Arbitrary Planning

West Sussex County Council used to do some Highways and Transport planning, but they don't any more. Planning is now devolved to County Local Committees, 14 groups of councillors to cover the whole county.

So, in the past, WSCC might have had a stated plan to reduce motor traffic congestion by encouraging sustainable transport modes such as walking and cycling. They then might have drawn up County-wide plans on how this might be done, through "soft" measures such as TravelWise and through building suitable infrastructure.

These days there is no joined-up planning at all. Each CLC meeting decides what they'd like to change for the highways in their area, based on the personal preferences of councillors and limited feedback from local people.

Even worse, each CLC is limited to an arbitrary maximum of three TROs per year, so making any progress even on local requirements is painfully slow.

So getting something like National Cycle Network Route 2 completed between Worthing and Littlehampton (a big gap in this national cycling network) is now effectively impossible.

West Sussex Transport would be an awful lot better if there was a county-wide strategic plan instead of a multitude of disconnected local ideas.

Only Three Changes per Year

To make a change to a public highway, for example to add:

• Double-yellow lines
• A pedestrian crossing
• A cycle lane
• A new parking space
• A new loading bay
• A taxi rank
• A one-way street

the Highway Authority, in our case West Sussex County Council, has to create a Traffic Regulation Order (TRO). This is a legal document that describes exactly what will be changed, and it has to be published for 21 days to allow people to object to the changes. If there are objections then these are discussed by the Transport Committee, who decide whether the TRO should be "sealed" and legally enforceable. If there are no objections, then the TRO can be sealed without any further discussion.

Oddly, West Sussex County Council limit the number of TROs each County Local Committee can apply for to just three per year. This low limit means that each District has a very long "waiting list" of things they'd like to do, such as introducing new pedestrian crossings where there's a great need.

The silly thing is that it's perfectly legal to combine many changes into a single TRO, especially if the changes are related. But WSCC don't appear to want to do that.

While West Sussex currently have just three TROs being consulted on in the whole county, Brighton and Hove are consulting on twenty!

It almost seems as though WSCC Highways and Transport don't want to see any change.

West Sussex Transport would be an awful lot better if WSCC could pull their finger out and process more TRO applications more quickly.