20 December - Bexley council is content to see the borough grind to a halt
Just because their failures are constant and expected doesn’t mean that Bexley
council should be let off the critical hook when they let us down yet again. 48 hours
after an hour long snowfall Bexley’s main routes are still untreated. I was going to say
“at least in the north of the borough” but while preparing this report emails
have come in saying the Welling end of Welling Way to the A2 wasn’t passable early this
morning and that Brampton Road is just a set of wheel ruts. Quite possibly the councillor at
fault, Peter Craske, has never ventured north and doesn’t know that Erith and Belvedere
can be very hilly and offer spectacular views across London from various vantage points.
You would think hills would be top priority for attention but Picardy Road for example wasn’t
touched. It’s a bus route and inevitably one got stuck blocking and trapping cars behind it.
Yesterday I had to drive to East Ham and it was the quickest journey of the year. Very little
traffic and clear roads from the moment I crossed the Bexley boundary, fortunately only a
quarter of a mile from home. The contrast between the Greenwich section of the B213 (photo 2) and
Bexley’s (photo 1) was remarkable and it still is as these scenes only five minutes apart on foot
and photographed mid-morning today illustrate. Abbey Road
at the point shown carries nearly three times as many buses as does McLeod Road and a
little further along where a bus got stuck it carries nearly four times as many.
Whilst
reminding Craske that hilly bus routes should be a priority for salting and gritting
maybe I should remind readers of what sort of man Craske is. Recently he
lied at a council meeting about the council’s
contract with Parsons Brinckerhoff
in order to deflect a question from a member of the public who he went on to verbally
assault. He is the man who approves the vendettas against businesses in the borough
through various parking scams, Blackfen
being the most recent example. He is the man responsible for the doubling (and soon trebling)
of the cost of residents’ parking permits
justifying it with arithmetic that makes no sense. And perhaps most shocking of all, Craske is
the spiteful bastard who forced a resident to shell out an extra £550 to rectify an error
he had innocently made when an alternative and helpful solution was staring
Craske in his purple face.