22 October 2001
Hurtling on towards destruction
It's a great time to own a car in Norfolk. The county council and the Highways Agency are making sure you can’t get to hospital, the city council is doing its best as usual to make you uncomfortable in the city, and the police are putting film back in their speed cameras.
At the same time the Norfolk Coast Partnership is about to host a conference on transport which unbelievably has as its opening and closing speaker a representative of the fiercely anti-motorist Transport 2000. This in North Norfolk – an area where public transport is meagre at best, and no one appears to be speaking for car drivers.
Meanwhile, anyone who has changed lifestyle in response to the ubiquitous anti-car propaganda can relax in the knowledge that park-and-ride fares are going up by a whopping 17 per cent. This has been justified by comparing it to the sharp increases in car parking charges in Norwich, which is interesting logic: we’ll hit you because other people have hit you.
What can you say? Not a lot, according to a reader who attended a public meeting of the county council planning and transportation committee when the proposed Sprowston park-and-ride was discussed. His conclusion: “The decision had already been taken, and the meeting was a formality. Arguments and suggestions were dismissed out of hand.”
No change there, then. One change with the speed cameras, happily, is that you can now just about see them – but the obvious temptation to put them in revenue-generating spots, rather than dangerous ones, continues to be worrying.
And the same flawed back-up figures are being rolled out. All drivers, apart from the odd lunatic, are in favour of reducing accidents and casualties, but there were 2684 fatal or serious-injury accidents on Norfolk roads last year, and only 657 of these were caused by excessive speed or loss of control. No one mentions that speed and loss of control are not at all the same thing, or that excessive speed is not the same as exceeding the speed limit.
Last month the 10 most dangerous road junctions in Norfolk were surveyed. Of the 59 injury accidents reported, the main cause of only one was excessive speed. By far the most common causes were inattention and ignoring road signs.
I wonder how many accidents are caused simply by exceeding the speed limit. Any at all? And is anyone doing anything to tackle the cause of serious accidents definitely not caused by speed? In Norfolk last year these must have numbered anything between 2027 and 2683. That’s between 75 and 99 per cent.
Feeling on the tilt as showers gang up
The sneaking suspicion that the world is falling apart stems not from huge international events, but from indications nearer home.
The ability of spin doctors to bypass democracy, for instance, is depressingly obvious, but in the background is an even bigger spin: the imminent reversal of the earth’s magnetic field as predicted by those ancient and knowledgeable central Americans, the Maya. This is scheduled for 2012, I am reminded by regular reader John Salthouse.
I am already checking my compass. I have been feeling on the tilt, but had put it down to global warming – a view strengthened by the peculiar behaviour of rain recently. Here I rely not on my own observations, but on the pronouncements of weather forecasters, who are constantly talking about showers “ganging up” and “getting organised”.
Admittedly it is risky to put one’s faith in people who get excited by precipitation, but the phenomenon of shower organisation is clearly one that could shake our lives. Unless we can negotiate with them, we could be in for regular soakings.
Meanwhile, on a much lower level, I was in a city store the other day when I noticed a file labelled “Manual Handling Operations Regulations”. I don’t know what was more disturbing: discovering that staff had to be told how to handle something manually, or that there were rules about it (wash hands manually first, for instance).
This sort of thing can tip you over the edge, if you happen to be standing close to it in the first place. Unhappily I was right on the brink, having just discovered that 25 out of 40 applicants who wanted to be journalists had scored less than 50 per cent in an English test.
I don’t blame them. They had probably been taught how to handle manually, and you can’t cover everything.
Still in the dark there
![[Artwork] Roads by candlelight](/articles/images/011022.jpg)
Sometimes you don’t see things that are in front of your nose. Literally, in this case. Friends from Nottingham pointed out when arriving for the weekend that they had been unable to phone us from their car and warn us of their imminent arrival because of the lack of roadside illumination.
Apparently the occasional street lamps at roundabouts did not illuminate the numbers on their mobile phone long enough for them to dial before they were plunged into darkness again.
This is clearly a serious problem, and one that I had never considered, largely because I don’t have a mobile phone – or maybe because I just accepted that Norfolk was dim and dark, just as I accept that it’s slipping into the sea, as another “foreign” friend would have it.
There is a rumour going round Nottingham that Norfolk is short of electricity. Could it be true? I have put consultants Houseago Associates on the case, but I am not optimistic. And lowest priority comes last
Overheard on an early morning local BBC television news broadcast: “Tickets will be sold to priority groups before any other tickets are sold.” Yes, I suppose they would be.
Peddar's Way
![[Photo] Peddlar's Way](/articles/images/011022Peddars.jpg)
A stretch of the Peddar’s Way that has been missing for over 200 years has been photographed by a Norfolk man.
Bruce Robinson, who is an authority on the Peddar’s Way, the Norfolk Coast Path, Poohsticks and a number of different stiles, took this ground-level picture in late autumn last year, on a day when it was raining and the field was being ploughed.
Although the missing stretch, no longer walkable, has been revealed on occasions in aerial pictures, the pale cropmark visible in this photograph is a rarity.
Mr Robinson tells me: “The missing link at Ringstead runs roughly from the Docking road to the Holme road, to the east of the village, from East End Farm to the houses at the junction of the Holme road. Again, to the east of the parish church and the Gin Trap pub.”
The picture, together with many startling revelations about the 2000-year-old road, will be found in his new book, The Nowhere Road, which is due to be published by Elmstead Publications in mid-November at £12.99. As a keen walker, ever keen to get out of my car, I shall be forming the nucleus of a queue.