RIVERLIGHTS PROJECT FLAWED

With yet another delay to the Riverlights project, perhaps the council leader could take time out to reflect on the impact this two-year development will have on the market trade in the city centre. Erecting temporary bus stops throughout the city centre, as small as the city centre is, surely is the most absurd idea ever to come out of this incompetent city council.

Does Maurice Burgess have any idea how many buses pass through the bus station on a daily basis? Arriva, Trent, National Express, holiday coach firms, the list of bus services using this facility is endless.

I challenge Maurice Burgess to visit the bus station one morning (it's that building round the corner from your offices that the Conservatives promised to save from demolition 12 months ago) to see for himself the impracticability of using these temporary bus stops as a stop-gap and maybe he will realise that once MetroHolst bring in the bulldozers, chaos will surely ensue.

With the development of the Main Centre, Full Street police station and, of course, the bus station all going off at the same time, there must be a genuine concern that the city centre will become a no-go area. Demolition Derby? Beware! It's coming to a city near you! A G Currie

The Riverlights project is not only about the redevelopment of the bus station and the construction of multi-storey buildings, but also the re-alignment of St Alkmund's Way, Station Approach, Traffic Street and the Morledge. The gyratory system around the Cockpit multi-storey car park island will disappear, and these roads will then form a complex series of intersections, controlled by traffic lights and inevitably resulting in slower-moving traffic. Outline planning permission for this amended road layout was given in 2001. The revised Riverlights project, recently submitted for outline planning permission, has doubled the retail/leisure floor area of the 2001 scheme.

The proposed hotel has been replaced with flats and an office block that could house around 700 people. The ambitious proposal for a 3,000 seat cinema has been abandoned. The 2003 traffic assessment submitted with this application concludes that these changes will not generate any increase in traffic! This assessment also omits the possible effects of the Westfield development (2,000 car parking spaces added to the existing Eagle Centre) and the consequences of Connecting Derby. Call me old-fashioned, but I thought a bus station was where buses dropped off passengers, picked up new passengers and set off again.

The 2003 traffic assessment for Riverlights says: "It is assumed that there will be no further (traffic) growth after 2003, due to the congested nature of the adjacent highway as agreed with officers of Derby City Council". On this basis and with the year-on-year traffic growth from 2003 to the completion of Riverlights in 2005, plus the errors and omissions set out above, the adjacent highway is going to be jammed solid with traffic, day-in and day-out. So how do you get a bus into the bus station and how do you get it out? How do you get to work on time or reach Pride Park before half-time?

Until the various traffic schemes proposed for Derby are considered as a whole and viable solutions found for the traffic problems of the city, the Cockpit gyratory system must be left as it is (warts and all) for it is the lynchpin in the city's traffic flows. Peter Steer

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