27 November 2006
The lights don't work, so why not turn them off?
I see that the Anti-Highways Agency has struck again, by declining to do anything about the bottleneck Gapton Hall junction at Great Yarmouth except install more traffic lights at entrances to the roundabout.
In a near-brilliant coup, their managers added that the only way this would be possible in the less-than-distant future would be to get a contribution to the costs from new developers – in return for planning permission.
New development, of course, would make the junction even more congested. Clearly Catch-22 is high on the reading list at the Anti-Highways Agency. Perhaps something on improving roads would also make good reading, but I suspect that has all been thrown out.
It would be nicely ironic if the agency’s inertia, coupled with its crazy obsession with combining traffic lights with roundabouts, were to coincide with some really radical highways rethinking somewhere out of their reach.
How about a city like Norwich, for example, getting rid of nearly all its traffic lights, together with a hefty number of its signs and road markings?
As one reader reminds me, this innovative idea has been tried in Holland, in a town called Drachten, with surprising results. Where there had been a road death every three years, since the removal of the lights seven years ago there have been none.
The logic behind the scheme is compelling. The organiser, one Hans Monderman, is reported as saying that taking the lights away enabled motorists, cyclists and pedestrians to co-exist more safely.
It worked well precisely because it was potentially dangerous, he said. “It shifts the emphasis away from the Government taking the risk to the driver being responsible.”
As a result everyone is much more careful and tailbacks are reduced considerably. He claims not to have found anywhere that traffic lights were actually useful. I imagine if such an idea were mooted seriously in Norwich, the usual suspects would be up in arms instantly, demanding more, not fewer, obstacles to the progress of traffic. But maybe I’m wrong. I frequently am.
Could it be time someone started treating motorists – and other road users – like responsible human beings? Lateral thinking, anyone?
Anyone?
Objections to sinister roof-squatter
This year’s Christmas postage stamps are religiously offensive, says Norfolk legend Henry (Fred) “Shrimp” Houseago, of Erpingham.
He wants them withdrawn immediately.
“I am amazed at the Royal Mail,” he said. “It has been more or less proved that Santa Claus didn’t exist – and if he did, he didn’t have a beard, and it wasn’t that long. In the stories, his treatment of elves is probably racist and certainly exploitative, not to mention the animal welfare problem. Reindeer are a threatened species.
“I do not believe in this sinister, roof-squatting figure. His exploits are obviously exaggerated and couldn’t have happened, and I object to seeing him every time I want to send a card or letter.
“Some people may worship him, but I object to being forced to join in.”
Asked if he was happy with the second-class stamps, Mr Houseago said he was not. “Many stories of snowmen are bizarre and obviously inserted by later writers. I am glad they’re portrayed as second-class, but would rather they weren’t there at all.”
He described the reindeer and tree cards as “unconvincing” and almost Japanese. “They are bound to offend people of non-tree faiths,” he said, “as well as people who are allergic to snow.
“The Royal Mail should show more sensitivity at this time of year.”
Curious affair of the disappeaing payphone
A more suspicious person than me might find certain elements in the case of the “lost” Norfolk village of Drymere a trifle curious.
You will remember that Drymere, near Swaffham, disappeared temporarily from BT maps at the same moment that the village’s payphone vanished.
Coincidentally, this was one of four rural payphones that BT had threatened to remove a couple of years ago, but which were reprieved after a campaign by local councillor Ian Sherwood.
On hearing about the disappearance of the phone and BT’s failure to locate the village, Mr Sherwood kindly supplied his own map to BT, together with a photograph of where the phone used to be. A spokesman then admitted the phone had been the victim of a “theft attack”, which is presumably different from a simple theft in that the thief wraps up the end of the wires after taking the equipment. Normally only a telephone professional would bother to do this, or a compulsive wire-wrapper.
Prof V A R Scheinlich of Hingham, who specialises in space-time distortion, suggests that a wormhole may be involved, or possibly a phone collector with access to BT maps.
“It’s easy to get your lines crossed in that area,” he said.
Residents of Swacking Cuckoo, near Cromer, are said to be “concerned”.
Jail depends on who stands where
I have no sympathy at all with habitually careless drivers. But everyone who is human – and this may not include one or two of my correspondents – will admit to having a momentary lapse of concentration while at the wheel.
The consequences of such a lapse are usually tiny, if measurable at all; occasionally they will be more serious; and very, very occasionally they may be fatal. The lapse is the same in all cases, but the consequences are different.
The Government plans to make jail likely for those drivers whose lapse causes someone else’s death, and I can understand the relatives of victims feeling this is justice. But is it?
Last week an elderly driver made an error of judgement in an unfamiliar car, and it shot forward off a wall and on to a busy street in Thetford. A mother and child had to take evasive action: if they had not, it could have been a double fatality.
Under the proposed law, if the “victims” had not been alert, the driver could have been jailed. As they were, he couldn’t. Making the punishment fit the crime is one thing: making it fit random circumstance is no justice at all.