Walk on by

As reported in

Wokingham.Today last week, Wokingham Borough Council is developing a network of ‘green routes’.

The aim evidently is to allow residents to use a ‘traffic free’ way to get between major developments.

Really? Have the Shute End Towers silly billies actually walked any of these proposed routes?

Of course, I can only describe the section to run along Jubilee Avenue via Clifton Road, Brook Close and Millmead to Reading Road.

To begin with, this section is most certainly not, by any stretch of the imagination, traffic free.

In fact, it is a regularly used road used by motorists as a short cut from Holt Lane to

Matthewsgreen Road and Embrook village, as well as residents travelling to and from their homes.

On any normal working day there are 70-80 private cars parked along the lefthand side of Jubilee Avenue, often forcing buses and vans to mount the opposite footpath to make way for oncoming traffic.

Clifton Road runs through a residential estate with cars and other vehicles parked on both sides.

Pavements are frequently used by pedestrians including young children.

Brook Close also has a number of vehicles parked along its length. Its pavements are, in places, uneven, and its road surface – to the best of my knowledge – has not been properly resurfaced for at least 40 years.

The section from Brook Close to Reading Road via Millmead is an uneven footpath more often than not littered with food wrappers, drink tins, bottles and mini nitrous oxide cylinders, among other things.

Accompanying the letter from the council was a coloured leaflet, including a map, which would take the eyesight of one of the local red kites to read. It is also informed that these green routes would, in addition to walkers, also allow for their use by cyclists, horseback riders (rose growers will be delighted), roller skaters and skateboard users.

Another cockeyed, illthought through plan from out of touch with reality, inept, petty part-time politicians?