Effingham Common Road is closed outside St Lawrence Primary School for the next 2 weeks until Saturday 22 April.
This means there is no access to Effingham Common Road from the south (The Street, Orestan Lane and Lower Road). Access to to Leewood Way, Lower Farm Road and Effingham Common Road is open from the north via Forest Road, Horsely Road or Old Lane.
The closure is for the installation of speed tables, drainage works and footway works.
Not everyone agrees as some people have moved the barriers, thus opening up the ECR
Surrey County Council has re-instated the barriers, and the Police have been informed.
It’s open again. If the police are monitoring it perhaps they could do some good old-fashioned traffic control and reconnect the Leewood Way residents with their local services so everyone is happy again.
The road closure blocking Leewood Way from the rest of the village is a thoughtless example of Lazy penny-pinching planning by Surrey CC highways. As 2/3 of the closed section from Leewood Way to the roundabout is open to the residents of Moonshine, the ‘safety risk’ is limited to the remaining 3-4M of the road entirely blocked off from Moonshine to the roundabout. The greater risk now appears to be people taking the situation into their own hands and opening up the unblocked road. This situation could easily have been managed by traffic control. I have monitored the activity on the roadworks, and after 6 days, 4.5 days have seen no activity on the roadworks. Every time a resident of Leewood Way wants to visit Bookham, there is effectively a £5 petrol tax for the diversion. The road was open again yesterday afternoon, and in my view, this crass plan will continue to be challenged by outraged residents.
An update on the road closure: I spoke again to the team working on the project. They are still receiving a lot of abuse (both physical and verbal) from frustrated truck drivers and delivery vans especially, and the occasional resident, which is unfair. They were not involved in the planning and are only doing their jobs. Fortunately, it appears that SCC Highways planning team have reconsidered the impact of the closure and has now drafted additional teams to work on the Common Road and is also changing the schedule to prioritise work on that section to get the road at least partially open. That is good news, at least. However, there are problems on the Lower Road. They are having difficulty finding the drain that the table is planned to drain into, which is delaying the completion of that section and may lead to a delay in the overall project.