A question that pro-driving campaigners frequently raise is displacement of traffic. This is certainly a reasonable concern, and we have no wish to make other streets suffer. However, data from the bridge closure in 2019 (for repairs) show that after an initial rise for around two weeks, traffic levels on surrounding roads went back to normal. Monitors showed a substantial modal shift from driving to active travel or public transport. And of course, when people stop driving down Mill Road, their vehicles are also removed from the streets where they start and end their journeys.

Almost all the available evidence shows that low-traffic neighbourhoods have little or no impact on boundary roads. But even if you don’t accept that, the answer cannot be to continue to funnel thousands of vehicles down an unsuitable C road: the answer – quite obviously – is to reduce traffic everywhere in the city, as the county council has promised to do.

High levels of public support for traffic restrictions on the bridge have been demonstrated over and over again.

The major and widely-publicised consultation of 2022 showed a whopping 72 per cent in favour.

Since then, every local election has seen candidates who support the bus gate triumph, and pro-traffic candidates heavily defeated. What happens on a C road is the business of local people, not those who want to use our high street merely as a place to drive through, contributing nothing but congestion and pollution.

So come on, we can do better than this! Let’s not allow what was once voted one of the UK’s ‘hippest neighbourhoods’ to remain a street of traffic jams and omnipresent pavement parking.

Let’s set our sights so much higher and make Mill Road a safe, attractive, and accessible place, one that enhances our sense of community, and makes Mill Road a place to go to, not to drive through!

The consultation runs until 13 September.