I had the delight on Saturday of going to one of Wisley Property Investments ‘Exhibitions’ where they showed their plans for the new town on Three Farms Meadows. Oh the joy of having people from the project team selling me the benefits of having 2,500 houses built. [one admitted this was likely to take 10 years to complete]
My favourite bit was one of the ‘project team’ saying: ‘You’ll have a shop in walking distance’ . As if that would compensate for everything.
Anyway, the image above is their Masterplan. And God it’s horrible. But the thing that really really stood out is just how bad, how unbelievably, shockingly bad this will be for local traffic. This is what I picked up, and some of the comments I got from their ‘traffic expert’.
So, the main entrance/ exit is supposedly on the A3 roundabout. Excellent, so every morning we’ll have a thousand cars heading onto that roundabout onto an already rammed A3 or into Ripley.
At this point I was told they’d be sorting out a widening of the A3/ M25 junction. and building a slip road from the roundabout to get cars straight onto the southbound A3 to keep the traffic from going through Ripley. If they’re acknowledging they have to do that, then they know it’s going to be trouble.
But of course, we know that this end will get busy and that people will really come out at the other end – either onto Ockham Lane and/or Old Lane. So they’ve said they’ll put in some ‘traffic calming’ on Ockham Lane. Aaaaagh. Excellent, so we go from having a small country lane that already has too much traffic on it, to a small country lane that has too much traffic on it and traffic lights. Oh, and if you’re a cyclist, that’s just great.
I started asking how many cars they would expect during rush hour. She said their estimate was 1,000. She then said that the normal commuters might actually cut through the New Town to get to the A3 taking traffic away from Ockham Lane. Basically making the new town a massive rat run. Nice.
Of course, there’s no knowing where the traffic will be heading. The people who live their could all just as easily be going off to work in Kingston as Guildford or heading off to the station.
I dread to think what it will be like the weekend.
Oh, and there’s the bus…but we can go into that another time.
This is before we start to look in detail at the actual proposals, but regardless of the vandalism to the Greenbelt from the new town, this is a traffic nightmare in the making.
There is no question that there will have to be major development on the A3. At least one joining point will have to be constructed. This would comprise building tunnels or bridges and ramp access on both sides. The infrastucture to service the new access points would be comlex and very expensive. Who do they expect to pay for it?