Today, I went along to the exhibition in St. John's Church Hall on the proposed Grove Airfield development that is eventually supposed to accommodate a total of 2,500 homes. There is a vast amount of information on the outline planning application already on the Vale of White Horse District Council planning website (see here), but the large format displays made it a lot easier on the eyes! For those who could not make it, the photos above give an idea and show (clockwise from top left) the illustrative masterplan, a plan of building heights, a drainage/feature plan and an access and movement plan.
At the moment, on the Vale website it says "The consultation process will begin once the officer has been allocated" and I know there has been some confusion about how/when people can send in their comments. Some residents like me, would have received a letter towards the end of February from the Vale saying "ensure that we receive your comments within 21 days of the date of this letter" - i.e. before any of the exhibitions. My understanding from this exhibition, however, is that residents will have until at least the end of April to make comments/objections. It is certainly very unfortunate that, for such a major development, the consultation process has still not been made crystal clear. I hope that this all gets clarified very soon! A further exhibition is also planned in Grove for 20 and 21 April, which will be jointly managed by the District Council planning officers and the developers.
The proposed estate has only two access roads, both of which are in the south-east corner of the site.
ReplyDeleteThis will prevent any bus operator from providing a sufficiently direct bus service through the site, and therefore a bus service that could ever make a profit. Any bus service would have to be subsidised by the County Council and would almost certainly be of limited frequency.
The estate seems designed to make its residents as car-dependent as possible.
Thank you for your comments which are, in fact, the same comments I made at the exhibition to the transport planners. I know that the bus companies need to have the shortest route possible to make any journey commercially viable and going in and out of the estate on the two access roads would put a long time on any journey. I agree, the important issue is to encourage people to use buses rather than their own cars otherwise the development cannot be sustainable. I hope that you can make your comments known via. the Vale of White Horse District Council website under the proposed planning application.
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