It was 1:25 in the morning and the mean streets of Welling were deserted except for one car with a single occupant making its way along Wickham Lane to its destination a few streets away. However Bexley council in its wisdom had decided to spend the holiday tracking vehicles with its C.C.T.V. system. Every report on C.C.T.V. has shown that their constant intrusion into our lives has failed to cut crime and even street robberies are not being significantly countered by them. At best 3% are solved with the help of C.C.T.V. evidence. It is probable that Bexley council is prepared to waste our money in the early hours of Boxing Day solely to try to catch minor motoring transgressions and because too many of their officials are hateful jobsworths who can barely muster a brain-cell to share between them.
Mr. Filey is on the ball isn’t he? Just two days after he received my report
about the non-working speed indicators in Abbey Road they were working again. A pity the email took two
weeks to get through the council bureaucracy and that Andrew Bashford didn’t pass on my enquiry
of last September. Mr. Filey says he relies on reports by council staff and members of the public. Dozy
Davey passes the speed indicators fairly regularly (I’ve seen him) and one must wonder why a councillor
can’t be bothered to mention them. Councillor Davey has quite a track record of
standing idly by when things go wrong. Just what is the man for?
Traffic was being slowed by the water in ‘Bashford Bay’ just down the road
but in the 15 minutes I spent watching the indicator the fastest I saw was 42 m.p.h. For some reason as
each car passed the sign it consistently and instantly flicked over to a much lower speed without the vehicle
appearing to have slowed. When the weather improves I shall look again. There are no photos of the speeding
traffic because either the digital camera doesn’t register the flashing display or I was very unlucky
with the timing of the 13 pictures I took. I’ll experiment to see if I can do better.
Reports
of minor prangs in Abbey Road continue to filter through but always too late for me to see the evidence,
until this morning that is, when snow provided a clue. A car going towards Erith took to the
pavement possibly in an effort to avoid an obstruction at the bus stop. The precise details are unknown.
It probably didn’t help that councillor Craske’s “flexible”
approach to road gritting means that there has been no sign of a gritter in this area.
Maybe it is better news that yesterday I had an email from Bexley council. In it Mr. Filey (Senior
Engineer, Traffic and Road Safety Group) says he was unaware that the speed indicators in Abbey
Road weren’t working and promised to have someone attend to them. Strange he didn’t know,
I asked that useless individual Bashford when they were to be restored to service months ago.
A
recent Tory leaflet said “Lesnes Abbey has been taken
for granted by Labour”. Very probably but the Conservatives have been no better.
Politicians spout words and line their pockets but actually do nothing useful. If they did we might not
be at a virtual standstill due to the lack of road gritting. There have been no postal deliveries since
17 December and I’m not surprised; it was difficult enough to walk to Abbey Wood station this
morning without having a load of mail to carry. There was barely half an inch of snow in the low lying
parts of Belvedere but over three days it compacted to a kerb to kerb sheet of ice. The loons in charge
of Bexley council have spent most of 2009 ruining the environment in this neglected part of the borough
and now they are doing their best to ruin Christmas by halting the Christmas mail.
I was in the Socialist Republic of Newham yesterday and their roads were all clear and on my return
saw Newham’s gritting lorries out in force. Even the pavements in minor roads were clear; I was
told a little machine had been along and somehow rid the paths of snow before it turned to compacted
ice as it has in Tory controlled Bexley. And to think I voted for that cretinous crew!
A radio news item mentioned spam email the other day and for a moment I wondered what they were
talking about because it is so long since I received any (at least two years)
that I’d half forgotten what it is. I do take precautions to prevent it and one of
those is that I use a different email address for each of my correspondents. If for example
I buy something on-line from the ABC Gadget Company I make up an email address of abc@myname.co.uk
and cancel it the moment I’ve finished with them. Only addresses I have specifically marked
for use can be used to reach me.
That’s what I did when I was corresponding with councillor Davey, Andrew Bashford and Will
Tuckley - if you can call a totally one-way communication with the C.E.O. a correspondence - about
the Abbey Road farce. Apart from using it to report bin
problems and gully thefts to the Deputy Director of Customer Relations
no one else in the world knows bexley@myname.co.uk exists; so when I suddenly get deluged with
salacious messages addressed to that address as I have been since last Friday I know that only one
organisation can be responsible for signing me up to some sex site or whatever needs to be done to
get on the spammers’ mailing lists.
When the correspondence with Andrew Bashford and co. ended I stopped using that address and switched
to another but didn’t bother to cancel the older address. Low though my opinion of Bexley council
is, it never occurred to me that they would resort to that sort of abuse. The current address remains
spam free and bexley@myname.co.uk has been belatedly cancelled, ending some small minded
criminal’s little game.
My Internet Service Provider treats me very generously; when they heard what this site was to be used
for they provided the facilities absolutely free of charge and they allow me full administrative
control over their mail server. I cannot only set up or cancel email addresses instantly on-line I can
direct the incoming traffic wherever I wish. I have resisted the temptation to have the
bexley@myname.co.uk address pass email back to Bexley council but if spam recommences to any other
bexley@address known only to me and Bexley council I shall know who is responsible and what to do.
I took my annual trip to Bexleyheath this morning; went on the 229 bus from Lesnes Abbey, quick and easy.
There wasn’t a hint that any gritting had been done for yesterday’s snow anywhere along the route
or in and around the centre of town. Later in the day some friends and I went looking for grit remnants
along local bus routes but could see nothing beyond the usual accumulation of dirt in the gutters. Now we
know what Craske meant when he told the News Shopper he was “flexible”
about road gritting. The slippery customer reserved the right to twiddle his thumbs doing nothing while
contemplating his £22k a year expenses.
In the main shopping arcade at Bexleyheath the TV screens were showing an advert which said
“Merry Christmas from Bexley Conservatives”. You can tell there is an election coming.
We have woken up to the snow that has been forecast since before last weekend and for
which there were severe weather warnings all day yesterday. Surprise, surprise there is
no sign (at 06.45 and 07.30) that Bexley council has gritted the B213 route between Abbey
Wood and Erith. Yet more proof, if it were needed, that our useless council is always
willing to gamble with peoples’ lives. On the
News Shopper website
Greenwich council is quoted as saying “Main roads, public transport routes… are the main
salting routes”. Bromley said it is “focussed on main roads, bus routes” etc. In
Dartford they have been gritting all week but Bexley’s roads supremo, councillor Peter Craske,
can only waffle on about having to be “flexible”. Presumably because he hasn’t got a plan.
The following photographs were taken and prepared for publication yesterday afternoon.
Several
times while Abbey Road was being rearranged to benefit cyclists I asked what would
be done to protect pedestrians and alighting bus passengers and apart from a vague
indication that pedestrians would have priority Andrew Bashford (Team Leader
Traffic Projects) obviously didn’t have a clue. The photographs show what
happens when you allow clueless bureaucrats to run amok in unaccountable positions
of authority. Sandwiched between two bicycles painted on the footpath (one at the
bottom of the photograph another at the road junction) you have tactile paving at
the pedestrian crossing point (next to the nearest car) put there to reassure
pedestrians, especially poor sighted ones, they can wait there safely. Thanks
to barmy Bashford they cannot.
In
his dishonest
consultation leaflet barmy Bashford promised residents that they would not
suffer any loss of parking spaces and somehow forgot to pass on the advice he
claimed to have followed which warned of consequential damage to parked cars.
However when it came to marking out the road it became apparent that it was
not wide enough to allow as much parking as before. There has already been
an accident at this point.
The result is as shown. The parking bay stops short of where it used to be and
as no revised parking orders have been issued the repainted yellow lines stop at
their original positions. This gives rise to an anomaly within the Abbey Wood
Controlled Parking Zone. We have a piece of road not subject to any parking
restrictions whatever. You’d be a fool to park there of course as my extreme
wide-angle lens makes it look like there is more room than there is. But if you
fancy having your car squashed by a 229 bus, then this is the place to be.
For
another piece of idiocy (or is it malicious design?) we have this bus stop overlapping and
obstructing a pedestrian refuge. The layout increases the possibility of a child making the
time-honoured mistake of dodging behind the bus to cross the road and being unseen by
motorists going in the opposite direction and it also brings traffic to a halt whenever a
bus stops there. This is almost certainly why it is as it is; Bashford is nothing if not
anti-motorist and given to being influenced by cycling pressure groups and with a nice
side-line of pouring millions of pounds of our money down the drain in the process.
We’ve
seen this one before, but months after the road was in all but minor respects, finished off
- in every sense of the word - we still have bare cables poking out of the ground and a rough
surface leading to the possibility of pedestrians tripping within a foot or two of speeding
traffic, not to mention an unlit obstacle placed in its path. No one at Bexley council seems
to give a damn for residents’ lives. Certainly not councillors dozy Davey and cowardly
Craske who are the masterminds who sanction Bexley’s road fiascos.
The plans and reports to councillors concerning roads that were available
on the council’s website have been removed, or possibly simply moved. The links
from this site have had to be amended. It is no longer as easy to check on the
full extent of Bexley council’s failures, dishonesty and willingness to put the population
in greater danger. Fortunately I kept copies.
On 9 December I asked the council if they were going to
reinstate the speed indicators in Abbey Road to see if their prediction of
reduced speeds would come true. Early this morning in icy conditions I saw a
small car go by at at least twice the legal limit. Fortunately that sort of
speed isn’t all that common but it would be interesting to see how the speeds
compare to the average 28·9 m.p.h. recorded before the work commenced. Today
the contact centre told me that my enquiry would be forwarded to
Rupert Cheeseman. Not exactly speedy in transferring
enquiries to the man in charge are they? What happened to the
promise to reply within two working days heralded in the
latest issue of the Bexley Magazine?
P.S. On 18 December Mr. Cheeseman told me that the speed
indicators weren’t his responsibility and my enquiry has been sent back to the
Contact Centre to try their luck again.
It was only a little after 7 o’clock in the morning but a white van man council
contractor was doing something to the keep left bollards in
Abbey Road. When I returned no more than 15 minutes later it was lit up and he
had moved on to the bollards near Elstree Gardens. Its closest
neighbour however was still dark; how could it be otherwise when the
supply cable is still poking out of the ground unconnected? One day Bexley
council will get its act together, but not one suspects while it is run by the
imbecile Tories who are in charge at the moment.
I was speaking yesterday with the Transport Research Laboratory man who helped
me demolish Andrew Bashford’s juvenile arguments in favour of giving priority to
a very small number of cyclists at the expense of pedestrian and vehicle safety
in Abbey Road. I admitted with some trepidation
that I had labelled him ‘a clown’ on this
blog expecting to get some mild reprimand for over-stepping the mark. “Well they
(council road planners) pretty much all are” came the reply and he told me about
the 20 m.p.h. zone installed near to where he lives. Because only one side of the
road is residential and the other side is rural, the council didn’t want the
signs to be an eyesore. So they made all the 20 signs green and not the regulation red,
thereby rendering the whole zone unenforceable. So when Bashford has wrecked Bexley and
got the well deserved elbow, there are places where even he might be welcomed.
Our councillors occasionally pretend to have an influence over bus and train operators but in practice I suspect they are virtually impotent so I won’t dwell on the new train timetable which came into force yesterday. Commuters will have grappled with it for the first time today. My 1988 timetable was never thrown away and comparison is interesting. More than 22 years ago the fast weekday off-peak service from Charing Cross to Abbey Wood took 27 minutes and today a modern train with the benefit of faster acceleration and devoid of the hindrance of slam doors, running over the same route with the same stops takes 34 minutes. That’s a 26% increased time. The fastest train home from London Bridge took 19 minutes and the exact equivalent (almost the same departure time, same route, same single stop) takes 23. 21% longer. The new timetable offers intermediate stations an advantage in terms of service intervals but if you have the impression you might be quicker on a bike, then you are not far wrong.
A couple of election leaflets have dropped through my letterbox. Boris Johnson
tells me what a wonderful job he has done with a carefully worded sheet that probably
omits more than it includes. He tells me something I didn’t know; that the Freedom
Pass is now usable all day every day. So that’s goodbye to the ‘Twirlies’
then. Where was the publicity for that? As Boris says “it makes it easier for our
seniors to travel to hospital appointments”. Well maybe not for those in the Lower
Belvedere and Lesnes Abbey areas who need to get to The Queen Elizabeth Hospital
in Woolwich. They have the choice of the infrequent 469 bus which meanders around many
backwaters and can take best part of an hour, or jump on a train which can sometimes
get you all the way there (with the help of a five minute bus journey from Woolwich)
in as little as 12 minutes but isn’t free before 09.30. But one cannot argue
it’s not a move in the right direction and Boris so far seems to do more things
right than the Jew-baiting amateur pugilist that preceded him.
The other leaflet was the local Conservatives’ Lesnes Abbey ward one. While Boris
successfully hides his failures, like doing nothing to improve the Thames crossing situation
(where’s the Blackwall contra-flow got to?), the local bunch
produce far more dubious logic for re-electing them. I think it is bad enough to
deserve an entry in the Politics section.
The pavement in Abbey Road was marked out with a central dividing line today in
the hope that cyclists will behave themselves. I doubt they all will, the first cycle
I saw using it was in fact a motorcycle which sped along the path and turned into
Carill Way. Before all this unwanted work was done I asked Andrew Bashford (Team Leader
Traffic Projects) how he planned to prevent alighting bus passengers stepping straight
into the path of a cyclist. It was one of several things he couldn’t answer
although buried somewhere in my files there is something about ‘pedestrian
priority at bus stops’.
The ‘priority’ as far as one can tell from today’s white-lining activity,
is to have no dividing line at all at bus stops and a general free for all. Very
intelligent I’m sure, and well up to Bashford’s usual standards.
Rupert Cheeseman (Bexley Engineering Services) emailed me today about the
traffic lights that spent the night guarding nothing
two weeks ago. As became clear after my initial enquiry this didn’t seem likely to be
due to anything other than contractor’s bad judgement and not something that Rupert could
easily have prevented. He apologised in a friendly manner that my email had taken so long
to reach him.
At 1.30 this afternoon I spotted the gestapo car getting ready to spy on Gayton
Road (adjacent to Abbey Wood station) and I asked the young lady what she was
going to do and was told the same story (blog 28 February)
given to me by Graham Ward. She was spying on people stopping at the bus stop. She wasn’t
interested in those stopping on ordinary yellow lines. I pointed out that occupying one of
only six parking bays in Gayton Road was to some extent encouraging people to park outside
the bays but I didn’t get an answer to that one. The gestapo car was still there (but
blocking a different bay) when I returned just before 6 p.m. while cars were struggling
to find a place to pick up commuters.
I think it would make more sense if the gestapo car parked on a yellow line or
even on the wide pavements, but then I have seen application of what I might consider common
sense, held up as being wrong. Does anyone know what benefit accrues from this activity
other than it being a nice little earner? I can’t believe anyone would park at the
bus stop under the eye of the council’s spy van but I did hear of someone who got
‘done’ there because traffic congestion caused him to stop in the wrong place.
Probably that is what their game is.
So that’s two people associated with Bexley council I’ve ‘spoken’ to today
who were open and friendly - even though one was being forced to follow the gestapo’s orders.
Better than being ignored or fobbed off, or lied to as was in danger of becoming the norm.
Today I received an acknowledgement to my two week old enquiry about
unnecessary traffic lights in Abbey Road. As
they were removed very soon after I sent the email it seems likely that the
inconvenience was the result of poor judgement by the contractor, there were no
restrictions at the next pedestrian refuge along the road where identical work
was being done. In my reply I asked when the speed indicators were to be
reinstated. According to Andrew Bashford in his submission to councillor Peter Craske the mess proposed for Abbey Road would make it…
1) Safer for cyclists. Walkers probably outnumber them 100:1 but their lives don’t matter apparently
2) Reduce traffic speeds. Bashford claimed that average
traffic speed exceeded
the 30 limit despite the indicator at Lesnes Abbey recording only 28·9.
Average speed is not a very good indicator; most drivers get close
to the limit and a few ignore it totally. The latter are the biggest problem and
deliberately making a road more dangerous is unlikely to turn them into
law-abiding citizens. Observation suggests that nothing much has changed. Why is
the council so reluctant to find out if peak and average speeds have been reduced
after pouring so much money down this ill-conceived drain?
Incidentally, when I used to drive past the Abbey Road indicators at a steady
30 m.p.h. the sign always said 31 or occasionally 32. However when driving by
other indicators at the same speed, e.g. the one that was in nearby McLeod Road
(Borough of Greenwich) it would tell me I was doing 29. My Sat Nav tells me that
at an indicated 30 my car is actually doing about 29.4. I think Bexley was
fiddling the figures for their own ends. Their dishonesty in some things is
proven, probably it is widespread.
The
plans for Abbey Road carelessly cobbled together by Andrew
Bashford and thoughtlessly approved by Conservative councillor Craske have made life far more
exciting (**) for pedestrians especially on rainy days. The overnight rain
stopped before 8 a.m. but three hours later the puddle which at dawn nearly spanned the whole
road was still reaching half way across each carriageway. Bashford told Craske that his scheme would
slow the traffic but there’s been little sign of that, maybe more rain is the answer. I really
must get around to asking when the roadside speed indicator will be restored to working order.
They won’t be keen to have it prove that not one single aspect of this crazy scheme has been a success.
** Cyclists on pavement with conflicting guidance as to where they should ride.
Unlit pedestrian refuges. Pedestrians on refuges
forced to stand within a foot or two of passing traffic.
It is now 28 days since my dustbin was emptied; longer than the 24 days for
which Labour councillor Francis managed to get a
politically motivated story into the News Shopper. My guess is that because
I had so little in the bin last time the Tesco bags at the bottom weren’t
noticed. Or maybe a black sack got added overnight and removed by hand rather
than the bin being taken to the van. I did email the council via their website
and, ignoring the weekend, they replied 24 hours later with an offer to come and
collect my two Tesco bags. I declined the offer and remain someone who finds
the refuse services satisfactory - but not as good as they used to be.
The new issue of the Bexley Magazine (front cover slogan “Listening to you”.
Ha!) says that the council aims to reply to emails within two days. Some departments
have a long way to go. I emailed the council about the
traffic lights that guarded nothing but a few cones
and no road work whatever more than a week ago and have heard nothing
at all. As is only too apparent, Bexley council never answers questions which may
show them to have failed again. I followed up the email with another in which I
accepted that the delays looked as though they were the result of the
contractor’s ill-judgement, thus giving the council an easy let out. But Bexley
council is firmly in ostrich mode as it so often is.
One thing that can be said about the Bexley Magazine since the Conservatives
took over… it is no longer a blatantly political propaganda sheet and we don’t
have to endure the mugshot of Councillor Balls (the ex-Labour leader) staring
out from almost every page trying to emulate Stalin in Pravda.
P.S. The bin was emptied as I thought it would be. These guys do a
difficult job pretty well. The nine day old email is still awaiting an answer.
Imagine
you’ve been really stupid and turned a pleasant road into an ugly accident black spot
which can only just accommodate a bus; what would you do next? Break the lighting system and
don’t fix it for ages maybe? Probably not but then most people aren’t as stupid as
Bexley councillors and their road planning staff. These four keep left bollards haven’t
been lit for, oh let me be generous, about five months and are supposed to offer protection
for pedestrians crossing the road. In that they largely fail because passing traffic has
little option but to pass by within inches of anyone foolish enough to linger there. But at
night they cannot be seen clearly. What sort of uncaring moron would leave them in that state
since last summer?
My T.R.L. contact tells me he has been in court lots of times helping to prosecute councils
who have failed to build or maintain their traffic infrastructure to an acceptable standard
and that the councils invariable have to pay big damages for their neglect. But it’s
only tax-payer’s money so they have no reason to care. If they did they might have
marked the pavement to show which bit is now designated a cycle track. Probably they
can’t make up what passes for their minds. The signs they
have put in so far give conflicting information.
The larger images in the photo gallery show the next pedestrian refuge more clearly.
As anyone out and about in Bexley today will have noticed, the traffic
congestion has been dreadful on main routes and the reason is that
Blackwall
tunnel is shut northbound. There was a vehicle fire yesterday evening close to the
northern exit and the tunnel is likely to be unusable until Wednesday.
It’s hard to know which bunch of politicians to blame for the inadequate links
across the Thames. Bexley’s Conservatives are proud to have cut off residents
from job opportunities across the river by successfully campaigning for Boris
Johnson to cancel the bridge proposed by his predecessor Ken Livingstone. And we
have Red Ken who banned the contra-flow in the southbound tunnel. Boris has
since changed his mind and belatedly realised that cancelling the crossing was a
mistake but he has so far failed to reintroduce the contra-flow he promised at
election time - though infrastructure to support it appears to have been
installed.
The chaos caused every time there is a problem with the tunnel is yet another
example of Bexley’s Conservatives council being wrong about road planning. They
may claim that the bridge will have introduced additional pollution but that is
only because they lacked the will and probably the skill to devise a way of
confining most traffic to major roads. As a result Woolwich and Charlton suffer
pollution due to standing traffic on a daily basis. Today we all reap the
consequences of Bexley Conservatives short-sighted and parochial attitude.
P.S. Someone decided that the traffic chaos was just too much for
London to bear and scrapped the extended safety checks planned for the next two
days. The tunnel reopened this evening.
A
new drain pipe has been laid under the kerb in Abbey Road leaving a road infill about
14" (35 centimetres) wide. The contractor rightly judged that the road was too
narrow with the small strip temporarily unavailable and so the traffic lights
had to remain until this afternoon when the underlying concrete had set. What
better illustration does one need that the road is too narrow when the loss of a
foot of width renders it impassable? No wonder it feels so dangerous to
stand on one of those refuges and have fast moving
traffic passing the end of your nose and that
motorists clip the kerb or even hit and
injure pedestrians.
Maybe it is time to remind ourselves who is responsible for this disgrace. It
was Andrew Bashford who headed the team responsible for the design and withheld
information about its likely consequences when
consulting a small minority
of affected residents. It was Conservative councillor Peter Craske who failed to
spot the flaws in the design and authorised the go-ahead, and it was Conservative
councillor John Davey who said
he saw no justification for it but
decided to stand idly by. Standing idly by is what he does it seems, because he
knew full well that motorists were being given parking tickets in the
most dubious of circumstances but once again
thought his loyalties lay with fellow councillors and council employees rather
than his electorate. To my mind that is a form of corruption. Remember how Craske
and Davey have let us all down when the next elections are due in six months time.
Another
day, another excuse to spend our money. I asked the contractor’s man what is
going on this time; it’s the only way to get a straight answer. Apparently the
surface water accumulates at this point and another drain is to be installed.
I’ve not seen puddles here but water does
accumulate on the other side
of the road. And why are some of the pedestrian refuges being excavated and then
filled in again? Because they are a centimetre too high, as if that makes any
real difference to road safety. But better I suppose than in Bromley where it
seems to be policy to have the traffic islands about 25 centimetres above the road
surface and where destroying front suspension systems is what that council does best.
I
went past this spot, the junction of Abbey Road and
Carrill Way at 2 p.m. yesterday and when I returned late in the evening the traffic
lights were back. The traffic had been held up again during yesterday’s
evening rush hour, all night and again this morning. All that had been done was the new
concrete of the central refuge had been dug out presumably heralding the
installation of yet more unnecessary and life threatening ironmongery. As these
photographs taken at 7.30 a.m show there was absolutely no problem with the road
surface to justify the lights, it was exactly as normal.
After extra ironmongery was installed further east a week ago I
had a word with my Transport Research Laboratory contact to get a quick reaction to placing
metal poles in the middle of the road. Basically he was horrified that insult
was being added to injury. Bexley’s road planning clown, Andrew Bashford,
had claimed that the changes in Abbey Road were supported by T.R.L. research but
comparison of it and the Bexley implementation showed that to be another
falsehood, and now having ignored the
warning that the scheme would result in the accidents
we have since seen, the accident-safe plastic bollards are being
augmented with steel poles to maximise injury in the event of collision. I
wonder if councillor Craske, the buffoon who authorised the scheme with his
signature was consulted again about throwing good money after bad by adding yet
more hazards for drivers to negotiate?
At 9.00 a.m. fresh concrete was poured into the pedestrian refuge and half an
hour later I emailed the council to ask why the road had been traffic controlled
since yesterday without any clear need for it. At 10 the concrete was smoothed over
by a man working on the traffic island for ten minutes which may have justified lights
because they slowed the traffic and by 10.30 the lights were parked on the pavement and
the road was clear again. The odd thing is that there are three more islands towards
Belvedere which are being similarly dug out and then concreted back in without the
‘benefit’ of traffic lights and outside the
Soviet style barracks
a trench is being dug right across the road reducing it to less
than half width and one-way traffic but no traffic control is deemed necessary.
Bexley council not only waste money on countless unnecessary road contracts,
they haven’t the skills to manage them properly.
By late afternoon more pedestrian refuges had been dug out, including another
one at the site pictured.
Yesterday I added to the site a report on Bexley’s ‘worst refuse service in London’ poll result and expressed my doubts that it was quite that bad. I was too generous: today my green wheelie bin wasn’t emptied. In an attempt to be helpful my two neighbours and I place all our bins together; theirs were emptied OK. Maybe three bins side by side is confusing. Perhaps we shouldn’t do it any more.
Bexley
council never learns from its mistakes does it? They make so many that you would
have thought a penny might have dropped by now, but they press on with their
incompetence as if their jobs depend on it, and in a way they do. If they got
things right for a change they might run out of things to waste our money on.
Once again today’s spotlight falls on Abbey Road
which thanks to council stupidity and the toothless councillor Davey failing to act on his
belief that its redesign couldn’t be justified,
is fast developing into an accident black spot. The only problem with Abbey Road was that
it was straight and some lawless people used it as a racetrack and a few would even
overtake on the wrong side of Keep Left bollards. But it was not only straight, it was wide,
which allowed reasonable separation between vehicles and pavement, so it didn’t register
on the council’s radar for being dangerous. In the words of my Transport Research
Laboratory commentator, “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”, but that
doesn’t make work for idle hands or satisfy the politically correct agenda of
people like Andrew Bashley who deceived residents with a restricted and less than truthful
public consultation
and was determined to justify his existence whatever the risk to life and limb.
Needless to say his mad-cap scheme has not in any obvious way slowed the
traffic, but it has predictably caused more impatience which in turn has led to
reckless overtaking and accidents. Today the latest Elastoplast® is being
applied to patch up the expensive mess Bexley council has created. The plastic
Keep Left bollards are being augmented by metal keep left signs mounted on steel
poles. Traditional Keep Left bollards are lightweight plastic shells illuminated
from ground mounted lamps so that in the event of an accident they cause minimal
damage and can be inexpensively replaced. But a proven safety measure is now
being abandoned in a desperate attempt to catch the attention of those
frustrated by Bexley’s latest road design disaster. What makes Bexley council
think that a metal sign will be more effective than an illuminated
plastic one? Ah, my mistake; thinking is not what they do is it? Next time there is
an accident like this we will not only have a
pedestrian’s leg badly injured but his skull will be cracked too as a
steel pole crashes into his head.
You
may assume from reading this blog that I don’t often venture far from Abbey
Road, Belvedere and in some respects you would be right. After Bexley took over
parking control from the police many years ago, I stopped shopping in Bexleyheath, preferring to drive to
friendlier towns and now that I hardly ever use a car it’s a habit that
hasn’t lapsed. Getting away from Bexleyheath by train from Abbey Wood is invariably far more
attractive. I now realise it’s a very good job I do tend to confine myself to
such a small corner of the borough; I dread to think how much idiocy I would
stumble upon daily if I went further afield, there is quite enough nonsense
within a few hundred yards of home.
I should have noticed before but I had been pre-occupied with the ugliness of
the plethora of new road signs introduced to Abbey Road and I’d not properly
taken in their full meaning. It looks as though Bexley has bought a job lot of
signs and not stopped to consider what was required following the introduction
of their recipe for collisions.
In the space of a few metres on a pavement devoid of any demarcation between
cyclists and legitimate pavement users there are signs indicating cycles flying over parents and children, others only
acknowledging the rights of cyclists, some accompanied by warnings of elderly
people, and others not. And where signs indicate a demarcation line between
cyclists and pedestrians, even though no such demarcation is present, the signs
contradict each other, some indicating cyclists should keep near to the road and
others the reverse. I suppose it’s what's to be expected when allowing thickos
to occupy positions of responsibility.
Harrow
Manor Way and the adjacent Abbey Wood railway station must be one of the most spied upon places
in Bexley. The number of cameras in the vicinity is in the low teens with up to
four mounted on poles only a couple of feet apart. I find it really unnerving (and
I’m not alone according to site feed-back) to have unknown eyes following my every move.
It’s not as though the operators can be trusted as the several News Shopper reports of
them peering through bedroom windows will confirm. But all that is now a thing of the past,
the old cameras have been replaced by dome
mounted devices which can look in any direction but it’s near impossible to tell which.
I have some experience with these ‘dome’ cameras, I have one mounted over my
front door. The steering and zooming capability is disabled as it is pointless
unless I am prepared to monitor it constantly, but while setting it up I did play
around with it for a while. It can pick out a single brick on a house 150 metres
from me or focus on a single car well over a quarter of a mile away. There is no
escape from this intrusive spying eye and who would trust Bexley council to do
anything with totally honest intentions? What do the Harrow Manor Way cameras
monitor? The bus lane of course, and was that bus lane installed to speed the
passage of buses. No it wasn’t. Bexley council
admitted in writing to me that it was installed solely to persecute car
drivers dropping off passengers for the station.
One must wonder about the sort of people that Bexley council, probably most
councils, employs. My guess is that the Hitlerite tendencies go hand-in-hand
with low intelligence. If one wishes to be some sort of boss, the honourable
route is to study, work hard and be successful in one’s chosen career. But if one
is is some sort of power crazed dunderhead
the obvious job is in local government where one is immediately able to indulge
almost any wicked fantasy with impunity. Such as sticking up
inadequate parking notices and collecting fines
or wrecking people’s lives.
It’s not often I have to use an umbrella on the morning walk to get my newspaper and today was the first wet walk I recall along the new, narrow, dangerous Abbey Road. It wasn’t a torrential downpour, just a steady drizzle, but enough for water to accumulate alongside the kerbstones. As the cars went speeding by with no space for recovery from error thanks to the stupidly gullible Conservative councillor Peter Craske, the extra risk of them skidding into pedestrians crossed my mind, but that proved not to be the immediate concern. This busy road is now so narrow, once the parking spaces have filled, drivers must keep their nearside wheels close to the gutters to avoid collisions and throw up a near constant spray of water for pedestrians to contend with. I bet the numbskulls such as Andrew Bashford who designed this calamity never thought of that.
One of my informers has sent me a cutting from last Monday’s Evening Standard in which they report that whilst other Conservative councils in London are expected to cut or freeze council tax in 2010, Bexley hopes only to get close to the Retail Price Index. How much longer do we have a choice only between an incompetent Conservative council that can’t stop wasting money on mad schemes and a local Labour party that thinks 17% increases are “reasonable”?
I
suppose it was inevitable once councillor Craske had signed away half a million pounds on
the basis of five sentences of
ill-researched advice from
Andrew Bashford that the environment would be despoiled by yet more street
clutter in Abbey Road. At the point shown six cycling signs have been installed
today within the space of 30 metres, and that’s just on one side of the road.
Councillor Davey, never forget, said on 7th May this year “The idea is that the
pavement will be split into a cycle track and a pedestrian track, so the
cyclists (I have never seen any in this road) will not have to go on the road.”
So the Vice-Chairman of the Transport Scrutiny Sub-Committee stands idly by while your
money goes down the drain even though the number of cyclists is so small that he
has never seen any. Is he mad, incompetent or corrupt?
Serious injuries to pedestrians causing permanent disabilities and brain damage have
occurred elsewhere due to schemes like this but Bexley council doesn’t care.
Note how it has put up the signs sanctioning cycling on the pavement before it has
put the promised dividing lines on the footway proving once again Bexley
council’s total lack of commonsense and contempt for residents’ safety.
I noted glass across the carriageway again while taking this photograph. Has the
crazy redesign claimed another victim?
As
reported below, a B.M.W. was abandoned
more than a month ago in one of
the few parking spaces outside Abbey Wood railway station.
Bexley council is very efficient at applying penalty notices to windscreens but
when it comes to applying commonsense they can be useless. Surely a car
left where stopping is restricted to one hour should be removed if it is there
for a month? Well the vandals obviously thought so as overnight they burned it
out. Totally. Nothing left but a blackened shell. By the time I got back home to
get the camera it had gone, leaving only the damaged road seen here. Quick action
far too late.
So thanks to the month long inaction of Bexley council and councillor John Davey who is
frequently seen in the vicinity we have the waste of a serviceable vehicle and
damage to a road resurfaced less than a year ago. Never mind, it’s only
taxpayers’ money and there for the wasting.
“This
road was not identified as one of the priority roads, based upon its
collision history assessment, during our annual reviews of the borough.” So said
the incompetent Andrew Bashford while trying to argue his case for the redesign
of Abbey Road after a Transport Research Laboratory consultant predicted that the
lack of recovery space for drivers was a recipe for accidents. It’s a pity
Mr. Bashford is
so arrogant and deaf to advice, because this evening there was another serious
accident in Abbey Road.
I have already commented on the fact that anyone standing
on a central pedestrian
refuge is, thanks to the imposition of a cycle track on the pavement, now within
a couple of feet of speeding traffic whereas the distance used to be about five
feet greater. Anyone with a dog on a lead is in considerable danger and there is
simply not enough room for anyone pushing a child’s pram. The slightest
miscalculation by a passing driver will result in terrible injuries or worse.
That is exactly what happened at 6 p.m. today. A man waiting for a gap in
the traffic (on the refuge shown here) was struck by a car going in the opposite
direction that ran out of road while negotiating the Andrew Bashford approved
restricted carriageway. Mr. Bashford’s lack of expertise, his belief that he
knows better than any Transport Research Laboratory expert, not to mention a
total lack of commonsense has resulted in someone’s leg being severely injured.
Yesterday
Abbey Road was left coned off all day although no work was done that
would justify it. Inevitably it caused disruption to the lives of commuters and residents.
However at 6.50 a.m. this morning all the cones were being removed (apart from the two
pictured) by the white lining contractor. He doesn’t appear to have completed his
work and as I write, (7.30) his vehicle is parked in the road. Presumably he still has
the cycle path to mark out.
One consistent thing running through my correspondence with Bexley council and
their assurances to the few residents they bothered to consult is that there
would be no reduction in the number of parking spaces. “No loss of parking
space” was picked out in bold on the
consultation document so I am watching
this one closely. It looks like the residents’ bays have been made short because someone,
presumably the incompetent Andrew Bashford, Team Leader (Traffic Projects), has belatedly
realised that the road is too narrow to accommodate all the spaces.
Not directly connected to the Abbey Road situation, but in Gayton Road a BMW has
been abandoned for the last three weeks and apart from the parking gestapo
affixing a penalty notice to its windscreen nothing has been done. Bexley
council is presumably content to see a sixth of the parking capacity outside
Abbey Wood railway station lost.
My early morning photographic sortie was marred at the end when I saw a man hanging
from a tree alongside Abbey Road. The police arrived
followed by an ambulance as I watched.
They
were out before 7 a.m. this morning, these photos were taken 20 minutes later, but that
wasn’t early enough to catch the first commuters and overnight parkers. It might
have helped if our cretinous council had put up warning notices in advance but
there were none. Just a line of cones on both sides of the road that weren’t
there yesterday. I shall be out at 11 a.m. to see if the gestapo have been busy with
their penalty notices. Maybe the polite message on the windscreens is a good sign.
At 11.15 a.m. and 1.20 p.m. (after the gestapo’s scheduled visit) there were no penalty
notices in evidence and the road marking was well on the way to completion. The
contractors had successfully marked out the parking bay around the early commuter and it was
the standard 1.8 metres wide. I checked with a tape measure; Bexley council has an unfortunate track
record of undersized bays and then telling those caught out by them to
challenge the fine in court.
The nearly finished job is included in the photo gallery. (Eight photographs.)
Andrew
Bashford, the council apparatchik whose job it was to oversee the redesign of Abbey Road
and who falsely claimed it met the recommendations of the Transport Research Laboratory
and the Department of Transport was right about one thing: that parked vehicles tend to
slow passing traffic, albeit with the unfortunate side-effect of causing them damage. Here
we have a prime example of it. The wide angle lens makes it look less of an obstacle
course than it actually was. The Citroen is parked between the two bollards
which stand opposite the junction with Carrill Way. It certainly
had the effect of slowing traffic while it was parked there for at least an hour while
I enjoyed a little of October’s sunshine around Lesnes Abbey.
It reminded me of the time I was sitting at the front of a bus passing through
Northumberland Heath which came up to a line of awkwardly parked cars. The
driver didn’t hesitate, he kept going and with a machine gun like sound removed
ten or more wing mirrors. Fortunately for the Citroen owner this bus driver has
a little more room.
At
8 o’clock this morning the Toyota Celica was still obstructing the contractors, its
owner having parked in a space marked ‘Free’ before the bays were suspended and
gone away for more than a day. All perfectly legal but acting within
the law is no defence against the corrupt Bexley council. The
owner was promptly issued with a penalty notice.
Fortunately the contractor’s men have more sense than the average council
officer so they moved the car. You can see it on the right in this
picture (taken at 1 p.m.) still with the penalty notice displayed on its windscreen.
7.30 a.m. It seems a shame to knock the useless councillor Davey off the blogs’ top
spot but things move on. Yesterday I took one of my infrequent car journeys along
Abbey Road. At 1.30 p.m. everything was normal but when I returned just after 1 a.m.
this morning the No Parking warning signs were out in force. I noted that
even at that time there were three cars parked opposite each other. Two in the
residents’ bays and one in the ‘Free’ space opposite. The accompanying
photographs were taken a few minutes after 7 a.m. Every available pole was adorned
with a warning notice and the road had been painted with temporary warnings throughout its
length. But there is no rule about parking in the ‘Free’ section while you go on
a week’s holiday so it will be interesting to see what happens to the unfortunate
owner of the silver Toyota Celica come 11 a.m. when the parking gestapo is due on the scene.
Expect a fourth photograph soon!
I anticipate that marking the parking spaces on the residents’ side will have
the effect of narrowing the road even more. Will the
Transport Research Laboratory’s prediction (confirmed by Bexley council) of
increased damage to parked cars come true or will the residents avoid
parking there as seems to have happened so far.
11 a.m. As expected a ticket has been placed on the Celica. The contractor told me
that normally a council finding a car long-term parked will have it moved to a
nearby safe place but Bexley weren’t prepared to do anything other than ticket
it which “is no good to anyone. I can’t get on with my job.” He
went on to say that other councils cover up the original signs when posting
temporary ones to avoid ambiguity. Not so in Bexley where idiocy, money
wasting and persecuting residents is the priority.
Three weeks have now gone by since Bexley council
unlawfully ticketed a dozen cars in Abbey Road, Belvedere
after failing to place signs or cones alongside parking bays that they had
planned to suspend. I alerted councillor Davey to this injustice immediately
and he hasn’t been bothered to even acknowledge the communication. He prefers to
see innocent motorists fined whilst knowing full well that that is unjust. Two days
ago his Conservative colleague Ian Clements was given a suspended prison sentence for
spending a couple of hundred pounds of council tax payer’s money on a few
lunches for other politicians, the sort of thing businessmen do every day. That
doesn’t make it right but it hardly compares with dishonestly extorting double
that sum from council tax paying motorists who had done nothing to contravene any
posted parking notice. I know which of the two I would like to see given a prison
sentence; the useless councillor Davey who stands idly by knowing that an injustice
was done right under his nose.
Since that shameful incident I discovered who posted the parking restriction
notice in such a stupid place away from the bays he intended to restrict. It
was Rupert Cheeseman of ‘Environment and Regeneration Services’.
He admitted placing a notice on a convenient post within
the Controlled Zone intending to restrict parking in bays outside
the Controlled Zone and for good measure left road maintenance materials in the
road opposite the warning notice to complete the deception.
See photos. Apparently he is entitled to
put up such a notice. If his job required him to climb a step ladder he would
have to undergo a training course to ensure his competence to lift a foot off the
floor, but to erect temporary parking signs he needs no knowledge of parking
regulations at all. All he needs is the excess of arrogance and effrontery which
too many council employees display. I spoke to Mr. Cheesman and he admitted to
putting up the signs during the afternoon before the incident and when it was
demonstrated to him how his notice was in the wrong place and was bound to
mislead motorists he merely shrugged and obviously couldn’t care less. This is
the sort of thing which councillor Davey condones and maybe encourages. How else
do you explain his silence?
It’s probably worth repeating that this Vice-Chairman of the Transport Overview
Committee is the same impotent councillor John Davey who pronounced the changes
in Florence Road “absolutely bonkers”
and said he wasn’t sure he believed Andrew Bashford’s justification for the
vandalising of Abbey Road, Belvedere. What
has John Davey ever done to justify a vote next May?
The asphalting of the Abbey Road pavement was completed today, except for the section outside the new Soviet style barracks. And on the Yahoo search engine this site now sits nicely in the middle of the four entries for the official Bexley council site when you search for ‘Bexley council’.
We've waited more than three months for the pavement to be completed and the
final trip hazards to be remedied. Alas we were to be disappointed. All this
activity ceased at 1pm and everyone went home. The corner on both sides of Carrill
Way is still a mess.
Another disgruntled Bexley resident found the site and made contact today.
I stumbled upon a website called Name and Shame UK which purports to expose malpractice of all descriptions across the UK. Now that we know that many of our MPs have their noses in the trough and an unelected Prime Minister gives jobs to cronies who have never been elected to anything who in turn break the law but carry on with impunity, unlawful behaviour by local authorities begins to lose any shock value it might once have had. But it is still depressing that Bexley council is so strongly featured at ‘Name and Shame’.
It took four days for Google and Yahoo to find this new site and two more
days before the first disgruntled Bexley resident made contact. It’s another
case of ask an awkward question and suffer in stony silence. Repeat ad
infinitum. I think I shall have to recommend this one is referred to the
L.G.O. The repeatedly unanswered question if
acted on might save a lot of money and by implication council jobs. The problem
with all forms of government and quangos is that they have a vested interest in
making work for idle hands to do to protect their salaries and final salary
pension schemes which few, if any, others have any more.
Today ten working days have elapsed since my enquiry to Andrew Bashford about
the accident two weeks ago. I said if he
didn’t reply I was going back to the L.G.O. with another complaint about him. I
got a quick reply.
Getting back to Google for a moment, I find it a little amusing that a search
for ‘Bexley Politics’ currently takes you straight to my
criticism of the local
Labour party. I bet they wish they hadn’t asked me to keep their last
communication now. It takes a little more perseverance to locate the
equivalent Conservative page, but give it time.
Something
a little more light-hearted for today. I asked these men if I could photograph
them and what they were doing. It seems that the long delayed asphalting of the
pavement had covered up an inspection chamber cover! It had to be uncovered and
raised. So the new path didn’t last long before being dug up.
While
close to Lesnes Abbey my walking companion felt the need for the park toilet facility. So we
trudged up the hill only to find it was shut. It’s only open on request to staff apparently.
So on a sunny Sunday afternoon or weekday evening it’s almost certainly unavailable.
The sign by the roadside would have you think otherwise.
While crossing Abbey Road via a pedestrian refuge today, I and a friend had
to wait just a foot or so from the passing traffic only to find a car travelling
at high speed pass behind us in the same direction to overtake the line of
slower traffic.
One must wonder why one unelected man, somewhat deficient of brain cells, is able to
impact the lives of so many people at the behest of a lobbying organisation and
I feel that there will soon be injuries because of what Bexley council has
inflicted on its residents. It would be ironic if their first victim was me!
Apparently “most of” what I have said about
Abbey Road is wrong.
Mr. Bashford did not, he says, “deliberately withhold
the consultation
from the people most affected” and the scheme is not to “solely provide a small
benefit to cyclists”. He doesn’t like my reference to accident statistics and says that the road redesign is not “politically correct”
in the way it favours cyclists.
Perhaps he should read his own files again. Street notices to keep pedestrians
informed were rejected because “As there are no such changes (of law)
required as part of the Abbey Road scheme, no street notices were
required.”
Mr. Bashford’s final submission to The Cabinet Member for Transport says that the scheme is “part of
a cycle route condition study which identified safety issues and the scheme
reduces speeds by decreasing road widths. This is achieved by widening footpaths
on both sides and relocating the existing cycle lanes to the widened footway.”
Apart from a reference to the London Cycle Plus Network that’s it. Abbey Road
was virtually destroyed by seven lines of typescript. If the scheme is not “solely
to benefit cyclists” it was certainly the driving force and the possible
by-product of speed reduction is not supported by the experts at The Transport
Research Laboratory (T.R.L.) or the Vice-Chairman of Bexley’s Traffic Scrutiny
Sub-Committee.
On the subject of speed Mr. Bashford said “this road was not identified as one
of the priority roads, based upon its collision history assessment”.
Is that not an indication that accident levels have been low? Now that
we have accidents occurring he seems to want to
rewrite history to make the contrast as favourable as possible.
Andrew Bashford makes many references to his contact with the London Cycle
Network Plus Team (LCN+) and how they have approved the changes in Abbey Road.
LCN+ is The
London Cycling Campaign, a Registered Charity. It’s a pressure group. Their
stated mission is to “influence decision making”. Mr. Bashford may not
like me calling his motives politically correct but rewarding pressure groups
with £400,000 of taxpayers money is certainly a political issue. But let’s look
on the bright side. My criticism of his “naive mathematics” about the car door
risks goes unchallenged. The same for my claim that he did not follow the T.R.L.
and Department for Transport guidelines and that based on their advice the failure
to do so could lead to head-on collisions. Neither was there any rebuff for my suggestion
that the restriction at Florence Road was “malicious” and that the
failure to paint the cycle track there for eight years was a mistake.
Why a scheme the councillor did not believe in was allowed to go ahead remains a mystery. Maybe we
should vote for someone with teeth next time.
I had a letter from Kevin Murphy, Head of Public Protection at Bexley council today.
They have apparently seen fit to join up with a quango, The Energy Saving Trust, (EST).
Kevin says I could save £300 a year on my fuel bill. I doubt it as that would
mean a more than 30% reduction. I could either
go on line
to get a report or fill in a form. If you fill in any government form your details
are likely to go on their database and eventually result in an increase in your council
tax. But curiosity drove me to go for an on-line check to see just how intrusive
the EST would be. I put in a postcode I’ve not lived at since early 1987 and it
came up with the right address but that is at far as it got. Internet Explorer
reported an ‘Error on page’ and refused to take me any further.
The form Bexley council sent me contains 36 questions, ten or eleven of them I
suspect they could answer themselves if they really wanted to. I’m not going to
fill it in. My boiler is 23 years old, I only have 4" of loft insulation as
the roof space is fully tongue and groove floored for storage, and if some government
nosey parker went up there he might see my stock of 150 traditional style light bulbs.
My experience is that the new ones give only half the light claimed and don’t last
anything like as long as they should. The Head of Public Protection, what a
grandiose title for a non-job that is, might be better employed protecting us
from guangos and escalating council taxes. It is absolutely crazy for any
homeowner to invite any government official, local, national or quasi, into his home.
They are already spying on us from the air to find excuses to tax us more. Don’t
make it any easier for them.
Energy saving at Bexley council
After the accident last week I emailed the chap at the Transport Research
Laboratory who predicted traffic accidents on Abbey Road to say that events had
proved him right. But they are cautious people at TRL and he reminded me that it
could be caused by a heart attack at the wheel or similar. However now that I
have listened to eye-witness reports I know that was not the case. I emailed
back to tell him. In reply he said “Don’t let them (the
council) fob you off with blaming it on mobile phone use. Accidents are
very seldom the result of a single cause and usually occur when a few factors
combine and usually it’s the case that remove any one of the factors and it
doesn’t happen. On that basis even if distraction as a result of mobile phone
use is one contributory factor the changed road design could be another and
and it may well be that if all else stayed the same and the road design was
changed back the accident would not have happened.”
This is all a bit academic of course because our useless councillor and Mr. Bashford
who admitted that accident statistics didn’t figure in his plans have both
failed to acknowledge my request for information when it becomes available.
I was speaking to my friend Terry this morning who owns property on Wilton
Road. Wilton Road forms the boundary with Greenwich. You may notice that the
waste bins on each side of the road are different and one side of the road is
often filthy while the other side has been cleaned.
Terry was telling me that the Bexley parking attendant had warned him that as of
today the parking regulations are being interpreted differently. They have for a
long time been of the ‘Maximum 60 minutes, no return within the hour’ variety.
However the definition of return has been changed. You cannot return anywhere
within the locality, even if you return to the other borough. No official
warning to motorists who will have grown accustomed to what they have been
able to do and not do and who won’t be aware of the changes until too late. That
might reduce the revenue streams. I saw the penalty notices being attached to
windscreens and as many as four photographs taken of each alleged offence. I cannot imagine that any reasonable
person would anticipate that driving off from a legal parking space and returning later to
another recognised space in a different London borough would result in a hefty fine.
What can you say about Bexley council’s behaviour? They must really hate every one of us.
I noticed yesterday afternoon that a yellow parking restriction notice had
gone up at the extremities of the parking space commuters use on their journey
to Abbey Wood station. There were none of the cones or road markings that Bexley’s
parking gestapo have previously put out on the same section of road while Bexley
were vandalising it. I anticipated the likely outcome and noted that by 7 a.m. a
line of cars had been left there, their drivers having been misled by the
inadequate notices. I returned just after 11am and sure enough some mindless
numbskull had been around punishing council tax payers ensnared in Bexley’s trap.
The photos indicate what has happened. The parking space is divided into two, a
short bit near the bus stop is within a controlled parking zone (but is
nevertheless marked ‘Free’. The rest of it is also marked ‘Free’. This morning,
by the bus stop, was a blue arrow of the sort that one sees before road works
and immediately afterwards there were cones in the road. The first driver must
have seen the obstruction ahead with the yellow restriction notice adjacent to
it (if he saw the notice at all of course) and sensibly parked in the Free
section outside the controlled zone, against which there was no notice and no
cones. Others naturally pulled up behind him.
By just after 11am eleven or twelve cars had been ticketed. No one seems to have
noticed that all the road markings were removed in April as part of the
destruction of Abbey Road and only the
notice on a pole saying ‘Free’ remains. But motorists still got tickets.
The council has form for stepping outside the law if
it leads to additional persecution of residents. I immediately emailed John Davey the
ward councillor about this latest piece of Bexley idiocy but heard nothing.
At 12.30 one of my network of informants phoned to say the yellow notices had been removed.
Now whether this is because the councillor took action or because the road work
wasn’t being done and the signs might as well go I do not know, but I
photographed the new situation and stuck an explanatory note on the windscreens of ten cars. One
or two cars may have disappeared before I managed to get there.
I have been driving for 47 years and never picked up a parking ticket but with
devious tactics like this even I wouldn’t stand a chance. We have to strike back
against the bastards (sorry there really is no other word apart from four letter ones)
who have no other motive than to trick and penalise motorists. The
parking adjudicator’s contact details are given below. I know someone who
is on good terms with the boss of the national adjudication office, below is for London only.
I’m told they like nothing better than putting council cretins in their place.
If you wish to comment on this, please use the Contact page. Incidentally, the
ward councillor never did respond. You would think he would if it was him who
had tried to put the situation right, instead I am left to conclude that the
notices were removed around mid-day because they were no longer needed and to
hell with the expense and confusion caused to ten or more motorists. I am also slowly coming
to the conclusion that the councillor for Lesnes Abbey ward is well into
chocolate fireguard territory.
P.S. During the early evening of 18th September I discovered that the inadequate
warning signs were removed by a council official from their roads department. He
seemed entirely unconcerned about the confusion he had caused and apparently
cared less about the unfair fines that had resulted. And yes I do know his name.
There was no contact from the councillor. Clearly his loyalties lay with the
bureaucrats and not the people who elected him.
Official Parking appeals service
A more useful appeals service (but not free.)
I usually walk along Abbey Road two or three times each day
and on my second such stroll today I noticed that the heavy duty fencing by the
bus stop opposite Fossington Road had been demolished. A nearby resident told me
that he saw only the wreckage after a Mini coming from the Abbey Wood direction
went out of control, he didn’t know why, but the end result was a smashed fence
(which was made of scaffold poles!). I hope no one was hurt.
Now this is interesting because for the past four months I have been trying to
get details from Bexley council of what they have been playing at in Abbey Road
for the past year. It was like getting blood out of a stone and I had to get the
Local Government Ombudsman on side before I made any progress at all. Even then
it took constant pressure. This sorry tale of incompetence, arrogance, profligacy,
half-truths and mismanagement will be reported in all its gory
detail just as soon as I can find the time. Meanwhile the salient point is that
Bexley council said there have been no accidents on this stretch of road and
that it was being narrowed solely to benefit cyclists. Not, it would appear, giving any
thought whatsoever for the safety of pedestrians, passengers alighting from buses,
passing motorists or of the wing mirrors of parked vehicles.
I passed this information to the world renowned experts in these matters, The
Transport Research Laboratory in Berkshire. They read my reports and looked at
my photographs and said that what Bexley had done was a recipe for head-on
collisions. The scheme isn’t even finished yet and it looks like we have
something like the first one. I have asked the council for more details as it is
always possible that someone collapsed at the wheel, but I haven’t
received so much as an acknowledgement. I only wish I knew the motorist
concerned as Bexley have ignored nearly all of the TRL recommendations on road design
and were warned of the consequences. Someone should sue the backside off them to
maybe teach them a lesson.
A strange thing that a neighbour remarked on is that within hours of the
accident Bexley council had removed every last shred of loose evidence. All that
could be seen were the relatively light scuff marks on the grass and the broken
fence posts. On the other side of the road they had left debris and trip hazards
for two whole months. The neighbour, who seems to have a more suspicious
mind than me, thinks the council is trying to hide the consequences of its bad
design as quickly as possible. I think he may be right. Two days later the fence
had been repaired. Quite different to the neglect displayed on the opposite side
of the road.
Since posting the above I have spoken to an eye-witness who I met by chance in
the street. A Bexley council road inspector (whose name I know but will not
divulge) was within 30 feet of the incident. He said that the Mini was
negotiating the kink in the road which is part of the new scheme and clipped the
kerb. One person, he said, but not him, thought the driver was on the phone at
the time. The road is too narrow to give room for recovery and the car went out of
control across the path of on-coming traffic, over the
pavement, through the fence and finished up in the bushes. Luckily no one
was injured. This is exactly what the expert at TRL had predicted and advice the
council ignored. Sooner or later they will have blood on their hands.
A few neighbours thought that after paying half a million pounds for Bexley’s
latest initiative, cycle lanes on the pavement, we ought to show our gratitude
on a nice sunny day and use it. So off to Erith we went.
Bexley council in the shape of Andrew Bashford their Team Leader (Traffic
Projects) says that lots of councils are mixing bikes with pedestrians. I don’t
know anything about that except that friends in Farnborough (Hampshire)
and Worthing suffer them and report at least one consequent death. Mr. Bashford
doesn’t want to talk about that of course. In fact he doesn’t really want to
talk about anything. Whether this is because he is not on top of his brief and
too easily out-manoeuvred, or because he isn’t proud of what he has inflicted,
or simply because he is too arrogant, is open to debate.
So what did we find on our travels? One thing that caught our attention was the
Soviet style barracks that have been put up near St. Augustine’s church. The
pavement was completely blocked there and nearby residents massively
inconvenienced with their driveways blocked. We noted that the pavement was not
only being widened but had been excavated deeply, quite unlike the work
conducted elsewhere. The deep hole was being filled with concrete and we did
wonder if it was the reason for no one being spare for deployment to other sections
for the past six weeks leaving umpteen trip hazards. One of our number
speculated that some deal had been done between the developer and the road
contractor to hasten the work outside the ‘barracks’. I suppose he should know
about these things, he’s the one who works in civil engineering, not me.
The cycle path itself was relaxing where it existed, but there were far too many
breaks in it and it was too easy to be just a little too relaxed when forced
back on the road. The frequent bus shelters were worrying. We were expected to
go between them and the kerb and hoped that a bus didn’t pull up at that very
moment and disgorge its passengers directly into our paths when they were
least expecting it. On a cycle lane the cyclists presumably have right of way.
Some bus stops appeared to be protected, in theory at least, from cyclists but
each bus stop adopted a slightly different arrangement. Some photographs
may illustrate the various hazards we encountered.
The first photograph shows a complex right turn for cyclists which sticks out
into the road tempting motorists to run down any cyclist foolish enough to wait
there. Fortunately there will be few cyclists as daft as Bexley council. If they are
intending to turn into the road on the other side they will either
be using the track on that side or will have ridden off the kerb earlier
and taken a short cut.
Where cyclists need to cross side roads, slipways are provided at some junctions
but not all. It is too easy to go down one of those slopes from the relaxing
cycle track on to a busy road without glancing over your shoulder. The third style of
slipway is just too complicated. The solid white line appears to be telling
cyclists to get back on the road. Do you think they will take any notice with
that wide expanse of empty pavement ahead of them? Probably the idea is to
get cyclists back on the road before the bus stop at the bend ahead. But if so
why is such a weird construction not in use at all bus stops? Please don’t
expect a sensible answer; this is Bexley’s road planning department we are
dealing with.
We were surprised to find that the ride from Lesnes Abbey to Erith town centre
took almost 25 minutes. It wasn’t the photography that made things slow, we
walked out more than a week later for that. Perhaps it was because we slowed down and sometimes
stopped when we encountered pedestrians, unlike one cyclist a few days ago who
brushed my sleeve with his handlebars as he raced by.
At around 7 a.m. each weekday morning I walk to Abbey Wood railway station to
collect my newspaper, The Telegraph in case you were wondering. It seems odd to
me that I get served by the friendly lady there much quicker than at the
village newsagent which is always queued up with people buying travel cards
there rather than the nearby station. I noted on my journey that four drain covers
(the council calls them gullies) had disappeared overnight with obvious dangers
to life and limb. I emailed Graham Ward, Bexley’s Deputy Director of Customer
Relations at 06.40 as I have always found him a helpful sort of guy. What I
didn’t know is that he is an insomniac because he emailed back almost
immediately to say he had passed on my information to Tony Hughes who heads the
team dealing with this sort of thing in the Highways & Amenities Department.
Tony must have been on the ball too because later in the day he emailed me with
the news that with the co-operation of Bexley police the culprits had been
apprehended. During the day the open gully openings had been made safe. So well
done Bexley council. I wonder how many times I will be saying that on this page?
This subject appeared on the council’s website under their ‘News’ heading and in
The Newsshopper.
I sent an email to the council’s Contact Centre last Monday chasing up a long
unanswered email about the nonsense going on in
Abbey Road, Belvedere and the next day it
came bouncing back with a mail server generated message to say delivery wasn’t
possible and that the server would keep trying for a week. Today (Thursday) the
Contact Centre replied to my enquiry and apologised for the delay in answering.
“As you will be aware, the borough has suffered from power cuts due to
EDF’s power station problems at Dartford Power Station. Council pc systems
have therefore been inaccessible during this period, and today is the first
day that we have been fully on line.”
Well yes, I can understand how their desktop computers might not work, but the
main mail server too? That should hold the mail just as it does over a weekend.
But ah! The council’s website was down too so yes they do run their on-line
services from somewhere within the affected area, probably the town hall (do
they still use simple descriptions like that?) So in an emergency like a four
day power cut, when residents might be expected to look at the
council’s website
for advice, the thing goes off air! Good strategic thinking Bexley council, you
have come up smelling of roses again!
The parking restriction notices between Florence and Fossington Roads were stolen on the night of 27th May apart from one which was hanging loosely on a damaged bracket. At a superficial level this may seem like a good idea on someone’s part but it soon dawned on me that the spaces now looked as though anyone could park there and they were officially residents only bays. Bexley’s parking officials have little regard for the law, without signs they shouldn’t ticket anyone, so obviously this was a situation more likely to provoke problems than not, so I emailed Graham Ward, Deputy Director (Customer Relations) and the signs were replaced within a day or two. Funny how they can always get a move on when it suits them
Six
weeks ago on 17th January, my daughter who has multiple sclerosis was put on a train at London Bridge
and I needed to collect her at Abbey Wood station. Probably I should have
arranged to meet her on the north side of the track but Thames Water had the
road up and Bexley council had banned parking and was enforcing it with cameras. So
I opted to go to Gayton Road where there are about six spaces for both shoppers
and those meeting people at the station. All of them were full, one being
occupied by one of the council’s mobile Stasi cams. I went around the loop
formed by Florence, Abbey, Wilton and Gayton Roads five times without finding a
space by which time some helpful soul had carried my daughter out of the station
and she was sitting outside.
My only option was to double park on the Greenwich side of Wilton Road, out of
sight of Bexley’s spy car and flash my lights in the hope that I would be seen.
Eventually I was and my daughter half limped half crawled to my car wondering
what I was playing at.
The next day I asked the council via the Contact Us page of its website what the mobile spy cam was actually doing. As is always the case with enquiries
to Bexley council, after ten days I had heard nothing at all so I emailed Customer Services to ask if I really had to write to the Chief Executive’s
office again. When nothing had happened by the 4th February I wrote to the Chief
Executive with a copy to my local councillor adding for good measure that
following road resurfacing that the parking spaces had been much reduced in
width. Even a tiny Ford Ka wouldn’t fit in them. Both the councillor and the
Head of Customer Services responded the same day! The latter, Graham Ward, said
that the council’s Mobile In-car Camera Enforcement vehicles (MICE) were spying
only on those parking at the bus stop. Goodness knows why because there are already
three fixed cameras looking at it. But at least it was a straight-forward
answer, even if it was harder to get than it should have been.
The very next day Mr. Ward emailed again. “Regarding the bays, I had them checked
this morning and they are narrower than I would normally expect. Rather than get
in to the history as to why they were put in as they were I have arranged for
them to resized in coming weeks, weather permitting!” Needless to say it snowed
the next day but Mr. Ward was as good as his word. As soon as the snow went away
the spaces were made a more sensible size. This is in marked contrast to when
170 cm wide spaces were provided in Abbey Road and I was told that nothing would
be done about it until they were challenged in court. Thank you Martin Low,
Assistant Chief Engineer (Policy). Where would petty bureaucracy be without
people like you?