13 June (Part 1) - Officially recognised. A £3·5 million disaster zone
Messages
expressing alarm and disgust at what Bexley council has done to Broadway
continue to arrive. The complaints are generally safety related and some parents
have vowed not to take their children to Bexleyheath again on the grounds they
have taught them that they are safe on the paved areas and will get instantly
splatted if they venture on to the road. Now they cannot tell one from the other and Bluewater is the beneficiary.
Whilst everyone accepts Broadway looks passably OK, but not nearly as nice as the plans shown at
the public consultation,
it is widely regarded as a death trap. We have a road which looks like a dual carriageway
but isn’t, road markings that look like a Zebra crossing but is just a pretty pattern and
a dual carriageway with no preceding roundabout to guide traffic in the right direction.
To any qualified traffic engineer the dangers should have been blindingly obvious but no
one at Bexley council was clever enough to predict it.
Now the reality has hit them they have rushed into panic mode. Warning signs
everywhere. ‘No entry‘ reminders for motorists who see the Magic Roundabout as a T
junction - which by design it is. A warning that pedestrians may be crossing (it
doesn’t work, no one stopped for me) and a sign on the make believe dual carriageway
to say that it isn’t what it appears to be. Bexley’s senior staff get almost the highest
local authority salaries in the country proving you don’t have to pay peanuts to get monkeys.
Another
correspondent is concerned about the ASDA crossing where the road is now
a right angled bend instead of the former gentle curve. This she says is forcing
buses into the middle of the road as it is not realistic to expect them to follow the outer contour precisely.
This forces eastbound traffic ever closer to the toes of waiting pedestrians. I shall watch
this more closely when I am next on site but meanwhile the tyre marks shown on the
associated photograph may indicate that this bend is indeed too sharp for the
constant procession of buses and was possibly designed by the idiot responsible for the
Wickham Lane roundabout.
In true Bonkers Bexley style, buses couldn’t get around it.
The Broadway scheme was
the brainchild of councillor Peter Craske, architect of
far too many of Bexley council’s transport disasters.