We are delighted that on Wednesday 19th July 2017, B&NES Cabinet voted to scrap plans to develop a 4th Park & Ride on either site B or F on Bathampton Meadows. While the formal reasons given didn’t include public pressure, we believe that our campaign did play a huge part in that decision. And we would like to thank all of you for your help over the last two years in making the council think again.
Our campaign has shown the council that this plan would not have helped to solve Bath’s traffic and pollution problems, and that it was the wrong solution in the wrong place and at far too high a financial and an environmental cost.
Many people played a part in this campaign – including our Ward and Parish councillors, residents across the city, and our well-known supporters such as Amy Williams, Piers Taylor, Peter Clegg and Andrew Grant. And we would like to thank each and every one of you for your support.
While we would love to stop campaigning, work remains to be done to make sure that the pledge given by council leader Tim Warren at the Bath Deserves Better’s public meeting on 11th July – that he would not allow the Meadows to be developed during his administration – lasts not only for this council’s remaining term, but in perpetuity. Our goal as the BMA is to see the Meadows put beyond threat of future development forever. We will now work towards achieving this goal and hope that those who have made donations to our cause will agree to allow us to continue to use them while we pursue this. With the money raised at events like the art auction and the fun run, our group currently has £16,000 in funds which we will use for this work.
Also, while we all joined the campaign primarily to save the Meadows, many of us have become interested in trying to help come up with solutions for Bath’s chronic congestion problems and trying to get better opportunities for active travel and access to public transport for all. To this end, we have joined with other organisations such as the Bath Preservation Trust to call for an independent city-wide study to really understand why people are in their cars at different times of day and what would motivate them out of them. This is something that we have been asking for since we held our first public meeting with the council in February 2016, and that the Bath Preservation Trust has been calling for, for years.
The need for a study of this kind is even more urgent as the Council has replaced the Park & Ride proposal with proposals for an A36/A46 link road without seemingly remembering previous proposals for this, or doing this vital research first. We will be meeting with the new Cabinet member for transport, Cllr Shelford, in August to talk through our concerns with him, and will keep you all informed of our progress.
Thank you again for all your support over the last two years, and well done all of us!
With best wishes,
The BMA