Call for later start to school day in town blighted by traffic jams

BUSINESS leaders have called for the start of the school day to be pushed back to reduce rush-hour traffic under a radical shake-up of transport policies in one of Yorkshire’s notoriously congested towns.

Traffic tailbacks blighting Harrogate have escalated so much that fears have been voiced that the congestion is affecting enterprise and undermining the spa town’s tourism and conferencing industry, which is the bedrock of its economy.

The Harrogate Chamber of Trade and Commerce has now urged highways officials from North Yorkshire County Council to instigate a major revamp of the town’s transport infrastructure to combat the queues of thousands of vehicles snaking through the roads every day.

One of the most radical suggestions put forward, by the chamber’s chief executive Brian Dunsby, is to push the start of the school day back by half an hour to reduce the number of vehicles on the roads during the morning rush-hour.

He admitted that some parents would still need to drop their children while on the way to work, but was adamant that the 30-minute delay to the school day would be key to alleviating congestion during the morning.

Mr Dunsby said: “It is crucial that something is done because it is vital that people are able to travel easily both to, from and across Harrogate.

“We depend on tourism, whether it be leisure visitors or the conferencing industry, and many people will be put off from coming to Harrogate because of the problems with the roads.

“I am sure that measures like pushing back the start of the school day would help. I accept that working parents would still need to drop their children off before 9am, but that doesn’t mean lessons couldn’t start 30 minutes later.

“We need to look at all options that are available to tackle the long-running problems of traffic congestion which we have here in Harrogate.”

Highways officers from the county council were given an insight into Harrogate’s beleaguered roads network when they toured the town’s worst congestion blackspots with Mr Dunsby and representatives from the town’s taxi and bus firms.

A two-hour mini-bus tour highlighted the problems on some of the town’s main routes including the A59, the A61 and the A661. The council officers were also shown the proposed location of a new Tesco supermarket on the site of the former gasworks at New Park.

Harrogate is the last postcode area in mainland Britain without a Tesco superstore, but the Chamber of Trade and Commerce has objected over concerns about traffic levels.

A county council spokeswoman confirmed that a major strategy was being drawn up to improve Harrogate’s transport network, with 2.5m earmarked to fund the project.

Among the proposals being considered is a review of existing traffic signals in the hope that the timings of the lights can be altered to ease traffic flows.

But North Yorkshire County Council’s executive member for highways and planning, Coun Gareth Dadd, admitted that Harrogate’s transport problems posed one of the greatest challenges to the authority.

He stressed, however, that funding for the town’s transportation strategy had survived largely intact in the wake of the Government’s cutbacks, indicating that efforts to tackle the congestion remain a key priority.

Other transport schemes, including a park and ride in Whitby, have had to be shelved after an overall 18m funding package for North Yorkshire was cut by more than 4m in the Emergency Budget in June.

Coun Dadd said there was no easy solution or quick fix to Harrogate’s transport problem, which presented some of the biggest congestion challenges in North Yorkshire.