Finchampstead Society Transport Presentation

Tonight’s Finchampstead Society Traffic Presentation was well attended, much as with the Highways Forum extra chairs were needed to accommodate everybody who attended.

The presentation was a simplified version of the presentation given recently to the Arborfield Forum, generally with a lot fewer figures, and this perhaps made for a clearer understanding for those present. The presentation didn’t give a different message than on that occasion either – even without any houses being built there are a number of problems with the network, but with the SDL’s in place everything is much worse. The most interesting part was the question and answer which raised several issues which have not been discussed previously.

• Wokingham Level Crossing A former resident of Barkham who now lives in Finchampstead highlighted the crossing in Wokingham as a potential problem area. According to the answer given a bridge or underpass was considered but calculated too expensive compared to the potential benefits.
• California Crossroads Issues around Nine Mile Ride and California Crossroads were raised, and the comment in reply was that as a known issue already Wokingham had explored engineering solutions, but the solutions that would properly address the issues were considered to be unacceptable to local residents – no elaboration as to what those solutions might be we’re given.
• How Many Houses will Actually Be Built? Cllr Simon Weeks made an interesting statement towards the end of the evening. He highlighted that a number of other local councils such as West Berkshire have failed to get a core strategy in place, and one result of this is that it is a lot easier and cheaper for developers to build in these areas than in Wokingham where the core strategy sets a much higher developer contribution – somewhere around £25,000 per house compared to the £5000 per house the council has obtained previously. Simon is hopeful that having this high level of contribution means that although we have locations in Wokingham they won’t necessarily get built out. Currently we have over three thousand houses in the borough granted permission, but that have yet to be built.

All in all it was an interesting presentation, and our thanks to the Finchampstead Society for hosting the event.