JP's notes

Here is my report. Please note that this is only my view and that we can discuss it at the Revolutions meeting next week (11th Aug). I just wanted to get something written up as soon as possible. Mary may have other views and interpretations of the meeting. It will be important for those of you with contacts with others at the meeting to get more feed back on the meeting

Attendees from Worthing: Mary Lermitte, JP Saville

We went to the meeting armed with e-mails from John Coote, Duncan Kay and Jim Davis together with a copy of the LTP (thanks J.C.). Thank you for those notes.

I think that we ought to acknowledge the effort that Simone Makepeace has put into organising this meeting and also the note how useful it is to have someone so supportive and understanding of our cause working on the inside at WSCC.

There were several other borough and district councillors together with representatives from Sustrans and the CTC. The meeting was chaired by Richard Bates.

There were no WSCC councillors

WSCC officers were:

• Julian Harris, Director of operations (infrastructure)
• Stuart Smith, Service Manager Operations, WS Highways
• Simon Stevens, Principle Engineer, Safety Audit
• Darryl Hemmings, Team Leader – Infrastructure Policy
• Simone Makepeace, WSCC Cycling officer

Cycle forums

• Worthing
• Horsham
• Crawley
• Felpham

In Julian Harris & Stuart Smiths’ introduction they said that what little money there was before the cuts was diverted to repairing 40,000 pot holes (£50 – £100 each) and whatever was left would disappear thanks to the new government’s spending cuts. Not a good start.

There were two themes to come out. On one side there were the 4 WSCC officers (excluding Simone) and the other the forums. There seemed to be unanimous support from the representatives from the various cycle forums that speed reductions were the most logical way forward. The WSCC stance was that they did not work, were not practical (traffic flow), unenforceable (new government stance on cameras) or not affordable.

When asked about 20s Plenty, Julian Harris actually quoted a statistic to say that in Portsmouth, since the program was introduced the average speed had only dropped by 1mph and so questioned the value of the £500,000 spend. (I wonder if he would take the same glib approach to statistics if a member of his family became one of those stats).

When dealing with the LTP for Worthing I asked why there was not any mention of speed restrictions other than the Heene & Mill road casualty reduction scheme and whether 20’s Plenty would be included in future. They suggested that there was only one black spot identified. It is up to us, as a forum to present the case for 20s Plenty to be incorporated into the LTP.

ACTION

We, as the Worthing Cycle Forum, need to present our case for items that need to be in the LTP. WSCC aim to have the revised LTP finished by 23rd September. We can then meet again with the officers at a West Sussex Cycle forum meeting to discuss it on the 27th October. To be fair, the officers are encouraging our committment. Embracing Cameron’s “Big society” idea they want feed back from us. Mary will try to book a room in Worthing so that the next meeting will be here (this is to be confirmed). ltp@westsussex.gov.uk Darryl Hemmings will get this.

Did you know that if we get 3,000 plus signatures on a petition we can demand a WSCC debate on speed redution. Sarah from Chichester has started a petion as has one of the other forums, pool them together and we

I came away thinking that, where as in the past cycling may have had a token place in WSCC travel plans, it now may now slip even further down the list. When push comes to shove, as explained by Stuart Smith, when money is tight and the motorist complain (the pot holes issue) funds will immediately be diverted to those issues at the expense of longer term goals.

I did not get the impression from anyone that cycling long or short term would ever be a priority for WSCC. It would have been nice to have had a commitment even if the will could not be match by the funds. Most forums wanted at least a committment.

Justifiably or not the excuse that will be used time and time again that central government is to blame for cutting all the great plans that they would have had…. If they had the commitment in the first place.

Thoroughly depressing.

JP