A LOCAL councillor has said he will ‘eat his hat’ if parking and traffic woes are alleviated by moving outpatients to the Alhambra Centre - and called for a re-think on long-mooted plans for a park-and-ride scheme following a ‘chaotic’ week around Barnsley Hospital.
Plans have long been proposed for a park-and-ride scheme for Barnsley Hospital, with almost 300 people signing a petition for its creation on land near Dodworth’s Capitol Park.
The council accepted a recommendation from its in-house scrutiny group to carry out a feasibility study for the project, which had been spearheaded by ex-councillor Peter Fielding due to poor air quality in Gawber and Pogmoor.
However the study, which was published in September last year, stated that the proposals were not feasible and were subsequently scrapped - much to the dismay of Coun Chris Wray.
Coun Wray represents the Dodworth ward and lives near to the hospital, and says that the issues around parking and long traffic queues are still evident to this day.
He told the Chronicle: “I live close to the hospital and I go past it practically every day.
“The parking around here is chaos.
“There’s never enough car parking spots.
“Unfortunately I’ve had the need to visit a relative in the hospital recently and getting parked there is next to impossible.
“Staff struggle to park and so they park on surrounding streets and we hear so many residents complaining about it.
“You’ve got two, three lines of cars trying to get passed.”
Through a joint collaboration between the hospital, council and the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority (SYMCA), the Alhambra Centre is set to become a health hub as part of the Health on the High Street scheme.
It will see the outpatient unit at Barnsley Hospital transferred into the town centre, with the hope being that cars will therefore not need to travel into Gawber and could use parking in the centre.
But Coun Wray is confident that won’t help.
He added: “In my honest opinion it’s not going to help.
“Yes, outpatients will be going into the Alhambra which is a good thing because it will improve capacity in the town centre.
“The Community Diagnostic Centre is great - I won’t take that away.
“But increasing capacity here doesn’t mean that it’s going to reduce it at the hospital.
“All it’s going to do is get replaced by something else.
“There’s no chance that it will help - I will eat my hat if this actually improves things.”
Instead, he has called for a re-think into the park-and-ride proposals.
He added: “The improvement would have been to do what we suggested a long time ago - the park-and-ride scheme.
“I don’t think that it’s dead in the water.
“I think you can revisit the park-and-ride when we eventually see that the Alhambra scheme doesn’t improve things.
“I think that park-and-ride is a viable solution, as it has been in a number of cities and towns elsewhere in the country.”
Coun James Higginbottom told the Chronicle that the park-and-ride scheme was a ‘hobby’ horse for the Lib Dems that the party use when an election is around the corner.
He added: “Easing congestion around the hospital requires a multi-faceted solution including reducing the overall numbers of cars accessing the site, improved public transport and increased active travel opportunities.
"Various iterations of a park-and ride scheme have been investigated over the years both by professional council officers and by independent transport experts at the request of the overview and scrutiny report in 2022.
“All investigations reached the same conclusion: a park-and-ride scheme is not a viable option.
"What is a viable option, however, is to reduce the overall demand at the Hospital by moving services from the Gawber Road site into the town centre as part of our trailblazing Health on the High Street initiative - which is estimated to move 100,000 appointments per year from the Hospital to the Alhambra.
“That will free up space, reduce demand on the network and support the wider regeneration of Barnsley town centre."
