A Pirbright resident has submitted a petition to SCC regarding the tunnel at the western end of the village. His points are valid and I have signed the petition.
The problem at this junction is that on the Pirbright side, there are two feeder roads with traffic lights, and on the Brookwood side, there are two feeder roads but crucially with one set of lights. This does cause a lot of frustration because the well meaning drivers leaving Brookwood via Connaught Road, will pause to allow drivers from Bisley Camp Road / Brunswick Road to go, and the sensors decide that there is no traffic. This in turn means the lights go to red prematurely and the traffic builds up to intolerable levels. It can take 20 minutes sometimes to get out of Brookwood.
The obvious solution has been to add an additional set of lights on the Brookwood side, and I have had conversations about this with WBC officers in the past. The challenge is effectively two fold; a) who pays for the changes, and b) the junction sits in Guildford Borough.
There are no development opportunities that can be used to extract funds from to pay for the improvements. This is a major problem, because finding the evidence to justify the improvements should be reasonably easy, but SCC will simply claim there isn’t the money in the highways budget to do anything.
From my perspective, the junction sitting in Guildford causes further issues. Assuming the petition reaches the minimum numbers required, it will go before the Guildford Local Committee, the next meeting being 13 June. I suspect that convincing the Guildford Local Committee to use their sparse funds to pay towards improvements that are going to have a bigger benefit for Brookwood residents will prove challenging. I will endeavour to keep an eye on the agenda for that meeting and try and attend, although I do have a prior engagement that night already.
The petition may be signed here and I encourage as many people as possible to do so.
Cheers.
Kevin
Cllr Kevin Davis 