Council chiefs say they are working closely with public transport companies as they seek to implement a £50m scheme that will see substantial parts of Newcastle city centre pedestrianized.
Newcastle City Council last week unveiled plans to transform its city centre, saying that work to make the area more family-friendly was key to helping it recover from the pandemic.
The plans include proposals to pedestrianize Grey Street and Blackett Street, as well as creating more public spaces and ‘greening’ the city centre as a whole.
But the plans to reduce traffic have already provoked some opposition from motorists, while bus companies have questioned the moves to shut roads that are currently well-used bus routes.
Speaking at an event organised by the NewcastleGateshead Initiative (NGI), the council’s director of place Michelle Percy and assistant director of transport Graham Grant said that the authority was working with bus companies to ensure the best solution.
Mr Grant said: “The strategy for the city centre, as outlined in our local planning documentation, is to try and put car parks around the outskirts and create a much more pedestrian friendly environment in the middle. We want to get more people into sustainable and active ways of getting about.
“One of the things to bear in mind at the moment is that there is a fundamental re-set happening because of Covid-19. Just as the retail and property market, where it’s driven 10 years of change in the space of one year, the same thing is true in terms of passenger transport.
“This is going to be felt across the entire country. We’re all facing a really significant issue whereby the patronage isn’t high enough to secure bus services as it is, so we’re going to be working with the bus operators to develop a new approach a network over the coming year to look at what buses will look like in the future.
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“We’re trying to work on something called an ‘enhanced partnership’, which means that as a local authority we’ll seek to ensure we provide reliable conditions for the buses to operate on. That means bus companies will have the confidence to invest in their operations.
“That work is going to be ongoing certainly for the next year. We need to sign it off by April 2022.”
The council has secured £20m of funding for the city centre from a number of public funds, and is hoping to attract another £30m through a mixture of Government grants and private sector investment.
As well as the high profile pedestrianization projects, it wants to improve Northumberland Street and some of the sidestreets that lead off it. Improvements to the Grainger Market and Central Station areas are also being looked at.
The proposals have received a broad welcome from the business community but Martijn Gilbert, chair of the NEbus bus operators association, has urged the council to “be very careful making any fundamental changes that affect the accessibility of public transport before demand has had an opportunity to return, or risk making using public transport harder to use at a time when it should be encouraged”.
Speaking separately, David Brown, chief executive of Newcastle-based transport company Go-Ahead Group, told the BBC’s Today programme, broadcasting from the city, that bus passenger numbers were rising every week as coronavirus restrictions are lifted.
He said: “Cities function through good public transport and public transport needs city centres functioning - it’s a symbiotic relationship. If you want the health of the city centre to recover, you need public transport to recover at exactly the same time.”