You’d expect a website devoted to carp to talk carp, would you not? So I was perplexed to read this complaint from local environmental supremo Councillor Bob Belam:
C**p Site talks C**p again
But then I realised this was a red herring.
What Bob says is this:
I fully agree with the comments about Tfl on this site, Crap Cycling in Waltham Forest [sic], you only have to look at the earlier post on my web site about them nicking the fence between Beresford Road and the A406.
How daft is that.
I also agree that signs are a problem, but the quote below is unjust
“Bob needs to get out more and spend some quality time at his local labyrinth”.
Here is the photo I took earlier. 22nd June 09 to be precise.
Rather unsportingly Bob doesn’t link to this site, so his readers may not have a clue what he is on about. Let me quote the paragraph which has got under Bob’s sensitive skin:
That sign in the background is pointing in precisely the wrong direction. No surprise there. Signing for cyclists in the London Borough of Waltham Forest is a total farce, with no one ever bothering to check on them (the Council claims that signs are checked every four weeks but that's a lie of stupefying proportions). Ironically this site is not all that far from where the Councillor most responsible for this dismal state of affairs lives, i.e. Bob Belam. Bob needs to get out more and spend some quality time at his local labyrinth.
Now I don’t think Bob’s indignant assertion that he visited the labyrinth last June and took a photo of a TfL van parked on the pavement really answers the point I was making.
I don’t hold Bob responsible for the malpractices of TfL. But TfL aren’t responsible for crap cycle signing, which is, shall we say, problematic all over the borough. That particular sign at the Crooked Billet was facing in exactly the wrong direction as long ago as November 2008, and no one has been along to reposition it some 14 months later.
Bob Belam is very much responsible for poor maintenance and neglect of cycle signing and infrastructure like this, and this and this. Bob has nothing to say about the Council’s preposterous claim that every cycle sign is checked once a month. All Bob has to do is instruct the officers to carry out the job they are paid for and which they are signally failing to carry out. The buck for most of the crap on this blog stops with Bob.
I also think it’s a bit rich of Bob to be cross about pavement parking by TfL vehicles when he is the person who allowed the officers to extend pavement parking on Browns Road E17, a road where the footway is just 1.5 metres wide – narrower than the pavement where the TfL van is parked in Bob’s snap.
I really don’t understand the mind-set of someone who complains about TfL pavement parking but does nothing about streets like this, which are under Bob’s direct control.
Still, Bob can be reassured there’s nothing personal about my sarcasm. Such is the rigour of this blog that it regards all the councillors in Waltham Forest, without exception, as crap. Including these three useless Wood Street councillors.
