Axe over 200 road plans
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VIORE than 200 Oxfordshire road schemes, ranging from najor by-passes to footpath improvements, will be scrapped if a .ecommendation from a county council working party is ipproved.
Oxfordshire County CounInherited Roads Working Party has spent the last 12 months studying no less than 294 road schemes that the new county took over from the former Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Oxford City councils.
In a report to the Environmental Committee, the working party recommends that 236 of the schemes, which .wuld have cost about £55 million to build, should be abandoned.
Many of the schemes were first drawn as lines on the map over 20 years ago, and in today's economic climate there is no realistic prospect of them being started.
But in the meantime, as long as they remain as schemes in the pipeline, they can blight the area they cover.
The 51 schemes, costing nearly £23 million, which the working party recommends should be retained, have been selected because they matched up to one or all of three important criteria by which all the schemes were judged.
These say that priority should be given for new roads which serve places where most new building is planned; for by-passes for towns and villages on roads classed as major through traffic routes; and for schemes which are needed on safety grounds.
The chairman of the working party, Mr Hugh Farrant, said: "We hope we shall now be able to remove the uncertainty"