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News and Comment April 2014

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8 April (Part 2) - The Welling Corridor improvements

Bellegrove Road Bellegrove RoadBexley council’s policy of making roads as narrow as possible has claimed another victim. The News Shopper reported the crash yesterday afternoon and the road was allegedly closed for three hours.

The road was ‘improved’ two years ago and was the subject of a long running serialisation by a photographer who lives nearby. The same reader has supplied the two new pictures. One shows the demolished bollards and the other gives a good idea of where the accident happened. I am informed that a Smart car hit the pedestrian refuge and overturned. Fortunately the injuries were not life changing.

Such accidents remind me of the advice I was given when Bexley council narrowed Abbey Road, Belvedere to the extent that buses have difficulty negotiating it when the parking spaces are full. Narrow Roads I was told have to be very carefully designed as they rob drivers of their recovery space should anything untoward happen. The same man, then a Senior Safety Consultant at the Transport Research Laboratory, had told me a few years earlier that the changes introduced in Sidcup showed either incompetence or malevolence and most probably both. That Sidcup arrangement has long since gone.

In recent days I have been driving to Bromley and back each day and generally speaking the traffic delays are all in Bexley. As you might imagine in the light of recent circumstances, I am more than usually aware of ambulances with flashing blue lights at the moment. One got stuck behind me at the northern end of Penhill Road this afternoon and there was simply nowhere for me to go. Trapped by safety railings and a woman in front who thought it was sensible to stop and do nothing.

Before Bexley council introduced its stupid redesign some years ago the exit to the Danson roundabout had two lanes, but no, the idiots had to make it a single lane and there have been queues even since. The idiot that time was Aurang Zeb who said that school children found it difficult to cross the road at that point. As the traffic has to stop there that may be debatable but if it was a problem the answer is a pedestrian controlled crossing, not perpetual queues and added pollution.

 

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