| |
Pro-hump spin rules
• ACCORDING to Councillor Greg Foxsmith, Islington Council doesn’t have an obsession with road humps (Things that go bump in the road, June 13). How is it, then, that Islington is the only council in the country that wants to put them in every road in its borough (apart, of course, from main arterial routes)? Is it because Islington has the highest record of fatal road accidents in the whole of the UK? I don’t think so.
He says that some people don’t like them, but many less vocal people do, and describes them as a necessary evil. Let me put Cllr Foxsmith right on this: drivers, who constitute a significant proportion of Islington residents, don’t like them, and are opposed to them where they are not needed. In that respect they are an unnecessary evil.
I would also say that drivers, and many other anti-hump residents, are the less vocal of the two groups, not the other way round. Anti-humpers are wrongly made to feel guilty in opposing the avalanche of pro-hump spin put out by the council in its consultation documents and elsewhere, dressed up to look like it’s politically correct and the right thing to do.
The argument goes that pedestrians hit at 20mph have a greater chance of survival than if they are hit at 30mph. But if they are not being hit in the first place this is merely academic.
Even if the accident record in a particular road calls for this lower limit, there are other ways of calming traffic without putting brutal and ugly obstructions across the road or installing spy cameras; in other words, without involving driver punishment. The planned schemes in Kensington High Street and Exhibition Road are just two examples of this. Even the car-hating former Mayor of London is against the proliferation of road humps.
Instead of just regarding drivers as an anti-social nuisance, the council should apply the sense of balance that Cllr Foxsmith claims it is striving to achieve, rather than indiscriminately rolling out its road hump policy.
DANNY MICHELSON
La Fromagerie
Highbury Park, N5
|
 |
|
| |
| Your Comments : |
| |
| |
| |
