12 April 2004
In search of a country car park
I sallied forth on a glorious day at the end of March to take in the newly created boardwalk at Barton Broad, which I was told is a thing of beauty. Happily, I can report that it is indeed stunning. Finding the car park is something else again.
No trouble at all if you’re disabled. You follow the bright orange AA sign in the centre of Neatishead and after a brief worry about whether it can really be this far, you arrive at a bright new, unmistakeable disabled car park on the road to Irstead, where you park.
Being fairly able, of course, I couldn’t. I was directed by a tasteful sign to go back the way I had come for 1.2 kilometres, a handy measurement that I find only slightly less useful than cubits and furlongs. But since my instinct is to do what I’m told, I turned round, searched for the car park for people like me and … eventually arrived back at Neatishead.
Just to show you how able I am, I then proceeded all the way to Barton Turf, where I had encountered Barton Broad before. It was still there – but no bright new car park, and no boardwalk. So I turned round again and did the whole journey in reverse.
And then it happened. Out of the corner of my eye, only eight furlongs and the odd cubit or so from the disabled area, by a freak chance I spied the sign as I passed it. It was in a tasteful light wood designed to blend in with the landscape, and it directed me up a lane on the opposite side of the road to the Broad, and behind a hotel.
I understand about tastefulness and the desire to blend in with the countryside, of course. But didn’t it occur to anyone that a driver might have difficulty in spotting an understated beige sign on the wrong side of the road, directing him to a car park he couldn’t see at a place where he wasn’t expecting it?
Unless it’s just me (which I suppose it could be), what you actually end up with for all your planning is additional pollution and traffic, plus drivers whose skill quickly decreases in direct proportion to their growing frustration. And then of course the toilets were shut, and the two prime spots in the able car park were restricted to disabled people too. I was so annoyed I went and parked in the empty forbidden zone. Go on, sue me.
Roundabout bid to nationalise page
Calls to nationalise this website have been made by a Wicklewood man.
“Too much attention is being paid to market forces, which are highly unreliable,” he said. “It’s about time real issues were tackled, like the sudden appearance of so many mini-roundabouts in Norwich’s medieval road system.
“Everyone knows that in the distant past there were many mini-roundabouts in the area, but the Normans removed them to make the Castle Mound. Now that the Mound has been hollowed out, it seems they are trying to put the mini-roundabouts back without thinking about how traffic has increased.
“That’s the sort of thing we want to know about. Who cares where Dorothea Goodchild is? And as for Professor V A R Scheinlich, I don’t believe he exists, any more than the Liberal Democrats.
“What use is all that to anyone? When do we get an update on garden gnomes and an investigation into why the Green Party has tons of reasonable policies and one idiotic one?
“Worst of all, it just rambles on. Nationalise it, I say. That’s the only way you’ll get any sense out of it.”
Mr Wicklewood, who prefers to remain anonymous, claims he did not say hardly any of the above, which is true enough.
Minding other people's business
In a recent poll on bicycle safety helmets, 62.7 per cent of people who responded said they did not ride a bike. Yet, when the same group were asked if there should be a campaign to make cyclists wear safety helmets, over 85 per cent said yes.
This means that at least 47 of every 100 people questioned did not ride a bike and so knew nothing about safety helmets, but despite that, they wanted cyclists to wear them. Does this mean (a) we are a nation of busybodies? (b) we like a good laugh? (c) we enjoy making pronouncements on things we know nothing about?
I might worry more about this particular example if I wasn’t aware of the large number of non-driving cyclists who have very firm views on how cars should be driven.
Fall-off of buses feared
A perceptive correspondent reports that the sudden deletion of all buses going to Yarmouth from Norwich earlier this month is almost certainly a response from the bus company to the prospect of coastal erosion.
Apparently the bus company says global warming calculations reveal that Yarmouth and all villages between it and Acle will have fallen into the sea by June because of the rising temperatures, sometimes known as “summer”.
The bus service has been withdrawn to avoid losing any vehicles. “It will also reduce carbon emissions,” said a concerned spokesperson. “We are putting lids on our saucepans too.”
Huge surprise on speed cameras
Well, there’s a surprise. Only two months after the Norfolk Speed Camera Promotion Partnership releases exclusive front-page figures showing that its devices work and cut road deaths, a police investigation finds that the partnership is “secret and unaccountable” and that the data used to decide camera sites is either questionable or missing.
This will come as no great shock to motorists who already know that road deaths in Norfolk have increased considerably since the creation of the partnership and who have enough common sense to spot that the positioning of certain cameras cannot be for anything other than fund-raising.
Meanwhile, the delusion that speed is responsible for most accidents continues, despite recent government figures revealing that it is way, way down the list. The Green Party wants to increase 20mph zones and traffic “calming” in Norwich under the mistaken belief that this reduces “noise pollution, emissions and fatalities”, and in Lowestoft the mindless machine that is Suffolk County Council wants to impose a 20mph limit and road humps on the A12 through the town.
Shredder, anyone?