A Development to Support

It’s not often that the campaign receives a planning application we feel that we can wholeheartedly endorse. Well it’s hats off to City of York Council Housing Delivery Team and architects Mikhail Riches for coming up with an innovative and exciting project on Ordnance Lane / Hospital Fields Road. We are excited about many facets of this development, but most of all welcome the ambition to create a community that puts car-free living at the heart of its vision and goes the extra mile to provide viable alternatives – including community cargo bikes, car-share provision and excellent cycle infrastructure. The site is well situated close to good amenities, excellent bus routes and the nexus of cycle paths that converge on Millennium Bridge, so if living car-free is possible anywhere in York, it’s right here. This neighbourhood already enjoys a high level of cycle usage and our fond hope is that such improvements will help generate a critical mass of cycling that will lead to even more of the good stuff we’re constantly campaigning for.

York Cycle Campaign have written the below endorsement the planning application, along with some minor suggestions and have urged all our members to take a look too. We do appreciate that there are a number of objections from residents of neighbouring streets, focussed primarily on parking concerns. However, this can be easily addressed by the extension of already existing resident’s parking schemes in the neighbourhood. If you like what you see, please add your personal support comment on the planning portal, or email it to planning.comments@york.gov.uk as York needs to see more of the same if we are to make cycling a viable option in this city once again.

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York Cycle Campaign’s Response

York Cycle Campaign would like to applaud the applicants for producing a design which will encourage and enable active travel. We’d like to congratulate the applicants for the outstanding consultation process that they conducted, and for producing such clear documents for this planning application, labeled in such a way as to make it easy to find relevant information. 

We have assessed the cycling provision associated with this development and in particular we are pleased to see that the applicants intend to provide ample cycle parking, in line with national guidelines. We have a few minor points which we’d be delighted to discuss further with the applicant, and we anticipate that these issues can be resolved.

• The plans currently indicate cycle parking provision for 12 cargo cycles (4.3% of the total cycle parking). We would like to see this increased to 14 spaces or more (at least 5% of the cycle parking), in line with Government guidelines (LTN1/20). We anticipate that the low-vehicle nature of this development will attract an above average number of cargo-cycles, and it will be important to provide for this, to enable residents to live here without owning a car.  
• We note that the width of the cycle parking is tight (1m for a two-cycle store). This is the absolute minimum recommended width and we would like to see additional width given to the cycle stores, to ensure that it is easy to store cycles and thereby encourages people to use their cycles. We wonder if it would be possible to create additional width by having shared cycle storage for a block, rather than rows of cubicles for just two cycles? 
• Two-tier cycle parking requires a minimum height of 2.7m (LTN1/20). We couldn’t see the height of the building for the two-tier cycle stores, but ask that the applicant check that they meet this minimum height requirement.
• If car parking provision is altered on Hospital Fields Road (to create resident’s car parking spaces for example) we ask that the opportunity is taken to install a segregated cycle path on the pavement side of the car-parking, so as to avoid ‘car-dooring ‘ incidents, and in line with national cycle infrastructure guidelines.