THE CHOICE of road signs for the Arborfield Cross Relief Road are bonkers, according to a Swallowfield Road resident.
Christiaan Munro and his neighbours in Arborfield Court are frustrated with the large road signs installed in a rural setting.
Mr Munro said the sign on Swallowfield Road is too large for a 40mph rural road.
He told Wokingham.Today: “It’s too big in our opinion, I understand that road sign letters need to be a certain size for the speed of the road, but the A327 Reading Road which has a 60pmh limit has the same size sign.
“We’ll be having people come from all four corners of the country because it’s so big.”
He added: “The signage just wrecked the vibe of the area — it looks bonkers.”
Mr Munro said the residents of Arborfield Court have been plagued by uncertainty, noise and disturbance for several years while the road was planned and then built.
He said: “It was acknowledged by Wokingham Borough Council in previously published documents during consultation that ‘Arborfield Court in particular would have its immediate setting severely affected’, but we had not envisaged quite the lengths that would be gone to, to severely affect our setting.”
But he said the concern was not about the visual impact to residents, but the impact on the scenic environment and the wider village feel.
“It feels like driving through Bracknell town centre or Slough rather than the countryside,” he said.
“They’ve done all sorts of planting and building a green bridge, but that’s quashed by these massive signs. It’s just craziness.”
He also believes the sign, which is adjacent to the entrance to Arborfield Court, will have little use to traffic.
“I imagine that only local traffic and visitors to Henry Street Garden Centre would be approaching the relief road from this direction,” he said.
“So I feel that the sign not only is an eyesore but very much redundant.”
A spokesperson for Wokingham Borough Council said: “The signs are the minimum sizes stipulated by national highways standards linked to the speed of the road and have been agreed in line with Wokingham Borough Council’s signage strategy.
“The amount of content on a sign will increase the overall size of it, therefore a sign on a 40mph road can be just as big as a 60mph road because it contains more local destinations and other information, which is often the case with local and strategic signing.
“The signs immediately outside the entrance to Arborfield Court are to a specified standard and cannot be seen from Arborfield Court itself, only the entrance way.
“The verges will be planted with grass and hedgerows installed along the fencing in late October 2020.”
