Hereford bypass section ‘won’t necessarily improve safety’

Transport experts have sounded a note of caution on whether the first phase of Hereford’s bypass will make the county’s roads safer overall.

Herefordshire Council’s Connected Communities Scrutiny Committee were debating how to ensure the scheme brings demonstrable benefits before it gets the official green-light in July.

The council’s infrastructure delivery director Scott Tompkins told the committee he had prepared a draft series of technical, planning, environmental, commercial and financial criteria that the revived scheme should meet, some of which “are quite straightforward others are very stretchy and challenging”.

“Our recommendation to Cabinet would be that want at least a medium-value scheme – so any BCR (benefit-to-cost ratio) of over one,” he added.
Committee member Coun Diana Toynbee said residents “need to know their money is being well spent, not just boxes ticked”, and drew attention to one “technical” criterion, that “modelling results [should] demonstrate no overall reduction in safety”.

“The reality of this road is you’re reducing traffic on some residential areas which will improve safety in those areas,” Mr Tompkins said. “But when you’re building a high-speed road, you get more serious incidents and fatalities.

“So I don’t think it’s fair to say that the scheme will ever entirely improve road safety. It will improve it in one area but it will be lesser in another area.”

Independent Herefordshire-based transport analyst Tom van Vuren explained that a fatalities and injuries “all get weighted with a particular value, and that leads to an overall component of the value-for-money analysis”.

“Understanding what these numbers are and how they have been derived I hope will help Cabinet understand how important a slight negative value of safety is in their decision,” he said.

Chair Ed O’Driscoll earlier explained to colleagues: “We’re not here to debate the merits of the bypass itself, the route or whether the scheme should proceed. Those are matters for later when the full business case is brought forward.

“Today is about whether the process for assessing that case is fit for purpose.”

Following the debate, the committee agreed that assessment criteria on safety and other topics would be “graded” rather than given a simple pass or fail, and that the final report to July’s Cabinet should have “clearer reporting of project risks, assumptions and uncertainty”.