Unprofessional

A police sign has finally gone up at the site of the pedestrian fatality in Lea Bridge Road. Look carefully and you'll see that the telephone number to ring is obscured by the Keep Left sign.

RoadPeace has long complained that the investigation of road fatalities is unprofessional. In London it is under-resourced because road fatalities are not treated with the same seriousness as murder:

No more than 400 traffic police officers are left in the whole of London to respond to over 80,000 personal injury crashes and nearly 300 deaths.

Furthermore

The government currently estimates the average cost of the police investigation into a fatal road death to be less than £1,500 (0.1% of the total value of prevention for a fatal crash), and only £200 for a serious injury crash (the equivalent of no more than a few hours of police time) (DfT, 2003). In London there are over 1000 murder detectives and although there are approximately twice as many road deaths investigated as there are murder investigations, last year the Met Police reported having only 46 specialist collision investigators, about 5 % of what would be required if the investigation of road deaths and murders were given equal priority.

It’s Sunday!

And lo! On the seventh day the worshippers attended St Mary’s Church, Walthamstow. And the Lord said, Thou shalt attend only by car. And there shall be no cycle stands at the House of the Lord.

And the Angel of the Lord said: Thou shalt show thy contempt for global warming by turning up in a Landrover Freelander. And thou shalt attach a bull bar to this Freelander, in order that it may maim or kill child pedestrians or cyclists. And thou shalt display thy contempt for those with a mobility handicap or visual impairment by parking it obstructively on the pavement.

And the Angel said: All who walk or pedal are an abomination unto the Lord, and they shall be cast out into the outer darkness of the London Borough of Waltham Forest, there to suffer the pangs of eternal torment under the Evil One.







































If you want to suggest a topic for a sermon (such as 'showing Christian consideration for others') why not email the Rector?

simonheathfield@surefish.co.uk

The Earthly Paradise

What will Waltham Forest look like in twenty years time? gushes the latest issue of the Council's expensively-produced propaganda rag wfm.

That's an easy one to answer. It will look like this.

And instead of one incinerator chimney spewing its contents across the Borough, there will - if this Council gets its way - be four! That's why in 20 years I hope I will be living far, far from here, in a place where the air is clean and it's pleasant to walk and cycle.

Environmentalism

Acclaimed author Philip Pullman champions a new brand of environmentalism that offers us all hope, trumpets today’s Daily Telegraph.

Q. Have you done anything to reduce your own environmental impact?

Philip Pullman: Around the house, all our light bulbs, apart from the ones in the kitchen, are low-energy ones. In the kitchen, there are these bloody halogen things. When we had our kitchen done three or four years ago, I said, "We want low-energy lights" and the designer said, "Oh, these are low-energy." Well, they're not, actually, they're 50 watts each. What he meant was they're low-voltage, which isn't the same thing. We seldom have the central heating up high, because neither of us likes being particularly hot. In principle, I'd have everything: I'd plaster the house with photovoltaic cells and have wind turbines off every gable.

I've cut out international travel as much as possible. That wasn't hard to do because I hate flying. But I've got to go to America in connection with books and films. I say I've got to, but I suppose I could say "No". I don't feel too guilty about electricity because we buy it from Good Energy, which supplies it from renewable sources. So I don't feel too bad when I'm playing my electric guitar.

Nothing about walking or cycling or the role played by car travel in his life (there must surely be some, even if only by taxi). Odd. The full interview here.

Meanwhile Up to 7.5million Brits do not care about global warming, a government briefing paper warns.

And what’s more:

Motorists are using cars more and more despite record fuel prices, higher vehicle taxes, and entreaties by the Government for greater use of public transport. Traffic has risen sharply in the past decade in almost every part of England except Inner London, despite the Government’s pledge for a greener transport system, figures today reveal.

While rail travel has grown by 40 per cent in the past decade, this has done little to ease the pressure on roads.

In 2006, 60 per cent of cars on the road had only one occupant – its driver. A quarter of all car trips were less than two miles long.

A study last year by the Government’s Commission for Integrated Transport found that Britain had much lower levels of car ownership than other large European countries but that its cars were more intensively used.

Yobs, binge driving and the judiciary

Judge Ian Trigger warned

of a generation apparently out of control.

“We are living in a society which is bedevilled by wild feral youths such as you. Before we plunge into even greater violence at the hands of lawless and irresponsible youths it is time for us to address the problem. It is time for parents to resume control over their offspring. It is time for parents to teach values and respect to their children, value and respect for other people and not allow their offspring to engage in selfish and irresponsible behaviour. It is time for the police to be released from administrative tasks and red tape and be once more a visible 24-hour presence on our streets, particularly in our violent hotspots.”

Crap.

The violence, lawlessness and irresponsibility of youths are tiny compared to those of adult drivers. Teenage yobs do not kill 3,500 people a year. Drivers do. We hear a lot about binge drinking but we never hear about binge driving - the dangerous addiction to car dependency and reckless driving. And yobbish binge drivers can always rely on their dear chums, the judiciary.

Killer yobs have no greater friend than Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips:

The threat of jail was lifted yesterday from drivers who kill while at the wheel without a licence or insurance. New rules for judges said that those among the army of illegal drivers on the road who cause death should normally escape with a community punishment. Even repeat offenders - who have a previous conviction for going unlicensed or without insurance - can avoid imprisonment under the instructions for the courts on how to deal with drivers at fault in fatal accidents. The ruling handed down by the Sentencing Guidelines Council, the body that sets punishment benchmarks for judges and magistrates, frees millions of illegal drivers from the risk of imprisonment if they kill. The Council, led by Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips, made its decision despite carrying out a survey that found a big majority of the public think sentences for serious driving offences are too light; that families of victims of killer drivers are "deeply unhappy" about light sentences; and that most people believe driving without insurance or licence is a very serious offence.

So that’s years of campaigning by RoadPeace down the drain...

Our legal system bends over backwards to accommodate prospective or actual killers at the wheel. Thus

A BUSINESSMAN convicted for talking on his mobile while driving at 156 mph has admitted using his phone behind the wheel again. Ronald Klos, of Sandport, Kinross, was previously banned after clocking the highest speed ever recorded in a car on a British road.

He was arrested again months after having his licence returned, and yesterday at Perth District Court, he admitted driving while using his mobile phone near his home on 7 July 2007. He was fined £60 and had three points imposed on his licence.

Judges are enormously sympathetic to yob drivers. Every week there are disgusting cases like this.

The judiciary’s sympathy and understanding of yob drivers is boundless:

A road rage driver has escaped with just a fine after he drove along a pavement in a city centre. The hot-headed motorist scattered shoppers as he belted down a 12 foot gap between shops and bus shelters after a foul mouthed tirade with a bus driver. Shoppers had to leap for their lives as Korey Rowett drove on to the pavement along Royal Parade in Plymouth city centre - and it was all caught on dramatic CCTV. But a judge let him off with a fine after telling him that he was satisfied that none of the public were placed in "undue danger".

Yob politicians also get slapped on the wrist with a feather.

No surprise that the David Cameron has jumped on the bandwagon.

Fascinating.

Last year there was the case of a yob who drove dangerously when he accelerated through a red light and knocked down a pedestrian on a pelican crossing, a court has heard. Jurors heard his high-performance BMW 6 series car reached 47mph as he overtook vehicles in the wrong lane just before traffic lights in Bolton town centre.

While on bail for this offence this same yob drove at speeds of at least 140mph on a stretch of road known as Death Valley…The boxer was convicted of speeding but escaped with a £1,000 fine and a 42-day ban because police were unable to prove how fast his high-performance BMW 630i was going. A police officer told a court his speedometer was "off the clock" at 155mph as he pursued Khan on the M62.

This particular yob was chosen by David Cameron as his “person of the year” because there is “much to admire in the man.” In fact according to Cameron this yob represents social responsibility in action.

Let’s forget for a moment Cameron’s personal association with violent yobs. Let’s concentrate instead on his hypocrisy as a Green. Here are some instances:

(i) Plans to force shoppers using out-of-town supermarkets to pay car parking charges have been given the thumbs down by David Cameron even before they have been formally launched.

(ii) a road-building programme was still necessary because "some extra road capacity" was needed.

(iii) He is keen to extol the benefits of public transport, on Thursday he was pictured taking a train in Bury, although admittedly it did take a helicopter to get him there… In 2005 he voted against the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act, legislation that gave local councils more power to take direct action against litter, graffiti and environmental problems.

(iv) He has taken 70 private flights since becoming party leader nearly two years ago. The revelations make a mockery of his claims to be a keen environmentalist worried about climate change.

(v) A spokesman for the Tory leader said the party had never made any secret of the fact that he was followed by car. "David Cameron has always enjoyed cycling and if he could carry all of the boxes of documents for work on his bike then he would," he said.

Pathetic. A phoney like Cameron has no idea what you can get on a bike.

BBC TV: Promoting Road Danger

A couple of nights ago I watched ‘The One Show’ on BBC 1. I hate the BBC. They have ‘Top Gear’ with the odious petrolhead Clarkson but they never have any programme about cycling or urban walking. Watching BBC TV on driving and streets you sort of know that everyone involved is on a fat salary, drives a Four Wheel Drive, and has a string of speeding convictions.

‘The One Show’ tonight attracted my attention because it said it was about road humps. And it was typical BBC TV motorist propaganda. For a start, it only looked at road humps from the perspective of the motorist. Nothing about how they might affect pedestrians or cyclists.

The programme was crude and impressionistic because it failed to register the large variety of traffic calming devices involving raised surfaces. The ones in the programme in fact weren’t road humps but speed cushions. Apart from a brief clip of a Councillor who quoted some statistics showing how local traffic calming had resulted in a drop in pedestrian injuries to zero, the message was that road humps are BAD. In the studio there was publicist Max Clifford, who whined that humps put on roads where drivers never speed. Complete crap, of course, but the kind of message that the BBC media class are keen to promote (their agenda is no different to that of the gutter press and its rabid motoring lobby).

Clifford sobbed that road humps are bad for people with arthritis. And next to him there was some Z-list celebrity, who whined that the emergency services don’t like road humps because they reduce arrival times. (Traffic congestion also slows down emergency vehicles, but you never hear that as an argument to get cars off the roads.)

And putting forward the views of the cyclist and the pedestrian? No one. The BBC is indifferent to organisations like the CTC, LCC and Living Streets. Road deaths aren't news. A faulty jumbo jet which injures no one is mega news but the fortnightly jumbo-jet toll of road fatalities never registers at a national level.

The hazards of Lea Bridge Road

One week after a pedestrian was run down and killed the flowers at the site have grown but there is still no police sign appealing for witnesses.

From the local weekly Guardian, which has extensive coverage and some graphic photographs:

THE man who tried to save the life of pedestrian Joe Sheridan, killed in Lea Bridge Road last Thursday, has witnessed four other accidents in the same place in six years.His wife's father was also knocked down on a nearby zebra crossing. Malcolm Durrant, landlord of the Hare and Hounds pub in Lea Bridge Road, Leyton, said: "One time I saw a man flying through the air. And in the 1990s a lorry clipped a cyclist's back wheel and killed her instantly. Some drivers are oblivious. The road is this bad because it's so long and so straight. They should have some sort of chicane system like in countries abroad."

The solutions aren't hard to seek. The entire length of Lea Bridge Road should be a 20 mph zone. But the Department of Transport & Motor Supremacism wouldn't allow the Council to do this, even if it wanted to. So drivers are free to drive at reckless speeds, only slamming on their brakes for a speed camera (the number of which is grossly inadequate on this major highway). The signs of bad driving are everywhere on Lea Bridge Road:




















Even though this very dangerous road has a high level of cycle use, extra hazards are quite unnecessarily created for cyclists:




















And naturally no blame at all attaches to drivers who hit a cyclist or a pedestrian with one of these. Carrying an offensive weapon which may kill or cause grievous bodily harm - that's not what our mass media means when it talks about yobs and anti-social behaviour.