Why did the government decide to reject what was learned through SoCoMMS and Atkins, and launch the A27 Feasibility Study in 2014? - to now throw massively more money at consultants on a piecemeal or possibly whole-route Expressway strategic agenda, wholly inappropriate to Sussex circumstances?
You can read the 2013 Atkins report's conclusions here:
https://www.westsussex.gov.uk/media/1599/a27_route_strategy_presentation_v2.pdf
It’s not as if Atkins was even pursuing a multi-modal and local-network-integrated approach. Just a moderate, problem-solving roads approach. Costing so much less in money and in environmental degradation than Highways England’s emerging new options.
And now Highways has contracted Skanska, which bought Atkins' Highways Services. Perhaps they have seen the future in the past.
Do this government and their consultants have any sense of the future shape of transport beyond their present term? Climate change, changing demographics, school buses, road pricing by time of day as well as route, driverless cars, intelligent signals, natural capital, more people living beyond driving age, other modes of transport, … so many straws in the wind.
Are they going to ignore all of these and just build piecemeal mini-motorway A27 sections through the countryside like it was the 1970s?
Or will they, after all, do something better and more forward-looking?