Joined-up thinking
Oct. 26th, 2025 04:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baroque_mongooseI live in a New Town, and I use a mobility scooter to get about. The intersection of those two facts can be, and very often is, a bit of a headache.
This particular New Town is, just for starters, so badly designed that when I talked to a chap in the SCA who's a professional town planner, he said it was a standing embarrassment and he had no idea how it even got approved in its current form. (To which my reaction was "oh, so it's not just me, then!".) The bad design is legion. It appears in everything from apparently random street numbering, to junctions which are very obviously going to become a death trap the moment they get a significant amount of traffic through them, to the long-running farce which has been our local community centre (let's just say I've been here five and a half years and they are finally in the process of building a permanent one), to... oh, great Scott, the bike lanes, do not get me started on the bike lanes. I haven't been able to ride a bike for quite a few years now and they still make me wince hard whenever I see them. And, while the demographic here does admittedly skew unusually young (the one thing they did take care to build, apart from houses, was schools, so we have a lot of young families), I'm still not the only person here who uses a mobility scooter. Or wheelchair, or, obviously, baby buggy. And the kerb ramps have been a problem ever since I moved here.
The thing is, when you're doing a lot of building, you can't surface the roads properly, because otherwise all your heavy vehicles are just going to break the surface up. So you put down something temporary that is good enough to be going on with, and then, once all the building is finished, you lay the permanent surface down on top of that. It's a similar story with the pavements (vehicles do sometimes have to drive over them to access the site), though not quite to such an extent; but the permanent kerbs go in from the start. So what you get is pavements that are a good deal higher than the road, which means you need ramps so that the likes of me can get across.
Some of the initial temporary ramps were OK. Others were outright appalling, and I had to complain to the community development officer, who was extremely good; he encouraged me to complain about all the bad ramps I could find, with photos, which he'd then show to the developers and bend their ears at length till they fixed them. Some were just built haphazardly and needed straightening up, while others were made from unsuitable materials such as gravel (doesn't stay put for five minutes) or concrete (once that starts to spall, it breaks up really fast to the point where the ramp becomes unusable). There are still a few that turn me sideways because they're uneven, and there are many that, while perfectly usable, are quite steep, so you get a significant bump. Thankfully they are finally starting to put permanent road surfaces in some places where there hasn't been any building happening for at least three years, and it makes a huge difference. I should think it does to the road traffic, too.
However, at the moment, they are re-asphalting a long stretch of pavement on my route up to church. I thought they'd put the permanent surface down already, and I think so did they; but two or three years ago we had a summer that was unusually hot and dry even by local standards, and a long crack (we're talking well over 100 m) appeared along the surface of the pavement. And this did have to be fixed, because of course the bike lane suddenly stops at the most dangerous part of the road (a fairly sharp bend), so all the kids from the secondary school ride their bikes on the pavement, which isn't legal but I for one can't blame them in the circumstances. (I'm generally all for keeping the law, but not if it puts someone's life at risk.) We don't want someone catching their tyre in this crack and landing in the drainage ditch. So, eventually, they had the surface up and re-did it. In stages, obviously. It's been going on about six weeks now, and I dare say it'll take them another six to finish it.
So, this morning, I went trundling up to church and thought "great! They've done another 50 or 60 metres." You can, of course, cross the road, and at the moment you have to; but the less I have to travel on the other side of the road, the happier I am, because the pavement on that side is even worse. I accordingly rolled cheerfully along this new asphalt (so fresh I could still smell it) until I got to the place where they'd knocked off for the weekend.
And there was no ramp.
There was no way my scooter could cope with the height of that kerb, so, with some difficulty, I turned round and went all the way back to the point where I'd had to cross the previous week, where there was still a ramp; there, I crossed the road, and rattled and bumped my way up to church on the opposite side.
They'd left all the equipment there. They're obviously going to start asphalting again tomorrow. Just for the weekend, they could have thrown down some gravel and it would have done the job. I mean, is that really too much to ask?
On the plus side... if nothing else, I get anecdotes!
This particular New Town is, just for starters, so badly designed that when I talked to a chap in the SCA who's a professional town planner, he said it was a standing embarrassment and he had no idea how it even got approved in its current form. (To which my reaction was "oh, so it's not just me, then!".) The bad design is legion. It appears in everything from apparently random street numbering, to junctions which are very obviously going to become a death trap the moment they get a significant amount of traffic through them, to the long-running farce which has been our local community centre (let's just say I've been here five and a half years and they are finally in the process of building a permanent one), to... oh, great Scott, the bike lanes, do not get me started on the bike lanes. I haven't been able to ride a bike for quite a few years now and they still make me wince hard whenever I see them. And, while the demographic here does admittedly skew unusually young (the one thing they did take care to build, apart from houses, was schools, so we have a lot of young families), I'm still not the only person here who uses a mobility scooter. Or wheelchair, or, obviously, baby buggy. And the kerb ramps have been a problem ever since I moved here.
The thing is, when you're doing a lot of building, you can't surface the roads properly, because otherwise all your heavy vehicles are just going to break the surface up. So you put down something temporary that is good enough to be going on with, and then, once all the building is finished, you lay the permanent surface down on top of that. It's a similar story with the pavements (vehicles do sometimes have to drive over them to access the site), though not quite to such an extent; but the permanent kerbs go in from the start. So what you get is pavements that are a good deal higher than the road, which means you need ramps so that the likes of me can get across.
Some of the initial temporary ramps were OK. Others were outright appalling, and I had to complain to the community development officer, who was extremely good; he encouraged me to complain about all the bad ramps I could find, with photos, which he'd then show to the developers and bend their ears at length till they fixed them. Some were just built haphazardly and needed straightening up, while others were made from unsuitable materials such as gravel (doesn't stay put for five minutes) or concrete (once that starts to spall, it breaks up really fast to the point where the ramp becomes unusable). There are still a few that turn me sideways because they're uneven, and there are many that, while perfectly usable, are quite steep, so you get a significant bump. Thankfully they are finally starting to put permanent road surfaces in some places where there hasn't been any building happening for at least three years, and it makes a huge difference. I should think it does to the road traffic, too.
However, at the moment, they are re-asphalting a long stretch of pavement on my route up to church. I thought they'd put the permanent surface down already, and I think so did they; but two or three years ago we had a summer that was unusually hot and dry even by local standards, and a long crack (we're talking well over 100 m) appeared along the surface of the pavement. And this did have to be fixed, because of course the bike lane suddenly stops at the most dangerous part of the road (a fairly sharp bend), so all the kids from the secondary school ride their bikes on the pavement, which isn't legal but I for one can't blame them in the circumstances. (I'm generally all for keeping the law, but not if it puts someone's life at risk.) We don't want someone catching their tyre in this crack and landing in the drainage ditch. So, eventually, they had the surface up and re-did it. In stages, obviously. It's been going on about six weeks now, and I dare say it'll take them another six to finish it.
So, this morning, I went trundling up to church and thought "great! They've done another 50 or 60 metres." You can, of course, cross the road, and at the moment you have to; but the less I have to travel on the other side of the road, the happier I am, because the pavement on that side is even worse. I accordingly rolled cheerfully along this new asphalt (so fresh I could still smell it) until I got to the place where they'd knocked off for the weekend.
And there was no ramp.
There was no way my scooter could cope with the height of that kerb, so, with some difficulty, I turned round and went all the way back to the point where I'd had to cross the previous week, where there was still a ramp; there, I crossed the road, and rattled and bumped my way up to church on the opposite side.
They'd left all the equipment there. They're obviously going to start asphalting again tomorrow. Just for the weekend, they could have thrown down some gravel and it would have done the job. I mean, is that really too much to ask?
On the plus side... if nothing else, I get anecdotes!
