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News and Comment March 2020

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4 March - Mystery solved

The unusual looking camera clamped to a lamp post at the junction of Fossington Road and Abbey Road close to the Abbey in Belvedere is a speed camera.

It was put there by the police with the permission of Bexley Council. It is a Vector camera which is an average speed recorder so somewhere along the road there might be another but as yet I have not located it. All information welcome.

An alternative might be that it is being used as if it is a fixed version of a speed gun.

Camera Camera Wall down Wall downOne might speculate that the Police are trying to gauge the extent of the Abbey Road speeding problem to see if there would be enough money earned to justify a standard yellow box.

Quite likely it is justified. Most of the time the speeds on Abbey Road are reasonable but every so often a nutter goes at 50 or more overtaking on the wrong side of Keep Lefts if necessary.

In 2009 while Bexley Council was busy making Abbey Road narrow I asked them for the accident statistics. There were none on record although my own research found a fatal accident report from March 2001.

Since 2009 there have been many more accidents, two fatal.

The reason is obvious. Bexley Council said that they had narrowed the road in accordance with all the guidelines issued by the Transport Research Laboratory. I called in the man who had authorised the guidance and he said that no part of it had been followed and what Bexley Council had done was “a recipe for collisions”. They had adopted none of the ideas which lead to lower speeds and narrow roads give less time to recover from mistakes. Accidents became inevitable.

Over the past ten years the forecast has proved to be all too accurate. TRL’s experts know what they are talking about and Bexley’s experts are not experts at all.

Note: The basic information regarding the camera came from research by local Councillor Sally Hinkley. (Labour.)

 

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