Its not NIMBYism, its BANANAism
Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone!
Regards
Ian
I would agree, a lot of it appears to be that they don't want change.
I would also suggest that there's a fear that they won't be able to drive where they want to.
Almost universally when anything is proposed the big concern is around traffic.
A classic example is when talking about HS2 it's fairly common to find locals talking about (say) "700 lorries a day" and then comparing that to a lorry every minute.
That sounds quite a lot, until you stand by the side of a road and say "right a lorry goes past", then look at your watch for a minute and then say "next lorry". As, unless you're looking at a residential street or a road which doesn't really go anywhere, the impact would likely be less than many fear.
You see the same with houses, people say "those 500 homes will add 1,000 or more cars to the network and it'll be gridlock" the thing is it very much depends on when those cars are going to be used.
Use them at 3 in the morning and they'll cause no traffic problems at all. The critical time is in the peak hour, when typically those 500 homes would add around 330 cars to the network.
330 cars again sounds a lot, however, other than at the site access, the reality is that they get split up quite quickly.
For 500 homes there would be at least 2 accesses, which maybe onto more than one road, however even if it's to the same road, some will go left some will go right, then at the next (significant) junction (i.e. one that goes somewhere and not just to another residential estate, although even then there's a skin chance that one or two cars may go there) the traffic will split again.
As such those 330 cars quite quickly get split so there's less than 100 cars going along a road, even where there's a key route that most people will want to go along.
Pass a shop, doctors, dentist, some offices, or a school and the numbers will drop away,
Also not all traffic will be new traffic, for example the bin lorries or post office vans are likely to not increase their numbers to serve that number of homes. Likewise "new* bus routes could be extensions of existing routes, and may actually mean that some existing trips switch to being undertaken by bus as that's now viable.
It's also worth noting that when designing traffic signals it is assumed that you can get 3 cars across the so line in 7 seconds of green time (assuming that's the total length of green for that traffic), that equals over 1,500 cars an hour in one direction. When you compare that to those extra 330 cars from those 500 new homes, they start to look fairly limited in number, especially given it'll typically be that it's around 230 are going in one direction.
That's before you consider that it may well be that those 500 new homes may come with other facilities. For example, that's of a size that it could be required to build a 1 form entry primary school on site, as such, even if people drive there from those 500 homes, they wouldn't actually be driving on any of the existing roads, so won't be making traffic worse.
Likewise, it could be large enough to need to provide a shop or there could be mixed use, so you have some office space built on a portion of the land. All of which can reduce the impact of the traffic on the wider network by reducing the need for people who are driving to drive on the existing roads.
