Charges for Tilehurst Car Parks ?

The Lead Councillor for Transport has once again demonstrated how arrogant Labour politicians never actually listen to local people. Cllr Tony Page has just announced his decision to implement charging for car parks in Dunstall Close and Recreation Road. There has been no consultation with local councillors, no notice, just a decision announced. I and my colleagues, Cllrs Pete Beard and Chris Harris are incensed at this heavy handed and outrageous move.

We have told officers that, following our recent Residents Surveys, lots of residents were in favour of charging for long stay parking, more than 2-3 hours, in these car parks as they  are denying space to the people for whom the car parks were designed, the shoppers.

What the council have come up with is a decision to charge everyone who uses the car opark, even if they only park for a few minuites to use a cash machine or buy a paper. This is a nonsense and Tilehurst residents will not support it.

We are calling in this  decision for re-consideration at Cabinet where we hope reason will prevail.

Daisy selected for Reading West

 My colleague Cllr Daisy Benson (pictured) Daisy

was last night selected as the Lib Dem PPC for Reading West. She will be taking on both Labour and the Tories at the next general election. Daisy already has a high profile in the local media having been a councillor in Redlands Ward for 4 years, she currently chairs the Housing & Health Scrutiny Panel on the council and is the Deputy Leader of the Lib Dem Group. She has a talent for getting problems sorted for local people and has built up an enviable reputation in Redlands Ward (see for yourself at http://www.redlandslibdems.org.uk ) and on the council. All in  all I think she will make a great candidate and a splendid MP.

We are all now looking forward to a  showing our Labour and Tory opponents what it is to have a local candidate with a track record of action and a party ready to fight for a fairer Britain.

Tilehurst Residents Surveys

I have spent time over the weekend going through the results of the latest batch of Residents’ Survey Forms from Tilehurst. There were a number of gripes but several issues were prominent among the responses (80 recieved so far and still counting):

  1. some residents wanted to return to a weekly bin collection for the grey (landfill) bins;
  2. quite a few residents thought that bus fares were too expensive;
  3. the traffic lights recently installed along The Meadway caused more problems than they solved;
  4. dog fouling was mentioned as a problem several times;
  5. speeding is clearly an issue on some of our roads in Tilehurst;
  6. morning and afternoon parking problems outside local schools;

And what have we councillors been doing about these issues ?

  1. the introduction of fortnightly collections has nearly doubled (from 20 to nearly 40% in round figures) the amount of rubbish that we now recycle as opposed to throwing into landfill . In general residents are content with fortnightly collections though there is always a danger of problems with maggots etc if the weather turns partiularly warm and we will ask council officers to plan for such a contingency.
  2. bus fares in Reading are not cheap but they become a lot cheaper if you purchase bus-about tickets or weekly tickets and even cheaper if, like me, you buy an annual season ticket. Single journeys are still expensive but the TIF bid includes money to subsidise fares in Reading in order to encourage the use of public transport. If the TIF bid is successful then we should see cheaper fares in 2011.
  3. The Meadway lights are an ongoing headache. We have tried telling officers that they serve no purpose but actually slow the flow of traffic for no good reason. They have responded by offering to rephase the lights and reduce the time allowed for traffic turning into The Meadway apart from Church End Lane which can be quite busy. I understand they are still working on the phasing. Like most of our residents, we remain sceptical about the usefulness of these lights.
  4. Dog fouling is the result of anti-social beahviour by some dog owners who think it is fine to leave dog pooh on public roads, footpaths and parksand who clearly do not care about children playing in the area or walking to school. Please let me know (ring 961 4027) if there is any mess on your streets that needs clearing up. If there is a problem with particular dog owners then call the Dog Wardens on 0800 626 540.
  5. Local action on speeding has taken a new turn with the introduction of mobile speed guns in November. This is a Lib Dem initiative and we shall see what effect they have on motorists in Tilehurst.
  6. We had an issue outside Park Lane School soon after I was elected and I got the Traffic Wardens to patrol outside the school at the relevant times. A few tickets later and the parents got the message. Moorlands is different in that parents do not park illegally but for half an hour morning and afternoon Church End Lane does become clogged. We do not have a solution other than to ask parents to drop off children at the entrance to the playing fields if posible.

My thanks to all of the residents that too the time and effort to fill out our survey forms.

Speed Guns in Tilehurst

Speed Gun in Action Picture

Well they have finally arrived and I have been out to see them in action, along with my Lib Dem colleagues from Tilehurst Ward, Cllr Chris Harris and Cllr Pete Beard. We were out in Wetswood Road, Chapel Hill and Halls Road and everywhere we went we had residents come up to congatulate us on taking action on an issue they were really concerned about.

Up till now we have had very little deterrence to make motorists think about sticking to the speed limits. Well now the Lib Dems have got the Council to provide 5 speed guns for use by local Neighbourhood Police Teams.  Whilst this is far from a complete solution to a serious problem on many of our local roads  it does give local police teams a chance to deter speeding motorists.

Several tickets have already been issued in Tilehurst.

You have been warned !!

Another Pincents Hill Update

I gather that the Planning Application for Pincents Hill is due to be discussed at West Berks Eastern Area Planning Committee which is being held at Little Heath School at 5:30pm on 16 December.

Building 750 home across the border from Tilehurst Ward will have serious effects on traffic and also on school places for Tilehurst residents who appear to be totally opposed to this planning application.

The Reading Chronicle has reported (20 November) that the discussion on the development at Pincents Hill has been postponed to allow the developers, Blue Living, more time to look at  matters raised by the Highways Agency.

Bus passengers kept away from new station

Reading station is being rebuilt.  The whole station area is being revamped. We have fantastic plans for the new station buildings. We have Mr Madjeski’s skyscapers going up over the road. We should all be celebrating the huge investments being made in our town. Unless, of course, you are a bus passenger.

In amongst the hundreds of millions of £s of funding the council has decided that we do not need any sort of bus terminus outside the station, passengers will be dropped at bus stops in nearby streets and then also have to queue up there. There will be no information desk, no teabar, no loos, no covered walkways to protect against bad weather and no easy way to find your bus stop if you are not a regular passenger. No, Reading can do without these, they might get in the way of developing Station Hill. We may have excellent buses and a good network of routes but at the hub of the network there will be no central terminus and no facilties.

The plans for bus passengers at the new station are a shambles and will not serve the town’s current passengers let alone the doubling of numbers expected after the station is rebuilt. This is no way to encourage people to make more use of the bus.

In case you missed it, Reading Boerough Council has just finished consulting on Traffic orders to close Station Hill to through traffic as the first stage in redevloping the station area.

Hasty Consultation for the Buses

Reading Buses are consulting on changes to their routes but have given people only one week to respond. This is outrageous.

Their consultation is at

http://www.reading-buses.co.uk/articles/reading-buses-needs-your-views/?PHPSESSID=6528259f93572ed490cdab575cb3b714

If my reading of the changes is correct then residents living in the far west of Tilehurst will see a major reduction in frequency of their bus services. Many services (routes 33 and the new 33a that replaces the 15) will now terminate in the Triangle rather than carry on to the Bird’s Estate and Westwood Glen.

This is clearly unwelcome at a time when we should be encouraging people to use public transport and I shall be commenting to Reading Buses.

I have written to Reading Buses asking why they have given the public just one week to respond to their consultation.

In the meantime, your comments can be sent by e-mail to:-

consultation@reading-buses.co.uk

or by post to:-

Consultation
Reading Buses
Great Knollys Street
READING
RG1 7HH

Speeding Yet Again

I note that this week’s TMAP (Traffic Management Advisory Panel) meeting will receive a report on the current Road Safety Awareness Campaign. The campaign consists of erecting signs (including a Smiley Sid flashing speed warning sign) along known traffic speeding hotspots for two weeks at a time, then moving on to the next hotspot. The theory is that you make an impact in the first two weeks but that beyond that time, the impact falls away dramatically as drivers get used to the signs.

The good news is that the Smiley Sid signs also detect average  vehicle speeds from each site where they are installed so RBC now have useful data on average traffic speeds. The not so good news is that they have no action plan on how to deal with the speeding hotspots now that they know definitely where they are. They have spent a year on a campaign that has told them where the hotspots are, something that local councillors already knew pretty well, and their only plan of action is to ask the local neighbourhood police to enforce speed limits at these hotspots.

You may remember that it was me that came up with the idea of providing local neighbourhood police with speed guns (see my post from March this year) and that I got them inserted into the budget for 2009-10 months after the Speed Awareness Campaign had kicked off. Well my information is that council officers have only ordered 2 out of 4 speed guns and we are still some weeks off seeing them in action. None of which says very much about the effectiveness of our coyuncil when it comes to tackling speeding even though it is a major issue for many residents, especially those living in the outer suburbs where traffic flows freely and motorists speed by default.

I did not realise what a struggle it would be to get speed guns into the hands of neighbourhood police teams. It seemed like such a straightforward solution to the problem of speeding which required some form of enforcement.  Anyway, some of them will be available for use soon and I look forward to seeing them in action, especially on the Tilehurst Roads where residents regularly complain to me about speeding cars.

The issue about speeding is not that is just dangerous (which it patently is) but that it also creates the perception in residents minds that there is nothing that can be done about it and that  their own streets are no longer safe places to walk in or to let children walk in. This is not good enough. The council and police, between them, need to re-assure our residents that speeding is taken seriously. We have never really tackled this issue before as it has been too difficult and we did not have the technology.

Speeding is a bit like crime, every time you hear about or see  an incident, it creates more fear that you or your children will be the next victims. It takes a long period with very few incidents to re-assure the public and change their perception.

In the meantime I look forward to some explanation of why it has taken the council so long as I intend to ask questions at this week’s TMAP meeting.

Updated Update on Pincents Hill

The closing date for comments on this planning application is now 18 September. Many thanks to the planning oficers at West Berkshire for seeing the light.

I have sent in my own response concentrating on the effects of the development on traffic around the local roads in my neighbouring ward of Tilehurst. Given the size of the proposed development there is widespread apprehension locally about the numbers of cars that will use Tilehurst Roads (especially City Road) to access the top end of the development.

Pincents Hill Hypocrites

Our lovely local upright Tories have long been saying they are opposed to any planned development of large scale housing on Pincents Hill (in West Berkshire between Calcot and Tilehurst). Yesterday’s announcement that Blue Living had put in a Planning Application for 750 houses on the site reminded me of the Tory hypocracy on this issue.

A month or two ago, after Alok Sharma the Tory PPC for Reading West and the local Birch Copse councillors (all Tories) and said publicly that they opposed the development, there was a vote on West Berks Council on the Pincents Hill development. You can guess what happened:  Cllr Emma Webster abstained, Cllr Joe Mooney voted for the plans without amendment and Cllr Tony Linden did not even turn up to vote.

I expect we will hear a lot more from the Tories now that the application has gone in, and they will all be doing their best to oppose it. Until, that is, the Conservative Party in West Berks tells them not to. Whereupon they all slink off and hope nobody notices.  Actually this kind of bellicose verbosity before a vote, followed by abstention or even supporting the other side during the vote, is strangely reminiscent of our local MP, the great Martin Salter. Yes he who campaigns against the Iraq war, against tuition fees and many other causes, but strangely does not manage to actually vote according to his ‘beliefs’. 

If politicians were rewarded for their principles Salter would not be our MP and the Birch Copse Tories would be out on their ears.