Public Consultation

As with comedy, the secret of good consultation is... timing. I was wondering what had happened about the public consultation on night flights that TDC had promised, so I emailed Anona Somasundaram, the Democratic Services Officer in charge of the AWP:

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Me:
On 19th August a news item appeared on the TDC website about Night Flight policy:

"The council will be engaging in a comprehensive public consultation process. Details of the process and how to be involved will be announced following a meeting of the council’s Airport Working Party."

As the AWP met on the 26th August, could you let me know what the process is for public consultation.
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Anona's reply:
My understanding that a further meeting of the Working Party will be called for the purpose of agreeing a programme for public consultation. I hope to be able to confirm that shortly.
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Thank you for getting back to me so quickly. Two more questions:

• does the public consultation period start when the programme is announced (or has it started BEFORE the public knows what the consultation process is)?
• how long is the public consultation period (if it's already started, when did it start)?

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I confirm, as stated in my earlier email, that the programme for public consultation will be finalised at the next meeting of the Airport Working Party.

I also confirm that public consultation has not commenced. Details have still to be publicly announced, and consultation will not commence until after announcement.

Public consultation will take place over a 12-week period.
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You're being very helpful - sorry to trouble you again. When is the next AWP meeting? I've looked at the TDC online meetings calendar, and there's no scheduled meetings at all for the AWP for the next year (!).
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No further meetings have been scheduled yet.

I'll make a note to let you know as soon as next meeting has been arranged.
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So, at some point in the (near?) future the Airport Working Party will convene, ruminate and pronounce. When the public have been told how the public consultation will work, only then will the 12 week clock start ticking.

Glad that's cleared up.

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Sign the petition against night flights.
.:.

It's been said before...

"There are people who are not sensitive to noise; but they are just the very people who are not sensitive to argument, or thought, or poetry, or art, in a word, to any kind of intellectual influence. The reason of it is that the tissue of their brains is of a very rough and coarse quality."

from "On Noise" by Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851

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Sign the petition against night flights.
.:.

Wiggins' routes

A red letter day, dear reader. One of my undercover researchers (codename: Casey) has unearthed a map of the routes agreed between Wiggins and TDC many moons ago. Apparently one of the lead negotiators from the TDC side was Cllr Harrison. These 'people-friendly' routes didn't make it into the Section 106 Agreement due to an oversight by, er, Cllr Harrison. Shame.

These routes were mentioned at a meeting held at Manston, chaired by the omnipresent Cllr Harrison. I got the impression that these route maps had somehow wisped away to nothingness, lost forever to the eyes of mortals. I'm pleased to have sight of them at last. I expect Infratil and TDC will be thrilled, too. Now that they don't have to go through the rigmarole of (re)negotiating effective noise abatement routes, they can use the time they've saved to install fixed noise monitors under the newly agreed routes.

The carefully drawn coloured lines on the map are explained by the accompanying colour-coded key.

(Click it to big it.)

The red route labelled 1 is the standard westward instrument departure route: by the time the plane is doubling back on itself and heading south, it's supposed to be at 3,000 feet and climbing. Route 2 is the alternative westward route; route 3 is the standard eastward instrument departure route. All of the other lines and boxes are explained in the key.

(Click it to big it.)

What I find interesting about this is that it so clearly shows what is achievable. The planes can fly people-friendly routes. So what do you think the odds are of anything resembling this appearing in the next S106 Agreement?

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Related posts:
Altitude sickness: sub-standard aircraft monitoring at Manston
Before I die of rage: Infratil ignores residents
JFK vs KIA: planes can avoid flying over residential areas
YES WE CAN: Enjoy being awake

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Sign the petition against night flights.
.:.

Noisy nuisance neighbour

Those nice people at the CPRE have produced some maps that are both pretty and informative. They show the distribution of "Tranquility" across our fine nation, and come with an explanation of how the CPRE assess tranquility.

Looking at the map of Kent (click it to big it) the cities and towns are easy to spot, as is the M20 running through Ashford to Folkestone, and the roads radiating out from Canterbury.

Looking more closely at North-east Kent, it's easy to spot Whitstable, Herne Bay, Birchington, Westgate, Margate, Broadstairs, Ramsgate and Canterbury.

But what's that red smudge of non-tranquility, just west of Ramsgate and south of Westgate? An all-night rave at Acol? Burning the candle at both ends in Minster? Innumerable painted lady butterflies smashing their wings together? Countless ladybirds clattering about like tiny scarlet castanets?

Nope. It's everyone's favourite neighbour: Kent International Airport at Manston. Even with the current ("unsustainable") low level of traffic, they have as much impact on the quality of life as a small town. By way of reminder, dear reader, the airport's strategy is to achieve 103,800 flights a year. Equivalent to one every 5 minutes, day and night, all year. You may as well fish out your favourite crimson lippy and colour in all the rest of Thanet a noisy red.

Or you could sign the petition against night flights.

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Related posts:
Yes We Can: Sleep
Fact-o-matic: Noise

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Sign the petition against night flights.
.:.

Manston Parkway Station

The proposed station is intended to link Kent International Airport (Manston) to the Southeastern High Speed rail service. Somehow. On the left is Southeastern Network's map of their routes (click it to big it).

The pale grey track that loops out from the existing Eutrostar route between Ebbsfleet and Ashford is the new high-speed rail link, taking in the Medway towns, the north Kent coast, Thanet and Canterbury. We are being promised shorter journey times from December 2009 - click for a list of forthcoming disappointments.

The map's legend has a symbol for Airport Interchange, notably missing from the Ramsgate area, for the simple reason that the Interchange or Parkway Station doesn't exist. Here's the high-speed link on a conventional map: the route is the blue line; the blue pins are stations; the red bits are explained later. Click here to see the full Google map.

Which brings us lumbering to the inevitable question: where will that little Airport Interchange symbol go? Where will Manston Parkway be built?

The strategy document is curiously non-committal, but suggests somewhere in the vicinity of the airport (sensible) and the Eurokent Business Park and Westwood (mad).


In this close-up of the earlier map, the red pins are the Manston Business Park (MBP) and Westwood, the red block the runway, the pink area around it the airport site, and the little yellow blob the Passenger Terminal.

• Building the Parkway half way between MBP/Westwood and KIA will be a poor solution for both, offering only a marginal improvement over using the existing Ramsgate station.
• If it's built at KIA, it will be as far from MBP/Westwood as the existing Ramsgate station, thus offering no advantage to MBP/Westwood.
• If it's built at MBP/Westwood, it will be as far from KIA as the existing Ramsgate station, thus offering no advantage to KIA.

Introducing MBP/Westwood into the calculations is bonkers - it instantly creates more problems than it solves. Let's assume instead that the airport is the sole driver. Dear reader, if you ran the world, how would you get passengers from the airport onto the high-speed link?

1. a shuttle bus service from the Passenger Terminal, along the Manston Road to Ramsgate Station;
2. modify the Manston Road to make it straighter and faster, or just build a dedicated faster, straighter road;
3. nick a few miles of the Docklands Light Railway (or build your own) and some of those neat electric shuttle trains. This service could run straight into Ramgate Station, passengers then just walk across the platform onto the high-speed train to St Pancras, where they can then wrestle their luggage through the Tube network to get somewhere useful;
4. build a new station on the high-speed route, where the track is nearest the southern tip of the airport, with a bus service from the Passenger Terminal to the new station.

In terms of practicality:

1. you could start tomorrow for the cost of hiring or buying some coaches;
2. straightening the road would cause months of delays, and would need the agreement of many landowners (as would building a new road);
3. a light rail service would also need the agreement of many landowners, and would involve some major works at Ramsgate Station itself;
4. retro-fitting additional stations on the fastest stretch of the high-speed loop would be counter-productive. The train would have to crawl from Ramsgate to Parkway and wait for at least the minimum 2 minutes before restarting.

Whichever solution is chosen, there is still the problem of the cost of the train journey. Rail fares from Kent to London are (unreasonably) expensive, and the high-speed service will apparently be 10-20% dearer still. This doesn't sit easily with a business model based on high volume, low budget passenger traffic - the train ticket could be costing as much as the plane ticket.

Local tourists, drawn from the airport's catchment area, are more likely to drive to the relatively cheap car park at Manston. Foreign tourists heading for London can choose from other airports that have cheaper connections to the capital.

I don't see Manston Parkway Station being built. Do you?

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Related posts:
Outer London: Manston Airport's in the wrong place
Seppuku Lite: Infratil's business model is corporate suicide
Manston's future: a suggestion

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Sign the petition against night flights.
.:.

Jet Carter

Behold last week's pithy missive from Mrs. Earplugs to Paul Carter FC via his blog on the KCC website:

"You say you understand that Boris doesn't want a third runway at Heathrow and that you don't want an airport in the estuary. And then you say you want more use to be made of Manston. Of course, you live nowhere near it, so you will not be experiencing what we on the flight path will experience.

Also, you have demonstrated by your avoidance of the KIACC meetings how little attention you propose to pay to the views of those most affected by your dreams of seeing more flights at Manston. May I borrow the phrase you used of the Audit Commission and categorise this as "stunning hypocrisy" on your part?"

No reply yet, I expect he's busy. Maybe he doesn't agree with her analysis. Maybe you do.

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Related posts:
Paul Carter. How dare you.

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Sign the petition against night flights.
.:.

Whisper who dares: TDC's covert planning

Many thanks to the eagle-eyed Mr Child for alerting the world to a curiously hush-hush meeting. Membership, attendance, time and location are public knowledge. We can see the topics to be discussed. But that's it. The minutes from the only other meeting this year (in May) are restricted. The details of the topics to be discussed are restricted. Even the reasons for the restrictions aren't clear.

To pre-empt being patronised by the more world-weary amongst you, yes I do understand about commercial confidentiality - in the brief twinkle of my life to date I have been party to such things myself.

What makes me uneasy is that this is when the flaws that are inherent in democracy become magnified. Because of the first past the post system, and the shameful laziness of British voters, the winning party (at every tier of government) is almost always chosen by a minority of the eligible electorate. From amongst their own number, the winners select (or are presented with) a leader and leading team. That individual, and handful, then hold sway over the lives and livelihoods of tens of thousands. It's a bad system, but not the worst.

The secret meeting mentioned above is the TDC Local Development Framework Working Party, which formulates the spatial strategy and plan for the District. The Working Party consists of a clerk, whatever professional Officers are needed, and 5 Councillors, split 3:2 between the majority and minority parties. Party politics being the disappointing thing that it is, the odds are that the 3 will vote as one, the 2 will vote as one, and that the two groups will often vote against each other.

Thus we find Cllrs Ezekial, Latchford and Gregory determining high-level long-term strategy on e.g. KIA and Westwood, with no public, no press, no minutes. At May's meeting they apparently decided to invite Matt Clarke of Infratil to the 22nd July meeting, presumably for the Agenda item "Airport Masterplan - Presentation and report".

Infratil released their Draft Masterplan at the end of last year, and not everyone was impressed. The CPRE said that it fell so far short of Government guidelines for Masterplans, and was so lacking in key information, that it should have been completely redrafted. This didn't happen, of course. I'm assuming that the "Airport Masterplan" referred to in the Agenda is the post-consultation (remember all that consultation?), refined and finalised Masterplan. Let's hope they don't keep it secret too long.

What little I've heard about the Three Framework Councillors ranges from disappointing to lurid. Matt Clarke is more driven, and possibly brighter, than the three combined. So we have the TDC leadership (reportedly of questionable judgement and Standards) planning the future with the local representative of Infratil (extremely wealthy and increasingly urgent in their need for results).

I expect Matt to deliver a competent presentation along the lines of: co-operation will lead to jobs aplenty; non-compliance or resistance will bring closure and redundancies. He'll be pushing at an open door: they want to believe that Manston can bring thousands of jobs. He'll run rings round them. It's Brian White's job to assess how realistic Infratil's forecasts are, whether there are better and/or quicker and/or more sustainable job creation plans, and the wisdom (in terms of eggs and baskets) of actively engineering a situation where so many local jobs depend on a single fragile and volatile industry. Unfortunately, none of us will ever see the minutes.

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Sign the petition against night flights.
.:.