Around ten new housing estates are planned for Farnham in the near future.

Coxbridge Farm, Green Lane Meadows (Badshot Lea), Monkton Lane, East Street, Deer Park at Six Bells, Waverley Lane (both sides of the lane), Old Park Lane, Oast House Lane, Lower Weybourne Lane and Centrum (replacing MOTEST and the Phyllis Tuckwell store) but not including The Woolmead land.

Several of them, like the Coxbridge estate at the end of West Street and the Deer Park at Six Bells, are already under construction and most of the rest of them have now received full planning approval. So is the town prepared for the new influx of people and their traffic?

Well, £17 million pounds is being spent now on revamping Farnham's town centre by our Farnham Infrastructure Program (FIP) Board.

I'm sure most people realise how tight council money is at the moment and so I suspect the town won't get that sort of investment again for a very long time.

At least in theory, the town should have been future-proofed for these housing estates that are in the pipeline. The council planning process is not swift and so the Board was well aware that these estates were in the pipeline. So was the town future-proofed?

The last time the Local people were consulted by the FIP Board was when the Optimised Infrastructure Plan (OIP) was published and approved in a public vote. It contained lots of ways to prepare for the future without changing the essential character of our precious town.

However, what we are seeing built with the £17 million seems to be quite different to what is in the OIP document.

What is being done to provide an alternative solution to the endless delivery vans holding up traffic when they park across the town?

Where are the cycle lanes that would allow people to choose which form of transport they would like to use for a particular journey? People should be free to choose what works for them. It was all in the OIP document, but this is almost all missing from what is being built by the Board.

And it's not as if they haven't been reminded many times during the FIP design phase. The serious traffic problems from the roadworks are now starting to impact local businesses. Last week The Plough pub on West Street and the Barn Bistro cafe announced their closures.

If the public had alternatives to the car to let them get into town for some journeys then this can only help town centre businesses.

Decisions have been taken behind closed doors and gradually the promise of an ‘optimised’ town as described in the OIP document went up in smoke.

After all, the FIP was originally created to reduce the town's air pollution and congestion. So is the traffic better now? Will it be better in future with the new road layout that is now in place, when the ten housing estates arrive?

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