Woolwich Road - Traffic Calming?

As anyone who has observed the way Bexley council steadily degrades our transport infrastructure will know, their idea of traffic planning is to block minor roads, make corners difficult to negotiate, reduce road widths in an unthinking manner and litter what remains with obstructions, many of them unlit. As the chairman of one of the European Union’s road safety committees told me when I took him on a tour of the borough, Bexley’s road planning department is “either malicious or incompetent”. I suspect both.

The standard Bexley practice is to distribute a questionnaire to residents, fill it with leading questions and half-truths, dismiss all the residents’ comments and implement the next crazy scheme to assuage officialdom’s inflated ego. Woolwich Road was no exception. All residents’ concerns were speedily dismissed. Would anyone expect otherwise? It doesn’t take an expert from the E.U. or the Transport Research Laboratories to predict the likely outcome, anyone with a modicum of common sense can do it. If you litter a road with obstructions, sooner or later someone is going to hit one with devastating results.

One of the local residents wrote to the council pointing out this simple truth and John Payne (Team Leader Traffic Design) replied on behalf of Bexley council in their customary arrogant manner that the changes were “designed to help pedestrians cross this busy road more safely” and that he did not “accept or appreciate” the advice. Let’s hope that not too many pedestrians choose to cross the road ‘safely’ as it’s probably more dangerous than it has ever been before. Within a week of installing obstructions in Woolwich Road at a cost close to £40,000, the inevitable happened.

When photographs of the results of Bexley’s idiocy were sent to Mr. Payne, his reply was rude and evasive. As always, these over-paid public servants don’t like being proved to be the idiots too many of them are.