Every school morning during the rush hour my street, quiet most of the time, becomes busy with a queue at the traffic lights at the end. There is no school, there are no other  facilities just homes. All the traffic is ‘rat running’. It affects the quality of my life not at all and I don’t mind it so long as they are insured and pay their road tax.

But spare a thought for the well-heeled residents of Ramsbury Drive and Oldbourne Avenue in Earley. Life in these over privileged hellholes must be hardly worth living!

The two roads, which form a neat little shortcut between Wokingham Road and Wilderness Road, were made ‘access only’ by their highway authority. The signs deter most drivers from using these publicly funded – not private roads. Many people would assume on seeing the sign that taking that road would lead to a dead end.

Not so. These signs don’t really have a traffic purpose, other than making a public road virtually private. In this case the police decided to spend valuable time ‘cracking down’ on this victimless crime in response to “a number of complaints from residents”. And Inspector Binns, clearly Earley’s answer to The Terminator, says “I’ll be back” – though he knows very well that he would have difficulty making any tickets issued stick in court. 

I would dearly love to support the police in all of their actions but it is awfully difficult to say good things about people who make decisions that are both witless and gutless. You can’t blame the residents or even their representative for complaining about people who knowingly ignore these signs, but the police reply should have been ‘Sorry, too busy’. Anything else is an insult to everyone who has been the victim of an uninsured driver, who has waited for a day or more for the police to turn up when they have been burgled or who can’t get prostitutes moved on near their homes off Oxford Road.

I wonder if the police would have had such trouble saying no if this rat run had been in Whitley or the less affluent parts of Woodley?

Long standing guidance from the Department for Transport suggests that traffic calming (and that is all that this is) should, as far as possible, be ‘self enforcing’*. It does so precisely because the Police don’t have time for this kind of thing.

In a similarly dim move Wokingham Council recently implemented speed limit changes on the A4 east of Shepherd’s Hill. The speed limit now moves from 40 down to 30 then back to 40 and finally up to 50 all within half a mile or so. I’ve no doubt that some kind of change was justified, but inconsistent changes that leave drivers confused don’t help. It isn’t easy for elected councillors of any party to see the wood from the trees. But part of the job is insisting that the bureaucrats’ make their case for their schemes – especially when those schemes are likely to prove unpopular. Needless to say a police presence, speed gun at the ready, has been required on several occasions since last year’s change.

Sensible traffic policing is badly needed. Reading is plagued with dangerous road use, yet it isn’t a priority for the same police force that can spare time to mount PR exercises for the benefit of residents in quiet Earley streets. If we want to have proper traffic policing that actually makes the roads safer, then we need traffic police under a separate command structure to do it – and not just on motorways.

* See for example DfT Local Transport Note 1/07 (March 2007).