Council sticks to ineffective Action Plan

Councillors who sit on the Community and Environment Committee of Conservative controlled Derbyshire Dales District Council will consider on Thursday 9th February the latest draft of an Action Plan to tackle air pollution in Ashbourne.
The current plan is remarkably similar to the one that was recommended by officers over 3 months ago at the November 1st meeting of the same committee.
Due to problems over the late publication of that Action Plan (with members of the public not having had an opportunity to read it) a decision on the plan was deferred until their December meeting.
However it seems that research commissioned by County Highways was not available by the time of that meeting. So 3 months later than planned councillors will be asked to make a decision on what can be done to reduce the illegal levels of nitrogen dioxide pollution in Ashbourne.

What have we learnt from the reports? Apparently not enough to alter the choice of actions in the plan. This seems odd because the one report included in the information for councillors attempts to establish the cost effectiveness of each of the proposed actions. The research is less than convincing in the way it seeks to do this but if we take their findings at face value it produces some strange conclusions.
Action 2 in the Plan is to 'improve traffic flows' in particular at two road junctions in the town. The argument being that smooth flowing traffic generates less pollution than stop start traffic. This seems reasonable but the way in which they attempt to 'prove' it seems very convoluted. (It also does not factor in the choices that drivers make in travel and it could be that if the traffic moved more freely then more drivers would choose that route and nitrogen dioxide levels could become even higher).
Although no justification is given, this action is awarded the highest score of all the actions for impact on NOx levels (a 3 out of 5). Overall it secures a cost effectiveness score of 13, the second highest score.
However what DDDC councillors have not been told is the result of another survey also commissioned by DCC from Aecom concerning exactly this junction re-modelling. In the summary of this report it concludes that if the junction improvements were carried out (at a likely cost of £100-500k) there might be "some marginal improvements" in traffic flow. Faint praise indeed - but it gets worse. For one of the junctions it concludes that "the arrangement is likely to introduce visibility and safety issues that makes the arrangement unfeasible".
And this was for the second best action in the plan for cost effectiveness..

Which action got top marks? That was a 16 for cutting the trees back. This certainly made for cleaner air on one day - when they closed the road for tree trimming and felling.