The front page street scene (Farnham Herald, December 21 – pictured above) is a handsome but misleading picture published six months ago of how the junction of The Borough, West Street and Downing Street might look after the Farnham Infrastructure Group has completed its traffic plans.

It shows the heart of Farnham with the road narrowed to two empty lanes, traffic reduced to just two cars, a parked bus and a lone cyclist. The widened pavements are full of people just walking about as if they had all strolled into Farnham for the day. It will never look like this.

The significance of the parked bus is that it is shown as having stopped at the busy bus stop which serves passengers of at least four hourly services. Often there are quite long queues waiting to board the bus. 

The current situation is that traffic coming into Farnham from West Street or from turning right out of Downing Street has the choice of three lanes to move forward to overtake any parked buses, turn left into Castle Street or continue through to the two lanes of The Borough.

The Infrastructure Plan will put this juncture under intolerable traffic pressure. These three current lanes will be reduced to a single onward lane because wider pavements will narrow the overall width of the road to two lanes and a new Right Turn out of Castle Street will reverse one of these two. 

This onward lane is then joined by a separate lane of traffic turning left out of Castle Street. These two lanes will then compete, sometimes aggressively, for access to the new single lane of The Borough to which it is about to be restricted.

The envisaged plan clearly shows the parked bus blocking the single lane forward and immediately next to it is an apparently empty lane for traffic turning right from Castle Street. An impetuous motorist sees the empty lane ahead and decides to nip past the bus at the same moment as a nervous motorist turns right at the junction from Castle Street which is not traffic-light controlled and they run into each other. 

This could be a dangerous aspect of the proposed changes because neither can easily see the other.

This proposed approaching left or right turn out of Castle Street could prove to be controversial. Normally traffic forming a T-Junction will be divided into two left and right lanes. 

It is uncertain whether the foot of Castle Street has sufficient width to provide two such lanes.

John Littlewood

Castle Hill, Farnham

I am writing about the picture  on the front of the Farnham Herald issue December 21.

Unless I am mistaken I can’t see how that picture  is correct . Is the street really wide enough to accommodate such wide pavements and still a two-lane road?

Please let me know, I assume it must be, as the picture is on the front page. Thanks for your time.

Helen King

Wrecclesham Road, Farnham

Editor’s note: We haven’t got our tape-measure out yet, so can only comment that this visualisation depicts the Farnham Infrastructure Programme’s agreed town centre changes to be built out later this year.