23 September - Yellow hypocrisy
I
don’t like Facebook but I usually look at a couple of local groups each day. It
was there that I picked up on the fact that there are new Yellow Moneybox
junctions around the borough; but where?
The search facility on Bexley Council’s website has always been utterly useless.
A search for yellow gives you yellow lines. A search for box will tell you about
recycling boxes that we don’t even have any more and junction will lead to far
too many road names to count. Yellow box junction in full will provide all of
them in one go. 1990s IT standards in 2023.
Fortunately blogger Hugh Neal of
Arthur
Pewty fame gave me a clue in the shape of a Bulletin issued by Bexley
Council which true to their form was not a lot of use except that it said that
Cabinet Member Richard Diment had signed off on seven more camera enforced
Yellow Moneyboxes.
The locations are however not revealed which is what one would expect when
the object is to entrap motorists and raise money.
Don’t believe me? Then you have not been paying attention.
After one of Richard Diment’s predecessors had lied that Yellow Moneyboxes were
installed for reasons of road safety, departing Finance Director
Alison Griffin blew his case apart
by revealing at the same 2017 meeting that the object was to raise £500,000 from the first of them installed in Welling
and that figure was built into her budget calculations.
The first two Moneyboxes were
raising only an estimated £300,000 a year by 2019 so obviously the answer is more Moneyboxes.
Bexley Council will have wasted at least £200,000 by the time it repays the
little dictator’s legal bills after losing their ULEZ challenge in Court and
regards the £12·50 a day permit to kill 4,000 Londoners a year as an unnecessary
burden on residents. Yellow Moneyboxes are not quite the same of course as they
can be avoided or you can simply hold up all the traffic until other drivers
stop blocking your way, but the ULEZ suggestion that Bexley Council is the motorists’ friend
is a long way from the truth. Bexley Council is nobody’s friend.
It is disappointing to find that Cabinet Member Richard Diment shows the same
hypocritical tendencies as all his predecessors.