The good news is that after lobbying from the Tilehurst councillors, Park Lane is to be re-surfaced between City Road and Mayfair. It is included in the list of roads being repaired this summer by the council.
Also included is Tilehurst Road (from Liebenrood Road to Honey End Lane).
Both these roads are in a shoddy condition and it is good to see the council spending some of the extra money (£400k) given by the Coalition Government for road repairs following two severe winters.
I was heartened by the announcement on 9 June by Norman Lamb, the Lib Dem Transport Minister, that he was removing a lot of red tape that was holding the implementation of 20mph zones in residential areas. Councils no longer need to wait for Whitehall’s authorisation before implementing 20mph zones and many of the requirements for specific signs and other traffic calming measures have been removed.
This could be very good news for people living along residential roads who seem to have lost control of their streets to the omnipotent cars that speed along frightening young children, old folks and any other pedestrians or cyclists who thought that they had an equal right to use the road.
I believe that 20 mph should be the norm along residential streets and will go some way to allowing non-car users to feel safer in their own neighbourhoods.
I have a question on 20mph zones down for the next Council meeting and I very much hope that the Labour Administration will move ahead with 20mph zones in Reading.
The full announcement is at:
Over the last couple of months I have reported the poor state of some of our roads in Tilehurst, highlighting Park Lane, Armour Road and Tilehurst Road opposite Prospect Park. All have been badly affected by the severe weather of the last two winters. I did notice some patching along Tilehurst Road and Park Lane but nothing like enough to return those road surfaces to anything like normal.
Reading has very recently been given another £400,000 to spend on road repairs by the government in recognition of the problems caused by severe weather. I will be pushing to see some of this spent in Tilehurst.
Incidentally, the road surface on Mayfair is aslo broken up but only the shallow top asphalt layer, and not enough so council officers tell me, to warrent a major re-surfacing.
Following a decision taken before Xmas, the traffic lights in The Meadway at the junction with Combe Road will be taken down next week (week beginning 7 March). They will not be missed and have been the cause of much havoc and confusion since they were installed. Following the Coalition Administration’s review of traffic lights these ones were found to serve no useful purpose and they will be removed, although a pedestrian crossing will remain.
There is apparently no sense of shame or hypocrisy in Reading’s Labour Party. Today I read that Labour’s Transport Supremo Tony (IDR) Page said “It’s a matter of great concern to me and my colleagues that the administration is downgrading a long-established commitment to public transport and the importance of a third Thames bridge.” This is from the man who put the Third Thames Bridge at number 30 of a list of 30 projects in the TIF bid 18 months ago, meaning that it was kicked into the long grass depsite questions from myself about its priority. This man has no shame and a very select memory. His support for public transport does not apparently extend to providing a bus station at the heart of Reading’s bus network for the good folk of Reading which we will now do without for the foreseeable future.
Then we had a Council meeting last night where Labour proposed an amendment to a report on Budget savings, asking the Administration to look at alternative ways of providing public services other than directly through the council. This, you will not be surprised to hear is exactly what the Administration has been doing since it was elected in May, looking for the most efficient ways to deliver services, minimising any potential cuts and ensuring continuity of service. It is of course difficult when faced with having to make savings of £19m in a total budget of £160m as a result of Labout mismanaging an economy, but the Administration decided to accept and support the amendment anyway. Then the Labour councillors, with a breathtaking show of hypocrisy voted against the amended report recommendations. The truth is they were trying to trap the Administration into voting against what, on the face of it, was a sane amendment. We did not fall for that particular trick and Labour ended up with egg on their faces by voting against something they had just proposed. But the farce was there for all to see, no principles, no shame, just pure farce from Labour.
Well it has been a while since I last posted but I think I need to get back into the groove.18 months ago I managed to get the council to purchase a number of mobile speed guns for use by the local neighbourhood police teams. They have been used with some success by local police in Tilehurst but over the last few months the delightfully named NAG (Neighbourhood Action Group – a forum which brings together the local police team and local residents) has tken the initiative further. Under a dynamic new NAG Chairman, David Webber, local residents have been trained to use the guns and have been out on patrol, accompanied by PCSOs, on roads in Tilehurst. These ‘Speedwatch’ actions have been very popular with residents and many of them have come out to congratulate those volunteers who instead of suitting and moaning, have been enabled to take action against speeding motorists who are the bain of many people’s lives in Tilehurst.
The NAG is now offering to help any group of local residents who want to carry out a ’speedwatch’ action in their street and similar speedwatch actions are slowly being taken up in other parts of Reading.
Before we bought the speed guns there was no attempt to enforce speed limits in residential roads apart from occasional actions by traffic police a few times a year. Now residents feel empowered to act for themselves and I am happy to have been the one that provided the tools to let them do so.
Don’t speed in Tilehurst – you have been warned.
In all the various council meetings over the last two years where we have discussed the rebuilding of Reading station and the Station Hill area south of it, I and my Lib Dem colleagues have been consistent in calling for a new bus station to replace the current one we are going to lose. Reading’s bus network is centred on the station which is a terminus afor many routes bringing passengers in to the town centre.
The current development plans drawn up by the Labour Administration, supported and continued by the Tories has been to do away with any sort of bus station and to drop passengers at bus stops on the roads surrounding the station where they will fall into streets already busy with pedestrian traffic. There will be no kiosk for a cup of tea, no covered walkway from the station entrance, no toilet facilites and definitely no bus information desk. In short there will be a complete lack of facilities for bus passengers who will have to walk through crowded streets to find their own way to a bus stop. This will obviously be a splendid way to welcome visitors to Reading……’oh you want to catch the bus, well cross over the station plaza turn left and take the next turning on the right and half way down the street you should find a bus stop.’
Unlike Bolton, Cardiff, Derby, Liverpool, Mansfield, Stoke, Stourbridge, Swansea or Warwick, all of which have just built or are planning to build new bus stations we in Reading are to have our passengers disembark in the middle of town, onto busy pavements full of shoppers and other pedestrians, and then have to find their own way several hundred metres to the rail station.
Our Labour and Tory councillors apparently believe that bus stations are not the modern way of travelling, they have consistently voted down our ideas for any sort of bus station in amongst the new station redevelopment or the Station Hill development opposite the station. Given that Reading Station is also the hub of our local bus service this is a very strange approach to take. For all their support for Reading Buses, this town’s other two major parties have let down the people of Reading and condemned bus passengers to a very second rate service.
Back in May the local Lib Dem manifesto included a committment to introduce 20mph zones where residents want them to improve road safety.
The reasoning behind implementing 20mph zones is really twofold. Firstly it does reduce the average speed of traffic within the zones even when other traffic calming measures are already in place. More importantly, the 20mph zones are a sign and an encouragement to local residents that they own the streets, not the motor cars. The 20mph zones make the streets safer for other users, whether pedestrians of cyclists or even small children wlaking to school or visiting friends.
Lib Dems in Portsmouth were the first major city council to introduce 20mph zones and they did it on a huge scale covering the whole city apart from the main roads which stayed at 30mph. These zones have now been in place for two years and have been shown to reduce overall traffic speeds. The effects on accident figures are much less clear with little or no reduction. However, the key question of residents’ attitudes to the new regime on their streets is much more difficult to measure but the received wisdom is that if traffic speed is reduced then people will feel safer about walking and cycling and also about allowing children out. I have not yet seen any actual data on this.
The bus shelter lots of peoploe in Tilehurst are waiting for is the one by the Plough opposite the Triangle in Tilehurst. It should appear in two weeks time after they complete the one outside Park Lane School. Pierce’s Hill, the other bus shelter that a number of people have asked me about is not due till October, as is the one at the top of City Road.
By November all the nearly 200 original bus shelters will have been replaced but it is thanks to the previous Labour Administration that we had such a long gap between losing all our bus shelters and new ones being installed. There are a lot of folk, especially the elderly ones, who are quite angry at how this transition has been managed. This is no way to support public transport in Reading and, frankly, Labour have let the town down.
I am sure that there are lots of elderly folk who do not understand why all the bus stops all over Reading have been removed over the last month or why the bus stop on Pierce’s Hill in particular has never been replaced at all since an accident damaged it last year.
The explanation is that one company was awarded the contract to provide bus stops several years ago by the Labour Administration in charge of the Council. Just before the contract ran out, they tendered for a new contract and awarded it to a new company. Sadly the contract allowed them to pick up their bus stops for all over the town without any reference to the new company that apparently cannot start operating until all the old bust stops have been removed. Only when can they start installing new bus stops. It makes you weep when contractual arrangements like this end up as a right pig’s ear with the poor public losing out. Lucky for the people of Reading, we have had good weather over the last couple of weeks – otherwise a lot of people waiting for busses would have got soaked as well as having no place to sit down.
I sincerely hope that the new contract does not have the same pig’s ear of a mess when it eventually runs out.
Oh, and the one on Pierce’s Hill will eventually be replaced, we just do not know when.