Disbelief at plans to create an A27 ‘superhighway’

Re your piece in the Herald June 28: ‘Upset at A27 ‘superhighway’, it’s not so much an ‘upset’ as ‘disbelief’!

Never has there been a time when there’s been a greater need for a transport study.

What we have been presented with is just a ‘road project’. No ordinary one either: a costly one, likely to carry a price tag of close to £1billion (not £450m- that oddly excludes the roundabouts/flyovers at each end).

We have underway a £72m improvement scheme on the A27. £3m was deducted to pay for the highly irrelevant ‘new A27’ study. How about paying it back to fund regular fast bus services between Eastbourne/Polegate/Hailsham and Lewes/Falmer/Brighton? There haven’t been any for almost two decades.

And the bus priority measures are waiting now on the Lewes – Brighton stretch, and guess what? They remove thousands of vehicles a day from the road. We’ve been waiting 20 years for bus lanes on the Eastbourne – Polegate – Hailsham routes.

How about our councillors chasing officers to bid for funds to get them up and running?

It’s no longer rocket science: bus lanes/priority measures have been doing wonders in Brighton – and other places – for years.

Let’s monitor and analyse how that junction and safety improvement scheme works, with its new end to end cycleway (there are now electric bikes). Longer and more trains? Yes please.

And let’s get the Lewes – Uckfield – Tunbridge Wells line back: we believe that up to 15-20 per cent of traffic on the A27 originates/ends on the A26 corridor.

And there’s a climate crisis. And there’s significant behavioural change going on that needs to be acknowledged, quantified and factored in. That was happening even before Covid -19!

And let’s integrate ‘transport’ and ‘planning’ so we don’t keep on building car dependent homes without excellent walking, cycling and public transport links. (There are quite a few million people under driving age don’t forget).

We must have high quality choices as we leave our front doors. Soon.

Attached to epidemics of road building, there are public health implications, habitat destruction, wrecking of landscapes, heritage, loss of agricultural land, denial of rights to beauty and tranquillity. They count.

For the promoters of the off-line, four lane highway, it’s as though given a whole palette of measures to be used creatively to deliver a truly sustainable transport system linked to sensible land use practice, they’ve ignored the oil paints, pastels and glitter and chosen a broken stick of chalk.

We’re advocates for the next generation. We can create better!