Tomorrow
morning commuters will arrive at the £684 a year Felixstowe Road car park and
find that Balfour Beatty has moved in. They will be preparing the site for use
as a base for the construction of the new railway tracks and station at Abbey Wood. By
mid-September the car park will be no more and stay that way for four whole years.
I know this because the site is only a few minutes walk from home and Steve
Lord, Crossrail’s Communications Manager, does a first rate job of keeping all
his ‘neighbours’ in the picture. Steve made himself available to answer questions at
the recent
Crossrail exhibition and his efforts have kept most people happy.
Those
living further away are beyond Steve Lord’s reach and might rely on Bexley
council for information. Most will be totally ignorant of what is about to happen. All that
Bexley council has managed is a Twitter notice and
a web page quoting councillor Gareth Bacon; and a fat lot of good he is.
What’s all this encouragement that Bacon is talking about?
South Eastern’s website
will tell you there is no cycle storage available at Abbey Wood, although in fact
there are half a dozen railway company provided racks offering no security in the street outside.
As for his remarks on Bexleyheath station, well you can’t expect Gareth Bacon to
know about these things as he is given free travel as a perk of his GLA job,
but while Bexleyheath is indeed in Fare Zone 5, Abbey Wood is in Zone
4, so his bright idea will add £5.40 to
the cost of the peak hour return fare to London. What a waste of space that man is.
So Bexley council’s idea for helping people through a potentially difficult
period is to put up a Twitter message and post an almost useless web page
when what they should have done is reach out to the motorists who are in for an
unpleasant surprise. You might therefore assume that Felixstowe Road car park
has been festooned with warning notices so that those most affected are well equipped
to make suitable rearrangements? Not a bit of it. Take a look for yourself…
These are Saturday afternoon pictures. Quite obviously Bexley council has done nothing to warn motorists, who almost by definition will
have come from beyond the immediate area, maybe from outside Bexley. The council urges Twitter reading motorists to plan ahead, but their
own planning goes no further than a money making scheme to
restrict parking in local streets
and make what is left even more expensive. If you can find an on street bay it’s soon going to cost you £3·80.
Two years ago
Bexley Tories claimed on their website that Labour didn’t know that Bexleyheath had a railway
station - it was an outrageous lie. Now we know who the ignoramuses really are.