PLANS to build a third road bridge over the River Thames have been given a fresh snub by South Oxfordshire County Council.
Reading’s draft local transport plan includes a repeated commitment to creating a crossing.
This is expected to be from Thames Valley Park, where a road already exists, over the river.
But councillors from the neighbouring local authority have picked apart the proposals.
In a letter sent to the council from its planning department earlier this month, they expressed their concerns over the plans, saying it would increase traffic pressures on Reading, Wokingham and South Oxfordshire, rather than alleviating them.
“The bridge and road proposals have significant implications for road building and strategic travel in South Oxfordshire,” they note, saying the bridge would be “counter intuitive” when it came to removing traffic.
Instead, there would be “an increased demand for vehicle journeys into and through the town, contradicting the sustainable travel priorities highlighted as key objectives in the draft plan”.
They added: “Standard navigation routing systems such as Google Maps show strategic routeing from Basingstoke to the M40 does not pass the eastern side of Reading, as the draft LTP proposes. Instead, they use the A33 to access the M4, A404 and M40.”
Any bridge would “funnel traffic through the Chilterns National Landscape (formerly known as Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty), causing harm to this irreplaceable asset”, while the third bridge scheme would be entirely within Wokingham and South Oxfordshire local authorities, and would increase traffic flows on “on Kings Road (A329) and London Road (A4) for Sutton Seeds Roundabout and also increase traffic demand on the highway located between the Earley (Reading) and Woodley (Wokingham) residential areas to the east of Reading, which conflicts with the desire to reduce through traffic in Reading”.
As to the existing road in Thames Valley Park, South Oxfordshire County Council said this is not matched on the other side of the river, with the A4074 being a single lane road, and the carriageway in Shillingford and Nuneham Courtenay being close to housing.
They also warned the cost of the project wouldn’t fall on Reading Borough Council:
“The ongoing maintenance costs of such an expansive bridge would fall on South Oxfordshire and Wokingham with no clear benefit to the two authorities.”
In a post on social media, Sonning Common ward councillor Cllr Mike Giles noted that in a recent BBC Radio Berkshire interview, he had called the plans “half-baked”.
In that discussion, Cllr John Ennis, Reading Borough Council’s lead councillor for transport, said: “Let’s be honest, North Reading and Reading are fed up with the beautiful area, and small roads, being used as a shortcut to the M4.
“We’ve really got to come to some sort of conclusion soon about what we’re going to do if there is always an obstruction and objection to building the bridge because we’re desperate for it.”
