1 December - Another year of road chaos looms
If
you have tried to get from Erith to Bexleyheath over the past month you will
know that the most direct route is unavailable due to one way traffic over the
railway line at Erith. It has left Northumberland Heath and the old industrial
estates of Erith without a bus service (routes 229 and 99 respectively) and things
will not improve until the end of the month.
The bridge has long been a bottleneck and in September 2011 Bexley council
granted itself planning permission to replace it and more recently obtained funding
for that replacement so I assumed that the current work was in preparation for that. But
sadly no. The two months of work going on now is just a maintenance job.
The street level notices say that the work is going on underneath but these
photographs taken around 2pm last Friday suggest that may not always be the case.
Hugh Neal over at the
Maggot Sandwich will cover this issue in rather more detail today.
When Belvedere’s Asda store was approved the planning officers said that the
extra traffic caused would take nearby roads to the limit of the capacity. With much of
the Bexley bound traffic and the 99 bus diverted past Asda and up the 1 in 10
hill of Picardy Road, grid lock has frequently been the result. Now we are due
to have a year or more of such disruption when the bridge is replaced. Bexley
council is seeking the support of businesses to try to get extra funding which
might mitigate the inevitable chaos. Has there been any time within the past
four years when Bexley’s roads have not been massively disrupted?
