A petition signed by more than 1,000 people calling for a controversial town-centre bus-gate scheme to be scrapped has failed.

The petition calling for the bus lane restrictions in Mount Pleasant in Tunbridge Wells to be abandoned was signed by 1,085 people, who also called for all the penalty fines issued to drivers since its implementation in March to be refunded.

The petition was presented to an online meeting of the KCC/Tunbridge Wells Joint Transportation Board by a Dudley Road resident, Sally Atkinson.

She told the council that the restriction known as Public Realm 2, between the junctions with Monson Road and Church Road, had failed in its stated intention of creating a greener and more prosperous town centre.

Instead, it had forced extra traffic – and more noise and pollution – onto neighbouring residential roads.

Furthermore, residents in the feeder roads such as Dudley Road and York Road were now having to make long additional journeys as they were forced to make repeated circular loops in search of a parking space near their homes.

She said that inadequate signage was not giving motorists sufficient warning before they were caught in the restricted area and some drivers were being forced into making dangerous U-turns in Monson Road to avoid entering the restrictions.

Some drivers were picking up penalties, she said, not because of a deliberate intention to flout the rules, but simply because the restrictions, which only apply between 9am and 6pm, were so confusing.

She said: “Mount Pleasant traders have suffered a loss of business and the confusion has created safety issues that previously didn’t exist.”

She pointed out that although one intention was to improve air quality in the town centre, no measurements had been undertaken, either before or after, to see if that aim had been achieved.

Instead between March 13 and November 19, Tunbridge Wells had issued 57,559 penalty fines.

She said: “When the signage is so inadequate, issuing penalties is so unfair.”

She said the £1.5m the council had raised in fines “left a foul taste in the mouths of motorists.”

She also pointed out that the money was “being used to swell the coffers of TWBC,” whereas by law, the income from fines should be spent on highway improvements.

Not all of the fines’ income is profit, however. It has cost the council £404,000 to implement the scheme – through this still left a profit of over £1m.

At the very least, Mrs Atkinson said, the council should “white-list” the residents of York Road and Dudley Road, giving them a special exemption to pass through the bus gate.

She was supported by resident Jim Key who said that Dudley Road and York Road residents were facing “a daily ordeal that is wearing on our mental well-being”.

They were “sacrificing hours” in the hunt for a parking space.

But Adrian Berendt, the chairman of the Tunbridge Wells Town Centre Forum, said that the forum's own surveys had not found increased traffic on neighbouring roads and he warned that “PR2 remains a key assumption in the Tunbridge Wells Town Centre Area Plan, and therefore the Forum could not support its withdrawal”.

York Road resident Pippa Collard disputed Mr Berendt’s traffic figures, saying York Road was now “taking the brunt of cars trying to make a cut-though to avoid the restrictions”.

She said: “You have succeeded in re-routing traffic away from a road where nobody lives to roads where many people live.”

She also said the restrictions were “alienating visitors to the town.”

She said: “They come once and get a fine which they don’t understand why, and then are too frightened to return to Tunbridge Wells again.”

Cllr Martin Brice (Lib Dem) thought the level of public concern was being exaggerated. He said he had personally issued a questionnaire to 280 homes in the affected area asking for views, and had received only two responses – one in favour of the scheme, and one against.

He said: “Nobody really seems to care.”

But Cllr David Osborne (Lib Dem) admitted that both he and his son had separately become unwitting “victims” of the scheme.

Cllr Rodney Atkins (Ind) was interested in the idea of “white-listing” York and Dudley Road residents, but John Strachan, the council’s parking manager, said he would be concerned that such a move would dilute the purpose of the scheme which was to reduce the number of vehicles travelling through the town centre.

KCC’s travel manager Jamie Watson, also warned against a whitelist saying that seeing some drivers drive through the restricted area might encourage others to follow suit.

Mr Strachan said the scheme was now working better as the town grew used to it. He said: “At first, 1,200 cars every day were driving through the restriction past the War Memorial – now that is down some days to less than 100.”

Cllr Paul Roberts (Con) was disappointed that there were no pollution measurements. He suggested that with the growing number of electric cars, the majority of pollution was now coming from buses – which were of course still permitted to enter the restricted area, along with taxis.

Council officers suggested a package of inexpensive “quick-fix” measures, known as Option B, that would help mitigate the perceived difficulties of the scheme without cancelling it altogether.

These included adding red surfacing to each gateway feature, adding more traffic enforcement signs to warn of the restriction, adding two SLOW markings approaching the granite raised table in Monson Road, and adding an extra camera enforcement sign with a left turn arrow on Calverley Road.

He said such changes would cost around £15,000 and could be completed within four months.

Cllr Nicholas Pope was in favour of the package, but warned that “more work would still need to be done.”

Jane Fineman, the council’s head of finance and procurement, admitted that it would be “operationally possible” to whitelist York and Dudley Road residents from the scheme, but that it would require a new Traffic Regulation Order to be passed to do so, and that would take time.

Cllr Roberts asked that such an option be investigated “post Option B.”

Cllr Alain Lewis (Lab) warned that people in Dudley Road and York Road were “hanging on by their fingertips” and said that they shouldn’t be penalised just because of where they happened to live.

The councillors voted unanimously to keep the scheme but to adopt the minor changes of Option B for now. But they expressed a wish that officers hold a consultation or workshop with residents to investigate what further measures could be undertaken to help.

The chairman of the board, KCC Cllr Sarah Hamilton (Con), expressed the hope that such a consultation might be held before the next meeting of the transportation board in three months’ time in April.

Meanwhile, KCC is due to take over the operation of the enforcement scheme at the end of June, when it will no longer be Tunbridge Wells’ problem.