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On 3 November 2005, the Department for Transport (DfT) published research (Understanding community severance I: views of practitioners and communities ) which identified a range of community severance effects including trip delay, trip diversion, traffic noise, traffic pollution, perceived danger and the cumulative effect of overall unpleasantness. Additional effects included:
The report identifies the groups most vulnerable groups to the effects of community severance
Local authorities were asked to identify the practitioners in their area that dealt with community severance. Very few of those sampled were involved in appraisal or assessment and there was a lack of knowledge amongst practitioners about the DMRB volume 11 method for assessing community severance. This raises questions about who is conducting transport scheme appraisals (e.g. whether it is predominantly external contractors), how they are conducting the analysis of potential community severance and how findings from appraisals are fed back to practitioners in the local authority.
The full report makes recommendations and can be viewed on the DfT website.
DfT published simulataneously a second report (Understanding community severance II: monetisation of severance impacts) which seeks to review severance monetisation practice in Germany, Sweden and Denmark in order to investigate the feasibility of this method for appraising severance in England.