DynamicSpirit
Established Member
There IS a possible solution to Lancaster's traffic problem, and that is the never talked about internal relief road that was planned in the 1960s to run from the Pointer roundabout to Greyhound bridge.
There's a deliberately undeveloped strip of land between the two, currently mostly car park which has been a thorn in the councils side for 50 years. They're currently planning to hide the history by replacing the car parks with housing, which would probably be a death knell to the shopping centre.
In reality if the relief road were built it would remove most traffic from the town centre, so resolving much of the problem
I think that bird has already flown. Today you could just about get from the Greyhound Bridge as far as Quarry Road by mostly demolishing car parks, but beyond that has already been built on. Even to get that far you'd have the problem of several junctions that would presumably need to be traffic light controlled.
By the way, I don't see why it would be the death knell to the shopping centre if those car parks were replaced by housing. You'd lose some people coming by car to the shopping centre, but some of those would swap to buses, and you'd add in new people from the new houses. I'd bet the vast majority of people shopping in the city centre even today get there by walking or on the bus - the only exception being people in Sainsburys/Currys/B&M using those shops' car parks.