28 May - Albany Park. Council job creation scheme
Reports have come in from the south of the borough complaining yet again of Bexley council’s constant
unnecessary fiddling with road layouts. Albany Park and Steynton Avenue is not an
area I am very familiar with, having been there only once before today, but it
is a very pleasant and busy village-like shopping area outside Albany Park
railway station. Road works were still in evidence today as were the new
one-way
street signs. As a stranger to the area it didn’t look so very bad to me but
neither could I see any benefit the scheme should have introduced; and this is the
point of the complaints that have come my way. Everything worked well enough
before Bexley council splashed our money around at a time when budgets are supposed to
be cut. The only conceivable reason for it is to keep themselves in work.
It is said that the road, a loop leading to and from the station, has been as it is for
longer than anyone can remember and because it is a little on the narrow side,
locals tended to use it as a one-way system. Not good enough for the control
freaks who infest Bexley’s road planning department! They had to place traffic
orders and enforce one-way traffic and just to show who was in charge they reversed the
natural flow direction adopted by the locals. Naturally, because they are Bexley
council with their reputation for hammering struggling businesses whenever they
can, they reduced the car parking facilities outside the shops.
It is hard to get inside the head of a bureaucrat just as it is difficult to
understand the mind of any other lunatic but I am coming to the conclusion that
road planning is solely driven by job creation and the justification thereof. If
bureaucrats left well alone we would have much less need of them, so they manufacture
unnecessary schemes to make themselves look busy. The phoney industry goes beyond that,
having installed something for no good reason at all they have automatically created
something that can be legitimately removed a few years down the line.
Brampton Road is the latest such example and even with the
million pound nonsense inflicted on Abbey Road,
its incompetent designer, Andrew Bashford, admitted to it being a stab in the dark that
may have to be reviewed later. Why can’t Bexley council employ people who aren’t
just in it for themselves and are sufficiently skilled to get things right first time?
The fourth photograph is another illustration of Bexley council’s contempt for
the population. Whenever they need to resurface a road they close it completely.
This example is within a couple of minutes walk of Albany Park station. On my
way there I encountered the effects of another, a stream of double deck buses in
Brampton Road diverted by the complete closure of Pickford Lane;
for resurfacing works again.