Residents ‘seriously concerned’ over 111 vehicle trips per day to service warehouses

By Joe Coughlan, Local Democracy Reporter

Residents of a neighbourhood are worried after a local council approved plans for more than 100 more cars and trucks to drive up and down a narrow residential road every day.

Two warehouses will be built in Tunnel Avenue in Greenwich.

It is estimated the centre will lead to a further 111 trips by vehicles being made in Greenwich per day, with nearly half of these trips including large vans and trucks.

The buildings would allow small businesses to drop off goods from delivery trucks to the centre so that smaller vehicles can deliver the goods across the borough.

In building the warehouses, a printing company and waste recycling company’s buildings will be demolished.

At a planning meeting by Greenwich council on Tuesday, Councillor Rowshan Hannan said she had “serious concerns” about the nature of the business, and that approving the plans “would not be the right thing to do”.

The councillor was worried about the additional vehicles added to the road from the warehouses, as the number of tenants for the buildings had not been confirmed.

She said that the council calculated the number of additional vehicle trips to be 349 a day, instead of the 194 Bloom Developments had initially stated before reducing the number.

Cllr Hannan said: “This proposal would bring traffic to our borough that would not otherwise come to our borough, and it’s not consistent with our vision in the transport strategy or our carbon neutral plan.”

Greenwich Council’s carbon neutral plan was announced last February, and includes aims to reduce car use in the borough by 45 per cent by 2030.

Sheila Keeble, from the Greenwich Society, said she was worried about the amount of additional traffic being added onto Greenwich’s “already overloaded road network”

Ms Keeble then said that there were already three distribution centres in the area, with one more waiting to be approved.

She added: “We believe it would be completely irresponsible to grant planning permission without doing some actual work on the traffic situation as it is at the moment.”

In line with the council’s green plans, the applicant said they were committing to making sure every vehicle leaving the centre was electric by 2030.

However, the applicant could not commit to making sure large vehicles entering the centre were electric.

Tom Davies, co-founder of Bloom Developments, said that smaller businesses would struggle to source large electric vehicles “affordably”, and that the “technology isn’t there yet”.

At the end of the meeting, Mr Davies offered to restrict use of the site to between 7am and 11pm, after previously saying it would be open 24 hours a day.

He also said the number of heavy vehicle trips to and from the site could be reduced to 111 per day, after an initial decrease from 194 to 155.

After the new conditions were offered, the buildings were approved by the chair of the meeting, Councillor Gary Dillon, after four votes were received both for and against the plans by councillors.

Cllr Dillon said: “I believe that the conditions just offered make a difference in traffic movements and the restriction on operating hours also lessens the impact on the local area. So my deciding vote is in favour of the item.”

Pictured top: Tunnel Avenue in Greenwich, the residential road where the new warehouses are planned to be built (Picture: Google Street View)