30 November - Blackwall tunnel shut
As anyone out and about in Bexley today will have noticed, the traffic
congestion has been dreadful on main routes and the reason is that
Blackwall
tunnel is shut northbound. There was a vehicle fire yesterday evening close to the
northern exit and the tunnel is likely to be unusable until Wednesday.
It’s hard to know which bunch of politicians to blame for the inadequate links
across the Thames. Bexley’s Conservatives are proud to have cut off residents
from job opportunities across the river by successfully campaigning for Boris
Johnson to cancel the bridge proposed by his predecessor Ken Livingstone. And we
have Red Ken who banned the contra-flow in the southbound tunnel. Boris has
since changed his mind and belatedly realised that cancelling the crossing was a
mistake but he has so far failed to reintroduce the contra-flow he promised at
election time - though infrastructure to support it appears to have been installed.
The chaos caused every time there is a problem with the tunnel is yet another
example of Bexley’s Conservatives council being wrong about road planning. They
may claim that the bridge will have introduced additional pollution but that is
only because they lacked the will and probably the skill to devise a way of
confining most traffic to major roads. As a result Woolwich and Charlton suffer
pollution due to standing traffic on a daily basis. Today we all reap the
consequences of Bexley Conservatives short-sighted and parochial attitude.
P.S. Someone decided that the traffic chaos was just too much for
London to bear and scrapped the extended safety checks planned for the next two
days. The tunnel reopened this evening.