Last week West Sussex County Council wrote to a number of objectors to its proposals to dual the A2300 (between the A23 and Burgess Hill). It has replied to us but provided no real reassurance it knows or cares what it’s doing. For example, it has claimed in a letter to Bricycles, the Brighton & Hove Cycle Campaign group, that: “Any form of controlled crossings such as toucan or Pegasus crossings will have negative impact of the business case and put funding of the scheme in jeopardy.” This tells us one of three things:
- The business case for the road is so weak it will be undermined if they slow traffic down to allow pedestrians and cyclists safe passage through the area (across the new road and its junctions).
- They haven’t a clue as to the needs of pedestrians and cyclists, if they think uncontrolled crossings are any form of benefit to them
- They just don’t care
What is worse is that WSCC cannot claim it doesn’t know that walking and cycling are important and bring many benefits. Late last year, the Government reiterated their importance and said that it wanted to see local highways authorities spending around 15% of their transport infrastructure funding on walking and cycling.
More recently, this year the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published a new draft quality standard where it proposed that: “New and upgraded roads should prioritise pedestrians, cyclists and public transport over motorised vehicles”. This is out of concern that lack of physical exercise is ruining people’s quality of life and placing an unnecessary and expensive burden on the NHS.
Watch this space for more updates but if you live in West Sussex or use the roads in the area, then we would encourage you to lobby the County Council to start getting serious with its provision for pedestrians and cyclists.
These files are our original objection, WSCC’s response and our reply to their response
Brighton & Hove Friends of the Earth 
Is it worth sending the Strava heatmap to show that the Pookbourne ln, Stairbridge ln, north/south route which crosses the A2300 is very widely used
https://www.strava.com/heatmap#16.00/-0.18640/50.96649/hot/all
It looks like they are making this junction “left turn only” which makes it impossible to cross safely for cyclists as you’d have to join the 70mph carriageway and then go around the roundabout with the M23
Great idea, we’ll aim to do this