Business Sector Profiles for Cambridge, York and Norwich. Historic Cities Project Task 4

The Historic Cities project is examining the potential impacts of transport demand management strategies on several case study 'historic' cities in England. These cities are York, Cambridge and Norwich, all of which have the following characteristics;

they are cities which pre-date motorised transport, and thus tend to have city centres dominated by narrow streets;

- they are all members of the Historic Towns Forum; - they have a high architectural and historic heritage, and attract many tourists each year;

- they have severe congestion and congestion related problems;

- the city authorities are faced with the problems of maintaining the environmental quality of the city, while allowing the most efficient use of the transport infrastructure.

The Historic Cities project is examining how transport restraint policies, particularly parking, pricing and road-space reallocation, can contribute to the last bullet above. It is examining this via a series of surveys and modelling of the city traffic patterns under different policies. The main 'tasks' (work packages) are as follows;

1 Travel choices; using a stated preference experiment on mode choices from various traffic demand policies;

2 Traffic effects; Modelling of policies in the various cities using network traffic models;

3 Environmental effects; using the outputs from (2)

4 Urban economy effects; using a survey of businesses

5 Public attitudes; using a survey of resident's attitudes and anticipated responses;

Task 4 in the Historic Cities project is examining the perceived and predicted effects on the urban economy from four transport instruments that attempt to restrain car use. It is thought that a major barrier to the implementation of these projects is their detrimental impacts on the local economy. This task examines whether this hypothesis is correct by examining the impacts on, and attitudes of, businesses in the case study cities.

This paper presents background information on the cities, building up a business profile of each. The data sources are mostly published information, although city specific business databases were analysed to obtain a cross classification of the business profile.

This is the first of a series of Working Papers on Task 4. The next Working Paper will outline the survey of firms that was undertaken, its initial results. It will use the business sector profile to determine how generally representative the samples are of the cities business sectors.