31 August - Abbey Road. “Crass stupidity”
I spent the weekend with a road safety engineer. He chairs E.U. meetings and appears as expert witness in accident investigations and court cases and writes reports for the Transport Research Laboratory. One of those reports was used by Bexley council to justify their narrowing of Abbey Rad, Belvedere. I doubt they read the report let alone understood it, but they thought it would be an easy way to fob me off when I complained about their antics. Probably they didn’t expect a mere resident to read an expensive report on road design. But I must get to the point…
I told my friend about the latest accident on Abbey Road and I shall quote
his response verbatim. “It is possible to get traffic to slow down by making a road
narrower, through cross-hatching or raised platforms, but to make a road narrower by
bringing the carriageways closer together is crass stupidity”.
I think you mean Craske stupidity I replied, but the pun was lost on him. I don’t suppose the girl who
ended up in hospital a week ago would raise a smile either but at least we know
that an expert in the field condemns Andrew Bashford (Bexley’s road designer)
and councillor Craske as guilty of “crass stupidity”.
Today is a bit of a red-letter day. It seems that someone has at last been
spurred into action and concreted in the hole in one of the pedestrian refuges which has
been featured here so many times before. One more to go.