Thursday 15 November 2007

Bogus ‘road safety’



















Non-compliance with the 20 mph zone on Hale End Road, where there are two schools and a zebra crossing, is 100 per cent.

On page two of the current issue of the Council’s lavishly funded propaganda rag wfm – residents of the London Borough of Waltham Forest live in paradise, is the rag's fortnightly message – is the headline Spike helps children keep safe.

Below it is a photograph which shows someone in a hedgehog suit leading three smiley kids from Holy Family school across a zebra crossing on Shernhall Street. (Look closely and you’ll see that the crossing’s white markings are all fading away – but no one at LBWF does irony.) Yes, Spike the Hedgehog ‘will be helping to teach school children to stay safe on the roads during the dark winter months’.

It’s a fraud. It’s all about blaming the victims of driver crime and diverting attention from the source of the violence – killing machines which are manufactured to go at least twice the maximum national speed limit and drivers whose contempt for basic traffic law is signalled by reckless speeding, red light jumping and driving while talking on a handheld mobile (to name just three). Spike the Hedgehog is an initiative of the cyclist and pedestrian loathing Department of Transport. The government’s road safety strategy is useless. Instead of the bogus ideology of ‘road safety’ what pedestrians and cyclists need is danger reduction.