Residents have calculated that a new McDonald’s will generate up to 42,000 extra traffic movements a week on a busy York road.
A group of activists campaigning against the planned McDonald’s at the former Iceland supermarket off Fulford Road have compiled a traffic and car park report.
The report, written by Tamsin Whitehead, of Fulford Cross, challenges a lot of the assertions made by McDonald’s in their own analysis.
For instance, McDonald’s say there are 110 parking spaces on the site, which is shared with an Aldi supermarket. Residents say there’s actually only 98.
In their survey, they counted the number of ‘movements’ at the site at different times between Saturday 27 April and Wednesday 1 May. Movements in this case meaning ‘journeys by pedestrians, bicycles and vehicles in this small area, ignoring passing traffic’.
This peaked at 433 movements in one hour, on a Monday between 3pm and 4pm. The equates to 7.2 movements per second.
The report also describes the narrow entrance to the site as a “pinch-point for pedestrians and cyclists crossing and cars entering and exiting the car park”.
“Given the high volume of traffic in both directions on the A19, especially at peak times, this often forces motorists entering/exiting the car park to quickly fit into gaps in passing pedestrians and to passing traffic, particularly for cars turning right.
“A high number of pedestrians and cyclists (including a large proportion of school children) travel along Fulford Road, and so this poses a significant danger to more vulnerable road users at the entrance to the site.”
The report also compares the proposed Fulford Road McDonald’s with one the residents consider similar – the one on Cottingham Road, Hull.
Their analysis suggests that this McDonald’s generates up to 35,000 traffic movements per week.
“The planned Fulford McDonald’s has 20% more seating, on a busier road with passing traffic heading into and out of the city,” the report states.
“Therefore, it has been calculated that there could be 36,000 to 42,000 extra traffic movements per week into the site as a minimum.”
The report concludes that the busyness of the road, the narrowness of the entrance and the “wholly inadequate provision” for parking means the proposed McDonald’s contravenes City of York Council traffic rules.
Meanwhile, McDonald’s has commissioned its own traffic assessment. It carried out a car park survey on Friday 19th and Saturday 20th April.
Residents point out that this coincided with the closure of Queen Street bridge when drivers had been urged to leave their cars at home.
The McDonald’s report says: “The survey results showed that the car park operates with spare capacity throughout Friday and Saturday, with peak demand for parking being its highest on a Saturday between 10.45am – 11am at 47 spaces (44% occupancy).”
It adds: “The traffic generation associated with proposed restaurant / hot food takeaway use will be similar to the existing use in traffic terms…
“In conclusion, the proposals would not result in any detrimental highway impact on capacity or road safety and therefore no traffic or transportation reasons are preventing the granting of planning permission for the development proposals.”
However, the residents claim this report is flawed because “the data is incomplete, inconsistently presented, out-of-date or not comparable”.
There are now 199 objections to the proposed McDonald’s on the planning application portal and more than 1,000 signatures on a petition against the plan.