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.