When William conquered England in 1066 Canterbury surrendered without a fight. At the time of the Doomsday Book in 1086 Canterbury probably had a population of around 10,000, and was one of the largest towns in England. The Normans then built a new cathedral Soon after main industry in Canterbury became providing for the needs of pilgrims. Archbishop Thomas Becket was murdered in 1170 and afterwards many pilgrims came to visit his shrine. They would spend money in the town, in this way Canterbury has grown into a tourist and shopping attraction it is today, and has not changed its economic infostructure since. The construction of a university would presumably cause traffic problems, but as it is in walking distance of the center of Canterbury and most people attending the university live on campus and do not need to travel to and from it.
However these days people no longer travel by foot or cart, but now thousands of cars swell the roads in an attempt to reach the center or surrounding parts or Canterbury. The construction of a university would presumably cause more traffic and parking problems, but as it is in walking distance of the center of Canterbury and most people attending the university live on campus and do not need to travel to and from it, the campus also has its own adequate parking facilities for those who do use cars. There are also numerous bus routes that run to and from the university.
The majority of Canterbury’s central business district is contained within the roman walls; this is where the majority of parking problems are. Just outside the walls are the main roads into the city, this is where the problems of traffic are most heavily focused. Canterbury is a prime example of what is called “Burgess’s concentric zone”, as well as being similar to “Hoyt’s sector model”.
We can use these models to explain why there is traffic and parking problem as ever day people flood in and out of the different “zones” the central one more so than others. There has been a broadly concentric growth of the city which is apparent in the inner rings. So far as the former model is concerned the city had a head start with the well defined constriction of the city walls. This roughly circular area marks the virtual limit of the central business district (1). However, within the city walls, there never was a complete urban fill; there were always open spaces, such as the Cathedral precinct and the Dane John Gardens. Suburbs were built outside the walls in the twelfth and later centuries, expansion outside these inner suburbs only took place in the middle to late nineteenth century (2).
From the eighteenth century, there was a differentiation into two directions of growth. Along the river valley at first avoiding the flood plain, poorer class dwellings were built near to the barracks, and also in the south-west direction along Wincheap, where Victorian terraces were constructed. This development has spread some distance from Wincheap and Sturry Road on land released from the former barracks (3). To the south-east in the direction of Dover and the County Cricket Ground, there were grand houses in large gardens and more around the London and Whitstable Roads (4).
The best defined ribbons of housing were built along the Whitstable Roads into the villages of Blean and Tyler Hill (7). Both these developments go through the woodland sector which is a marked feature of the area immediately north of Canterbury (8). This part of the city shows a similarity to the sector model. There are two other minor ribbons along roads out of the city. The eastern ribbon towards Littlebourne is where the Roman stone street reached towards the city.
Medieval industry was widely distributed in the city and there was no hint of industrial sectors, but the river has been an important location factor from the earliest days. Firstly it provided a source of power and secondly water for washing. The tannery was originally in the centre of the town and moved to its present site during the nineteenth century, where it was near the river but within the line of the city walls and thus also near the supply of local labor. It started a trend which was followed by later planned industrial estates on and near to the river, not previously built on, thus creating the well-marked industrial sectors along the valley(S). This trend was followed by the location of electricity sub-station and sewage works close to the river and the gravel works on the edge of the city. Lastly the Chartham paper mill uses the clear water of the Stour in making high quality paper. To the south of the city there is a fairly well defined green belt where the fertile brick earth reaches close to the city and where building has not been encouraged. There are numerous farms located in orchard and with hop gardens and other arabic land (6).
Within this ring there are several private sports clubs, although there are more clubs on the less fertile land to the north and east of the city. AS Canterbury’s growth was restricted to the north by the steep Tertiary escarpment and to the south by the fertile belt of brickearth, building jumped to the ring of villages mainly to the south and east of the city. Planners permitted building expansion in these villages, particularly in Sturry, Littleboume and Bridge
Whilst restricting it to smaller numbers of houses in Patrixbourne and Fordwich for example. So grew the outer ring of urbanized villages (9). This is where most commuters to the city travel to and from every day.
Canterbury shows well defined sectors and rings combining the features of both the Burgess concentric cone model and the Hoyt sector model mentioned earlier. It does not illustrate the Harrison and Ullman multi-nuclei model because Canterbury is a well proportioned city and has not developed more than one nucleus, mainly due to the city wall which I mentioned earlier. This may happen in time with the expansion of business districts, as more and more people are attracted to the area. This will bring about more problems of transport, as more people travel longer distances to work and live.
The layout of Canterbury means that all the traffic is diverted through numerous avenues, rather than having lots of entry points, like in a city such as London. In this project I will be asking people their opinions on the state of parking and transport in and around Canterbury; I will ask them their reasons for traveling to Canterbury, such as employment, shopping, entertainment or tourism. I can then continue this line of questioning by asking what they would like to be done about the situation, and then perhaps compare this to Canterbury city councils plans for the city’s transportation infostructure in the near future. I will support my findings with use of geographical theory such as “sphere of influence” and “market areas” to explain why the traffic and parking has become a problem for Canterbury. One particular solution I will be investigating is the council’s acclaimed park and ride scheme which they hope to expand and build on, but is it actually working? Also I believe that the majority of people traveling anywhere at any time will be by car.
Key words I will be using are……
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Commuter: Someone who travels a distance from the place they live to the place as a part of normal routine.
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CBD: Central business district, the commercial and business center of a city or town.
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Counterurbanisation: The movement of people and industry to areas away from larger settlements and towards smaller ones in rural areas.
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Suburburbanised village: A small village which is adopting characteristics of a suburb as more commuters begin to live there.
When and where (identify and methodology):
To collect the primary data I need I will ask 25 people a questionnaire which I will make from scratch. I will as 25 because this can easily be turned into a percentage. For example if 7 out of 25 people use the park and ride scheme, It works out as 28% I will however need to ask my information at separate times to achieve an accurate spread. I will ask 5 people on a Monday and a further 5 on a Friday as they are at the start and end of the business week. I start and finish my questioning between 7 and 9, as this is the time most people travel to work. For this I will locate myself at the Castle street car park, as it is the largest car park within the city walls. The next 10 I will ask on the two days Saturday and Sunday. I will be questioning people between 12 and 2 as this is around lunchtime, and most people would either be arriving at the city to have lunch, or have had lunch and would be leaving. I will locate myself at the top end of the high street. I will only be asking adults on both occasions, and I will try to vary male and female as much as possible even though it is not really crucial to the overall results.
To save time I will be using a Systematic sampling method, and as every other person. This will depend on if they meet my first point of criteria on the separate days, so I will need to design two separate questionnaires. There will be a yes and no box so I can simply tick the appropriate column, and there will be a “other” area so I can write in information that will not answer some questions with just yes and no. The questions for the weekday will be significantly different to the ones at the weekend, as I will be mainly concerned with traffic and private transport on the weekdays and the weekend will see the introduction of my public transport questions. I will need 10 copies of the weekday questionnaire and 15 copies of the weekend version. I can then use the data I gather to see how it fits in with the council’s numbers and theories for the future, as well as seeing if people do actually want to use the public transport that the council is spending so much money on attempting to get people to use.
Transport questionnaire (Monday and Friday)
Transport questionnaire (Saturday and Sunday)
Secondary data I will be using will come from sources from the Canterbury city councils 2003 to 2004 transport strategy, subtitled “unlocking the gridlock”.
Data presentation:
After I collected my 25 pieces of information I set about dissecting the information I wanted. This was very easy as I had made sure the questionnaire was simple to use and more importantly gathered the information I wanted.
I firstly put all the numerical data into tables and graphs, as well as any other data that is best shown in a graph, so that accurate comparisons may be made.
This graph shows the relation of people to transport method over the four days….. (Graph A)
This graph shows the distances people traveled to reach Canterbury at the weekend. (Graph B)
This graph shows how long it took for people to travel to work on the weekdays. (Graph C)
This graph shows how long it took for people to find a parking space on a weekday. (Graph D)
This chart shows what people were in Canterbury for at the weekend. (Graph E)
This concludes all the data that can be tabulated, however the remaining data I will be using to fortify my interpretation and conclusion, as I have previously said I will be timesing my information by four to yield a percentage out of 100%. The graphs are labeled A to D respectively, so that I may refer to them later on.
Data interpretation, conclusion and evaluation:
As we can see on graph A the most common method of transport was car, this is something I suggested in my hypotheses. However this is manly a result of 10 people traveling by car as a result of my method of result gathering. This was because I only asked people who traveled to work by car on the weekdays. Still the majority of people travel by car, this is easy to see by simply looking at the roads in the “rush hour” period. Although you can say that 20 or more people could be on a bus, the sheer volume of cars with a minimum of one person in them outnumbers buses an average maximum of 34 cars in the radius of a bus. (Average statistic ) Graph C shows us that the most often time taken to travel to work is 50 to 60 minuets, with less than 10 minuets having a result of 0. This may be because anyone who’s journey to work takes less that ten minuets would have walked and so would not have been included in my survey.
This is a good indication of the state of the traffic, as you can infer that most of these people will live an average distance away, as someone who lived 3 miles away would get stuck in as much traffic in Canterbury as someone who lived 5, because most of their journey would have been on the way to Canterbury where the traffic would not have had a major impact on journey time. Also the average and most often time taken to find a parking space was 10 minuets or less, this is most likely because it is still early morning and so the car park has yet to reach capacity. Something I noted was that the later it got the longer the time took to find a parking space got, this correlates with patterns of parking, the hardest time to find a parking space is in and around mid day.
At the time of writing the new multi story car park has had the outer “shell” completed and is nearing opening in 2004. When the post war version was demolished parking shifted to other parts of town, notably the post war suburbs. To stop this Canterbury city introduced a London style residents parking scheme, something that caused much controversy. One person I interviewed Mr. Kay of Canterbury in the other comments section that I asked to round off each of my interviews said that “My uncle lives in Canterbury and has to pay for his parking. He has 3 adult children and when they come to visit none of them can park outside due to the parking scheme. Out of interest on the subject with the next person I asked specifically about the permit scheme, Mrs. Cartwright said that “In my road before resident’s parking you couldn’t get into you own space because people were parking there and then going to the train station. Twenty pounds is nothing and eases congestion in residential areas considerably” Two very different views on the same scheme. It is probably reasonable to say that for ever new idea the council comes up with to ease traffic and parking problems there will always be people who are strongly for or against, and some undecided.
At the weekend most people traveled into Canterbury from around 2 to 3 miles away (Graph B), and did so for shopping (Graph E). Roughly 48 percent of people were in Canterbury. I believe this to be accurate, as after tourism based activity shopping is the next highest form of income Canterbury, so it would be reasonable to presume that this accounts for the other percentage on a wider spread.
I compiled a rough guide to the top transport concerns of people, via my own interviews and the 2003 traffic report from the Canterbury city council.
1. Worsening traffic congestion on Canterbury’s ring road
and inner routes especially during morning and evening
peak hours and weekend shopping times.
2. Traffic congestion caused by the ‘school run’ (including
higher education colleges).
3. Poor bus services that are seen as unreliable, infrequent and
noisy (when shared with school children) with a lack of rural,
suburban and evening services.
4. An increase in the amount and speed of traffic on urban,
residential and village roads highlighting road safety issues.
5. Poor maintenance of roads, footways, signs and street lights.
6. A need for more parking spaces (and cheaper parking) in
town centers with more flexible parking for residents.
7. There are not enough Park and Ride sites. You would like to
see extended opening hours and more flexible use of the
service and sites.
8. There are not enough safe walking and cycling routes
and there are concerns over those ‘shared use’ routes that
already exist.
9. There is a lack of integration between methods of
transport for example train timetabling linking better
with local bus timetables to prevent lengthy waits
between services.
From my questionnaires I found that only 8% of people used the park and ride scheme, and roughly 80% of people asked about the scheme said that they did not use it as it was not as convenient as using their own cars. Mr. Bates of Sturry pointed out a glaring hole in the integrity of the park and ride scheme, he said that “The park and ride doesn’t work because you have to travel through the city to get to them” So If there seems so much little active support for the scheme why does the prospectus for Canterbury’s funding points in 2004 look like this?
Bus services covers the park and ride scheme. We know there is some support for the scheme or else the car parks at the pick up points would be empty and the buses would not run so frequently. But are people using it by choice or is there no other alternative? Comments such as “I think the park and ride is a good idea but its never full” from Mr. Allen contrast with that of Mrs. carver who says that “If you work in Canterbury you have to use the park and ride because parking is too expensive. This supports my hypothesis that the park and ride is not as successful as the council would have you believe, but it does go some way to easing the choke points of the day at the start and finish of the business day.
To find out how many “points” were going to be spent I emailed the Canterbury city council transportation office, to which I got no exact answer, but I did get this diagram of new sites and proposed expansions.
I also asked about how exactly you could reduce the numbers of lorries on the roads, I asked that if a lorry has to make a delivery in a area at the center of town how do you propose to “reduce its presence” (see fig 1) To which I got no reply.
As a last point, on fig 1 it is clear to see where the council’s loyalties lay. Encouraging people out of their cars is second lowest in spending, second only to what I found to be the printing of leaflets promoting public transport budget.
In conclusion there is nothing that is immediately obvious that can be done to solve the problem; many ideas have been fielded, including a highly unfeasible light railway system as seen in London’s docklands. Whatever happens Canterbury is expanding and the transportation can only get worse. It is only with careful management that anything can be salvaged. The people who design and plan these schemes most likely drive to work, rather than take the public transport they advocate. People will always want to use there cars and will do no matter what the cost, even if a “congestion fee” is introduced. But at then end of the day, with public transport should we simply as Ms Suzanne Harding put it “Force people to use it”?
The only thing I would change about this investigation is the size and variation of my sampling. If there were no time constraints I could have taken samples from many different times of years to see what patterns immerge, but I collected enough data to validate my methodology and draw conclusions; I had no problem in doing so. However it took longer to collect all the data I needed on the weekdays than on the weekend, as less people stopped in the mornings on their way to work to answer the questionnaire, so I had to wait till enough people had, which meant that time was an adverse factor in my enquiry. This is due to the car parks filling up with cars and so making it harder to find a space quickly the later in the morning it gets.
My findings could not be used accurately for another location, however they could be useful to someone else doing a transportation study in a city with a similar sector model to Canterbury.
