16 May - Bexley council gets it wrong again
Brampton
Road is one of the main North-South thoroughfares across the borough and being straight it
may be too much of a temptation for impatient drivers and being narrow it may
over-stretch
the skills of some. Having said that I used it regularly for more than 15 years and never
saw an accident until Bexley council installed three closely spaced
mini-roundabouts.
It must have been six or more years ago that the council put up a sign saying there had been
32 accident casualties in Brampton Road over the previous three years which they used as an
excuse to build obstacles at several road junctions and a year or two later amended the
figure to 44 and built three mini-roundabouts. Did it not occur to them that the increase
might warrant removal of obstacles designed to force vehicles into the path of on-coming
traffic? The roundabouts always look very dangerous to me and to be approached with great care.
The demolished wall and damaged car shown here may indicate that not everyone
takes the care needed to safely negotiate the danger points and exposes the
Achilles’ heel of Bexley’s lamentable road planning. It frustrates careful
drivers and disregards the reckless to whom obstacles present a challenge.
However the other pictures suggest that the planners may have recognised their
own stupidity and the dangerous obstacles placed at junctions are
on the way out; they show the new kerb and where the old one was defined by the black patch and
the double yellow lines.
