Letter: Junction 10 Should Not Be Considered In Isolation

Published on: 12 Dec, 2016
Updated on: 12 Dec, 2016

From Ben Paton

In response to: Public Views Sought On M25-A3 Interchange Plans

An acquaintance of mine with marketing expertise, and knows about these things, commented on the questionnaire as follows:

“This is a fairly typical example of a survey designed to ‘accommodate’ a preconceived set of conclusions – where the survey design team begin with the desired answers and then pose suitably ‘flexible’ questions.

“It’s a bit like sleight of hand magic only not as entertaining.”

It should be noted that the brochure contains no data on existing and future traffic flows.

One Highways England officer told me that no flows were included for further capacity at Heathrow – ‘because a third runway will have no effect on the road network. Passengers will use public transport’. Really?

No work is planned to widen the A3 in Guildford. So traffic will now speed into that bottleneck at a faster rate. Highways England have no plans to even consider Guildford until after 2022 – according to the people at the consultation and the agency takes no account of increases in traffic arising from increased housing. Given that Houses, numbers of people and numbers of road users all correlate that seems to be a major logical flaw.

They also plan to close a number of local road access points to the A3 – including Old Lane and Wisley Lane.

Integrated holistic thinking – or more incoherent piecemeal planning?

Share This Post