24 February (Part 1) - Ruts at Ruxley. Rats in charge
The
third sunny afternoon of 2011 tempted me away from the keyboard to follow up
reports that were in danger of being neglected. First port of call was Danson
Park because a lady had reported that the lifebelts were kept under lock
and key; she was worried that if they were needed, by the time someone was
fetched to unlock them it would be too late. She had been to see her local
councillor (John Wilkinson, Brampton ward, £9,543 a year) who explained that the
lifebelts had to be kept locked up because of the activities of vandals. I
walked around the entire lake this afternoon and saw no lifebelts at all so
maybe the council (or the vandals) has solved the problem.
The debate on whether or not there should be unlocked lifebelts and how to tackle
vandalism was not however my concern. The lady returned to her councillor after
seeing unsupervised pre-school children feeding ducks at the water’s edge but his
only response was to ask if she “couldn’t find something else to worry about”.
All too typical of Bexley’s unsavoury crew.
It is seven months since I first highlighted the situation at
Ruxley Corner. It is Wickham
Lane’s counterpart which didn’t get the same degree of publicity as a roundabout
large vehicles cannot get around. Unlike Wickham Lane, no attempt has been
made to fix Ruxley’s roundabout. (Warning : Sarcasm alert!). If there was a contract with the transport
consultants Parsons Brinckerhoff as stated on that company’s website and
reported in all the local papers, and if the council’s publicity department
hadn’t made such an enormous mistake and put the details in the council magazine
and on its website, such embarrassments might occur less often. But they were all
wrong because Craske says so, aided and abetted by our inadequate Mayor. Without
the experts to help out we have to fall back on Bexley’s own design team. And
this is what we get. A roundabout lorries and buses cannot get around. A bus was
stuck in the mud a few days ago and Arriva had to send out their rescue truck to haul it out.
Finally
I dropped in on Pembroke Road, Belvedere because it is extremely narrow and
HGVs are said to swipe mirrors off cars and sometimes block the road. It was a long
shot that I might see one and I didn’t but I did note that the whole width of the
road appears from the markings to be given over to cyclists (picture in gallery) and
one of Craske’s stick-out-in-the-road obstacles has been knocked down surrounded
by bits of vehicle. Sorry, no photo of that because it wasn’t safe to park nearby.