A friend was telling me about the deal that the Fastway people made with the County Council people in which money was lent to the Fastway people to keep Fastway on track in the Horley area - BEFORE the Masterplan was ever agreed upon. It just shows you how democracy truly works. Decisions like the Horley Master Plan are made without the general public having any say at all. Any notion that we do have a say is just a facade.

Anyway, I have drifted from the point I was going to make.

On searching Google for information about the said underhandedness above, I note that all the results in the top 10 on Google.co.uk search for “fastway horley money” (without the quotes) throw up eight results in .PDF format (Portable Document Format) and the last one being this site (written in honest to goodness html and plain text). I have noticed government sites doing this more and more. I can only assume that it’s because it’s more difficult for the often controversial information enclosed in the PDF file is more difficult to propagate around the web and less people are likely to view it (and complain about it).

However, google also caches the page as some weird form of HTML - I have no idea how it works and the sentences are only selectable as single lines (this may impair search ability also). If anyone knows how this works, please tell me.

Anyway, I finally found it - here are some excerpts:-

The cost of extending Fastway from West Sussex into Surrey was originally to be funded by contributions from developers as part of the Horley Master Plan but with proposed developments delayed the County Council will guarantee approximately £1 million to keep the project on schedule. The council will recoup the money later when the Horley Master Plan gets underway.

11th December 2003 the document is dated. It’s no wonder that the Horley Master Plan was pushed through in the face of fierce opposition the way that it was.

The document goes on to say:-

“It means that the people of Horley can look forward to a state-of-the-art transport service that is frequent, efficient and reliable and one that offers a real alternative to the private car. With around a third of Gatwick’s employees living in the Crawley/Horley area Fastway will be a very welcome amenity for the Horley area.”

I for one will be very interested to know whether the Fastway bus will run 24/7 to reflect the shift patterns of the third of Gatwick’s employees living in the area? Or is it just another waste of money that no one will use or is unsuitable for their work patterns?