I have only kept this petition active so that I could give you news of the progress of my judicial review. As I said in my last update, today was to have been the day for a 3 hour hearing to consider permission, expedition, and the capping of costs. In legal parlance, the hearing has been 'vacated' because yesterday my solicitor, on my behalf, signed the Council's consent order, as did the CEO of Brighton & Hove Buses. We are back to the beginning and the 1976 weight restriction. Western Road is due to re-open to 2-way traffic in mid-August, using temporary traffic lights. 

We have both reserved our positions. My grounds were that the Council failed to consider the impact of the TTRO on the amenities of the affected communities (noise, light, vibration, environmental pollution, loss of privacy, reduced road safety, impact on road surfaces and infrastructure etc), breached its duty to acquaint itself with the relevant information before enacting the TTRO (by not even getting information from utility companies or other Council departments), relied on the flawed consultation in 2021 that did not include the diversion, unlawfully used a TTRO to exempt public service vehicles from the “reinstated” weight limit, and unlawfully abdicated its responsibility to decide the streets that buses could use to the bus company. 

The issue of my litigation costs looks likely to go back and forth before the Court until September. We made a generous offer yesterday to short circuit this tedious process as it will generate more costs but the Council did not respond. Documents sent to the Court by the Council indicate they have been working on revoking the TTRO at least since 5 July and probably earlier. When we sought clarification  of their intentions and timeline, the response we received on 11 July was “the diversion route will revert to Upper North Street once it reopens following completion of the repair works”. At that time, according to one.network, Upper North Street was to re-open on 14 July. That response wasted more costs in preparation for the now ‘vacated’ hearing. 

So at least by the middle of August, we should be back to ‘normal' thanks to my legal team, and the enormous amount of work put in by all of you, sharing this petition far and wide so we have 776 supporters. In addition, residents constantly and repeatedly raised every issue with the Council, and then turned up to a meeting with only 2 days notice on a Friday evening! Apparently, from the documents we got yesterday, there were over 40 of us from the original diversion, who went back multiple times to the Council with multiple issues. I honestly believe that if we had not consistently and repeatedly put in all this work (and ££££s!!!), the Council and R J Dance would have slowly messed around with Western Road for the 18 - 24 months they first signaled. Your support has been fantastic. I am incredibly grateful to each and every one of you. Thank you very much. I shall set about declaring victory once there are no more updates to share with you.