Stubbington Bypass

The Challenge

Within the Gosport peninsula, the following transport problems have been identified:

• Limited road access to Gosport;
• Out-commuting travel demand from Gosport;
• Slow journey times, congestion and delays;
• Severance, and;
• Future demand and economic regeneration.

The Fareham and Gosport Strategic Transport Infrastructure Plan (2013) set out four specific transport objectives for resolving these problems, which included:

• Encourage regeneration, investment and growth in the area;
• Removal of transport barriers to growth;
• Unlock critical bottlenecks and congestion hotspots on strategic routes, town centre areas and areas of employment;
• Provision of new and improved existing infrastructure to help better manage traffic flows particularly during peak periods.

Following the DfT’s five-case model (Strategic, Economic, Financial, Management and Commercial), it was concluded that a proposed bypass in Stubbington was the only option that met the requirements of all five cases.

SYSTRA’s Role

SYSTRA was appointed by Hampshire County Council to support the modelling and economic appraisal of the proposed Stubbington Bypass, using the Sub Regional Transport Model (SRTM). The SRTM was developed by SYSTRA for Solent Transport to support appraisal of wide-ranging interventions, and has been applied extensively across the region for forecasting changes in travel demand, traffic volumes, public transport patronage and to support funding programmes.

SYSTRA has been involved in this project since the development of the route options for the bypass, whereby the SRTM was used to model and understand the forecast flow changes arising from different routes. At all times throughout this process, SYSTRA was engaged with numerous stakeholders, presenting modelling results as they emerged and discussing the different option scenarios.
Following the option modelling, SYSTRA undertook further modelling work for the preferred Stubbington Bypass route, with the outputs being used for the Transport Assessment which formed part of the documents that received Planning Permission, granted in October 2015 (subject to conditions). These model outputs were also used in the preparation of the Transport Business Case presented to Solent LEP in 2016, including economic assessment.

SYSTRA has also provided the modelling support for the Full Business Case, again utilising the SRTM for provision of key modelling outputs to feed into wider economic impacts, along with the conventional economic analysis.