Fined for Breaching Weight Restriction in New Lane Hill

It is not often I get the urge to repeat a press release from the council but this one caught my eye.

Fine for Driver Breaching Weight Restriction on Road

A supermarket delivery driver has become the first in Reading to be prosecuted after a resident reported him for ignoring weight restrictions on a road.

Co-op delivery driver Kyrstof Adamski was spotted by a resident taking a short cut in his 33-tonne articulated lorry up New Lane Hill, to get to the Co-op on School Road, Tilehurst.  New Lane Hill is one of a number of roads in the Borough with a 7.5 tonne weight restriction limit on it.

Reading Borough Council has been prosecuting weight restriction breaches for some time, but this is the first instance of a driver being prosecuted following a report by a resident.  He was fined £200, plus an additional £100 costs and £15 court levy by Reading Magistrates, following an investigation by Reading’s Trading Standards team under its (OWL) Over Weight Lorries Scheme.

The proper route to Tilehurst for vehicles over 7.5 tonnes is via Liebenrood Road and the Meadway.

The OWL scheme was set up for residents to report overweight vehicles illegally using their roads for short cuts. Trading Standards carry out spot checks during the year but the scheme was set up so residents could report illegal vehicles as and when they see them.

For more information of weight restricted roads in Reading, visit www.reading.gov.uk/adviceandbenefits/tradingstandards/owls-weightrestrictions/ or contact Trading Standards on 0800 626 540.

 Well done that local resident for reporting the lorry !

Who Believes in Park & Ride ?

On Monday, together with my Lib Dem colleagues Kirsten Bayes and Daisy Benson (our Wokingham colleagues have also called in the similar decision made by Wokingham as this is a joint service between the two councils), we called in the Labour Administration decision to increase the fares for the bus service to Loddon Bridge Park & Ride. Never mind that the increases are many times the current rate of inflation, this Administration, aided and abetted by the Tory ‘opposition’, gave a two fingered salute to those of us who are desperate to get commuters out of their cars and to reduce congestion in Reading.

Despite the amazing ease with which Reading uses TIF (Transport Innovation Fund, money given by central government to help reduce congestion)  funds to support bus services elsewhere in the borough (several times this year already), when in comes to Park & Ride they prefer to see more cars drive into Reading.

One explanation might be that the users of Park & Ride at Loddon Bridge do not tend to be voters in Reading whereas users of subsidised bus servcies within Reading do, or am I being too cynical.

The TIF bid for future funding includes money for replacing Loddon Bridge with an alternative Park & Ride site, its future is secure, so why reduce the bus service and put up fares by 20% ?

Local Labour and Tory politicians  should be asked to explain their action given that they have been trying to convince the rest if us that they support Park & Ride schemes.

Bottle Banks in Tilehurst

Reading BC is under pressure to increase the amount of glass it recycles. For years it has collected all the kerbside recycling in a red bins provided free to each household. The recycling materials are then sorted at the new Materials Recycling Facility in Smallmead. Glass is excluded from this collection system as it would shatter and create a hazard for anyone sorting the recycled material by hand (and even in Smallmead some of the sorting is indeed done by hand). So for years now tonnes of glass are thrown into the grey non-recycled bins and end up in landfill. It is one of the major components of the waste that Reading sends to landfill.

The answer the council have come up with is to put out many more bottle banks around the town to try and encourage people to recycle more of their glass bottles. That is a good aim but convincing local residents that a bottle bank close to their house is a good thing can be a bit tricky. Sending out letters explaining the reasoning behind the bottle banks has not generally produced a flood of comments being fed back to the council.

The council have identified 3 potential sites in Tilehurst for bottle banks. The first one in Harvaston Parade got very little response (only 6 out of 50 letters sent out) so the local Lib Dem team sprang into action and surveyed the houses near the proposed site, door to door. The result was 21 residents in favour and 16 against and whatever the result it was a lot more representative than the council’s letter responses.

More recently sites were proposed atoutside the Horticultural Society Hall in Gratwicke Road and on the green in Lansdowne Road. Again the council’s response rate to its letters has not been brilliant. Again the local Lib Dems carried out surveys and found that residents in Gratwicke Road were 15 against to 14 for the bottle bank whilst over in Lansdowne Road there was a big majority, 9 to 2, against the bottle bank. In fact on the latter site there appears to be a petition now being circulated to oppose the bottle bank.

All of which goes to prove that if you want residents’ opinions on local issues, the best way to find out is to go and talk to them. Relying on folk to write back is not good enough.

CRB Checks in the News Again

Criminal record checks are in the news again with the press wondering why anybody who might remotely come into contact with a child or young person must have a CRB check these days.

Labour Cllr Stainthorpe brought this up at the council meeting last month and proposed that all councillors must be CRB checked in case they came into contact with children. It is absurd that anyone that might even meet a child in the street must first have a CRB check. Even more absurd when you consider that the great bogey of our time, child abuse, is mainly carried out within the family rather than by strangers. We do not propose to have every parent CRB checked before hvaing their baby. Or maybe this is Labour’s new way of safeguarding families.

Whilst it is right that teachers and other people who work with children should have a CRB check to avoid employing undesirable people with convictions relating to children, this surely need not apply to every council worker in the Civic Centre, every newsagent, every ice cream man.  This is nonsense, another example of Labour’s nanny state overstepping the mark. The state should not be holding databases of 60 million people with intimate details of all our private lives and history, even if it could store data securely, which it demonstrably cannot do at present. 

Reducing the Number of Councillors in Reading

This topic has been raised by Battle Ward Independent Cllr Tony Jones as one way of reducing the running expenses of Reading BC. Well its true that reducing the number of councillors by 15 will drastically reduce the sum paid out in allowances (around £9,000 a year per backbench councillor) and election expenses. What that means for the the remaining 31 councillors is not spelled out. It means more work per councillor, it means a much smaller pool of talent to fill executive and committee posts, it will reduce the effectiveness of the council. Additionally,  it may well put off more members of the public from standing for the council at all.

It may be a populist idea, Tony, and grab a few headlines, but it is not a way to enhance democracy in Reading nor a way to increase participation.

Station Hill Planning Mess

Over the last week I have been at two functions that show the limitations of the planning system in this country.

Firstly, I attended a meeting of Reading BC’s Strategic Transport Board where we looked at plans for the new station and for the developemnt of the southern concourse which is designed to be an attractive glass ‘gateway’ to the town.

Later in the week I popped in to see the new plans on display by Sackville (controlled by John Madjeski) for the redevlopment of Station Hill. Station Hill 2 is the second attempt by Sackville to produce acceptable plans for this area. They have redesigned their original scheme to include more open space and put more thought into the amenities that could be provided for the public. This is very much designed as a showpiece that would change the face of Reading significantly.

The problem is that the two design teams working separately on Station Hill 2 and the new station itself do not seem to have had any contact with each other and however good or bad their plans are, they do not fit together. If built as currently proposed the vast new glass station entrance would be shaded by one of Sackville’s office block skyscrapers and nobody would ever see the magnificent new station entrance from the town and visitors coming in to Reading would be greeted by a concrete block obscuring the sun and light from half the new glass atrium.

And then there is the matter of Reading’s new transport interchange which the council’s team are now designing not as one complex but a series of three transport interchanges that will make changing buses at the central hub of Reading’s bus network a nightmare of long walks up and down stairs before finding that the new terminus is just the old bus stop in Friar Street (or wherever).  The bright new transport terminus is turning in to a different one way bus loop using bus stops spread out over miles of existing town centre roads with their narrow pavements and lack of facilities.

Would it not be possible for both sides, Sackville and Reading BC, to rethink their proposals for the vast area that is ready for redevelopment on the south side of the station and come up with an attractive, unified plan that incorporates the new gateway to Reading, a modern transport interchange (for buses, taxis, MRTs and even Private Hire Vehicles), a welcoming public open space as well as the new office blocks, shops and appartments.

Surely the value of  both developments would be enhanced by  working in unison, rather than each partner pulling in different directions.

Parking Spaces

Any urban council these days has a real problem with car parking. Many older streets were never built for cars and barely have one place on the road per house. Modern conversions of houses to multiple flats exacerbates this problem no end. Every resident assumes an automatic right to park his/her car outside their house. We can use residents parking schemes to avoid issues with outsiders taking up parking places but if there is not enough road space for all the required cars, somebody will get upset when they cannot find a space for their car.

On new developments we can make better rules but if this is done without thought we still end up in a mess as we have done on the Kennet Island development. Everyone selling the houses there knew that there were limited spaces available for parking cars. Everyone buying a house there should have been informed. That has not stopped new residents getting angry and upset when told that there is no room for the second car even if both partners sharing a house need them to get to work.

There is no easy answer, to build new housing with 2, 3 or 4 car parking spaces will require vast more new tracts of land to be made available (and consequently less green and pleasant land to live in) or for developers to build less houses per hectare. We already have a chronic shortage of affordable housing in Reading and across South East England. 

There is no answer without a modal shift to alternative forms of transport. We need to wean residents away from 100% dependence on cars to buses, trains, bikes and even (shock, horror) walking. We could add car clubs which provide cars on demand for their members for occasional trips.

We all know what needs to be done to get away from car dependence but often lack the will to do it. Public policy should aim to make alternative modes of tarnsport as appealing as possible. We do have a great bus service in Reading, we are making a start on implementing safe routes for bikes, we want more children to walk to school and not have mums clog up the roads with very short school run trips.

The reality is that we are going to have to suffer a great deal of collective pain on this subject over the next decade or two until we finally convince ourselves that there are alternatives to the car and that we have no automatic right to a parking place in the road outside our front door.

Get Lost Vodafone

Vodafone have recently sent in a planning application to erect a 12 metre high mobile phone mast in Lower Elmstone Drive, Tilehurst, in the middle of a residential area where it will stick out like a sore thumb. As a comparison, the current street lights are 6 metres tall. Vodafone’s column will be twicw that height and have antennae on top adding another 2 metres, making 14 metres high in total. This will destroy the existing outlook of a pleasant tree-lined road and has already upset local residents.

Last summer Vodafone did a ‘consultation’ exercise and wrote to the 10 nearest houses with their proposal, outlining their intention to put in a planning application. Upset residents sent in a barrage of 40 protest letters,a clear indication of local feeling.

Well, the planning application has now arrived and I am working with local residents to get it rejected.

You can see the plans in the Planning section of Reading BC’s website at:

http://planning.reading.gov.uk/publicaccess/tdc/DcApplication/application_searchform.aspx

The reference number is 09/00289/TELE.

We cannot allow this monstrosity to be erected on our doorstep.

Budget Deadlock

Everyone and his seems to have commented already on the painful progress of Reading’s Budget debate. Round 3 is on Monday evening following the council meetings last week which both finished after 23:00 with no agreed budget.

My own take on all this is that Labour are as arrogant as ever, with no serious consultation prior to the council budget debate, even though they are a minority administration and reliant on other parties to agree it. The Tories have not a clue of any budget details, but only keep up a mantra of ‘no increase in council tax’ with not even a hint of what might need to be cut from council services.

I guess that Labour will be forced to make an accommodation with somebody if they want to continue in Administration. Should they fail or lose a vote of no confidence then the Tories seem remarkably unwilling to take up the reins. All of which leaves the good citizens of Reading in limbo as far as council tax rates are concerned.

I suspect that Monday evening will be another long one.

Road Safety

I was struck again earlier on today driving back to Reading from Oxford by the amount of investment by other authorities in basic road safety. Every village on my route had an electronic 30mph speed sign that flashed a warning if drivers approached at faster speeds. These signs are now common almost everywhere except in Reading. They do remind careless drivers that there is a 30mph limit as they enter a built up area.

In Reading we have a very different approach to road safety, we tie several small yellow plastic signs to lampposts with long messages in print so small that drivers could not read the messages even if they saw the sign amongst all the other street clutter as they speed by at 40-50mph. Oh, and the signs are taken down after two weeks and moved to another road. There were originally supposed to be electronic signs used in these two week actions but the council only has two such signs so most of the campaign is restricted to the ineffective yellow plastic signs on lampposts.

And the reason  –  RBC officers fear that electronic signs would be vandalised and parts nicked if they were left in Reading streets. So why does this not happen to traffic lights or other road signs ? They also have precious little budget for road safety so we have this wonderfully ineffective ‘awareness campaign’ which is, apparently, going to help reduce traffic speeds in Reading. Do not ask them how, they are not measuring traffic speeds before or after the signs are put out. In short the whole campaign is all about pretending to do something about a very serious problem for which they have no resources to tackle properly.