18 December - A catalogue of errors - click any image for photo gallery (4 images)
We have woken up to the snow that has been forecast since before last weekend and for
which there were severe weather warnings all day yesterday. Surprise, surprise there is
no sign (at 06.45 and 07.30) that Bexley council has gritted the B213 route between Abbey
Wood and Erith. Yet more proof, if it were needed, that our useless council is always
willing to gamble with peoples’ lives. On the
News Shopper website
Greenwich council is quoted as saying “Main roads, public transport routes… are the main
salting routes”. Bromley said it is “focussed on main roads, bus routes” etc. In
Dartford they have been gritting all week but Bexley’s roads supremo, councillor Peter Craske,
can only waffle on about having to be “flexible”. Presumably because he hasn’t got a plan.
The following photographs were taken and prepared for publication yesterday afternoon.
Several
times while Abbey Road was being rearranged to benefit cyclists I asked what would
be done to protect pedestrians and alighting bus passengers and apart from a vague
indication that pedestrians would have priority Andrew Bashford (Team Leader
Traffic Projects) obviously didn’t have a clue. The photographs show what
happens when you allow clueless bureaucrats to run amok in unaccountable positions
of authority. Sandwiched between two bicycles painted on the footpath (one at the
bottom of the photograph another at the road junction) you have tactile paving at
the pedestrian crossing point (next to the nearest car) put there to reassure
pedestrians, especially poor sighted ones, they can wait there safely. Thanks
to barmy Bashford they cannot.
In
his dishonest
consultation leaflet barmy Bashford promised residents that they would not
suffer any loss of parking spaces and somehow forgot to pass on the advice he
claimed to have followed which warned of consequential damage to parked cars.
However when it came to marking out the road it became apparent that it was
not wide enough to allow as much parking as before. There has already been
an accident at this point.
The result is as shown. The parking bay stops short of where it used to be and
as no revised parking orders have been issued the repainted yellow lines stop at
their original positions. This gives rise to an anomaly within the Abbey Wood
Controlled Parking Zone. We have a piece of road not subject to any parking
restrictions whatever. You’d be a fool to park there of course as my extreme
wide-angle lens makes it look like there is more room than there is. But if you
fancy having your car squashed by a 229 bus, then this is the place to be.
For
another piece of idiocy (or is it malicious design?) we have this bus stop overlapping and
obstructing a pedestrian refuge. The layout increases the possibility of a child making the
time-honoured mistake of dodging behind the bus to cross the road and being unseen by
motorists going in the opposite direction and it also brings traffic to a halt whenever a
bus stops there. This is almost certainly why it is as it is; Bashford is nothing if not
anti-motorist and given to being influenced by cycling pressure groups and with a nice
side-line of pouring millions of pounds of our money down the drain in the process.
We’ve
seen this one before, but months after the road was in all but minor respects, finished off
- in every sense of the word - we still have bare cables poking out of the ground and a rough
surface leading to the possibility of pedestrians tripping within a foot or two of speeding
traffic, not to mention an unlit obstacle placed in its path. No one at Bexley council seems
to give a damn for residents’ lives. Certainly not councillors dozy Davey and cowardly
Craske who are the masterminds who sanction Bexley’s road fiascos.