By David Jonas of the Green Party

Whether or not you think that Forest Row should have a bypass, overcoming the technical challenges would be so expensive that, just as for East Grinstead, the finance could only be raised from a substantial housing and infrastructure development in our village. This, together with other factors, would defeat the object of the exercise.

So what is the solution to increasing levels of traffic in our village?

The background

In May last year, our neighbours Mid Sussex District Council invited comments on their proposal to build 4,500 houses in East Grinstead together with a relief road joining the A22 either just to the north of Forest Row, or by passing up the “Cow Path” in front of Michael Hall School Mansion House. There were more than 6,000 responses, mainly opposed to the scale of the plan and the road proposals.

FR Parish Council, with finance from Wealden District Council, commissioned a report to examine the feasibility of extending such a relief road further to the south of Forest Row. They found that such a route was technically possible - though challenging - via a 27m high viaduct or embankment through the valley field just south of Michael Hall School. Other major earthworks would take the route down through the Medway Valley. They estimated it would cost an additional £4M, but offered no proposal as to how this could be paid for.

At the time I wrote to Cllr Mathew Lock of the Highways Dept for East Sussex County Council, asking how he thought such a scheme would be financed. He said:

“East Sussex County Council has considered a range of options for a bypass of Forest Row and has established that there is no scope to implement a route, given the protection afforded to the environmental designations of the

• High Weald AONB,
• Ashdown Forest SSSI, SPA and SAC and,
• Kidbrooke Park, registered historic parkland.

Even if that were not the case, the land form offers such challenging topography that the costs of such a project would be prohibitive and such a scheme would not be supported by the County Council.”

1000 new houses with free bypass?

The only form of finance that currently exists for such schemes in SE England is a levy on new house construction. How many new houses would a developer have to build in Forest Row to finance such a scheme? At least a thousand!

Of course we need new houses to accommodate the expanding needs of our existing population but these needs can be met by much more modest development plans. The scale of development that would be unleashed by this bypass proposal would attract large numbers of new people into the village, for whom there would be insufficient local amenities and local jobs. This would create new commuter traffic problems, thus defeating the original object of the exercise.

Bypasses don’t give long term relief!

In July 2006 a study of the Polegate, Newbury and Blackburn bypasses by The Countryside Agency and Campaign to Protect Rural England, found that traffic on roads that were supposed to be relieved was back to the levels surveyed before the bypasses were built. And this is exactly what would happen in Forest Row, since the old A22 would always be a route of choice for those heading to and from Croydon, central London, east around the M25 and to and from Tunbridge Wells.

The Bigger Picture

Climate change - Our government must commit to an annual 3% CO2 reduction target in the forthcoming Climate Change Bill if we are to avert a socio-economic and environmental catastrophe of unprecedented proportions in the coming decades. Transport represents 25% of our national emissions. A FR bypass might increase our local traffic emissions by more than 50%

Public transport infrastructure - A group of leading oil executives and eminent geologists are convinced that we are now at, or very near the point known as Peak Oil, where global demand will increasingly outstrip supply. We must prepare for escalating oil prices by investing in improved public transport rather than new, expensive and soon-to-be-obsolete highway infrastructure.

The best strategy for Forest Row is to continue to support the efforts of the Post Referendum Campaign group in East Grinstead in getting the proposed scale of the EG development reduced in favour of building homes nearer to Crawley where the jobs are. A bypass for Forest Row is simply unachievable without opening the back door to the same level of unsustainable housing development that the residents of East Grinstead are currently fighting.