I saw on the local news just now that shop owners in Chilwell and Beeston are worried that their businesses will collapse if Nottingham City Council closes two major roads.
Hilariously (and I mean in the circus clown sense), the Council has not informed traders of its plans, and these traders are worried that moves are afoot to close High Road and Chilwell Road in Beeston “for several months”.
During evening rush hour, it is already absolute chaos on the ring road as a result of University Boulevard being down to a single lane. All it takes is some dickhead breaking down or rear-ending another car and traffic comes to a complete standstill as there is nowhere else for it to go.
As I reported a few days ago – after the incompetent NET workers “overran” and caused total gridlock during morning rush hour – both NET and Nottingham City Council would be guilty of criminal incompetence if such a crime existed. Apparently, the loss to local businesses that day was in excess of £2,000,000! And numerous roads are already closed – many for “up to 12 months” – with others being shut all the time. There are restrictions and temporary lights everywhere, and not just from the tram works – the imbeciles in the City Council have also allowed unrestricted gas main and electricity service maintenance work to go ahead simultaneously with all this.
To make matters worse, the contractors involved in utilities road works now seem to favour 3-way and 4-way control, with the extended waits and increased queues this creates. And in some places the gas main work has been ongoing for 3 months or more (notably, on Westdale Lane and Cavendish Road in Carlton, with no end in site). The Council is apparently making no effort to get these idiot contractors to finish the work and get out of everyone’s way once and for all.
They’ve tried to blame the recent rain – well, in the case of the gas mains, if they’d have done their bloody jobs properly in the first place they wouldn’t be having to work in water-filled holes because they’d have packed up and moved on months ago. And I’m sure that NET and the Council have heard of weather forecasts, so it’s just a shame that they’re simply to stupid to adjust their work around heavy rain and so choose to create gridlock instead.
When you consider all of this, it is no wonder that Beeston and Chilwell traders are worried about what the Council intends to do. Total road closures in that area are absolutely likely with these idiots calling the shots. They don’t give a damn about road users or businesses – all they want is for their beloved tram extension to get built.
We’re in recession. Even if we’re technically out of recession (by about 0.0001% of growth), businesses are still closing by the shed load every day. Those traders in Chilwell and Beeston can’t afford to lose customers, otherwise it is absolutely guaranteed that they will go bankrupt. And Nottingham City Council is the only thing they can rely on.
God help them!
According to the BBC News, the Council says “disruption is inevitable”, but they are “trying to keep it to a minimum.” You can see the effects of this “minimum” every night – University Boulevard could easily have been kept as two-lanes, and the NET work could easily have been done faster and more competently. As things stand, absolutely nothing is being done to expedite the work (they weren’t working today, for example), and events like those last week are never far from the surface.
The BBC article interviewed Cllr Jane Urquhart. She looked like a terrified amateur being interviewed, and performed like one as well (all breathless and fast-talking):
We’re gong to maintain the maximum possible access… we’re continuing to have the discussions and work with our County Council highways colleagues and the tram project team…
I’m getting flashbacks again. That is bureaucratic bullshit. So far, they’ve done everything BUT maintain “maximum possible access”.In fact, much of the disruption looks almost deliberate – particularly when you consider the ridiculously long planned duration of it, and the total chaos every single night (and that’s no exaggeration). The Council should be TELLING their highways “colleagues” and the people they have EMPLOYED to build the tram what to do – not letting THEM call the shots and prattling on about “teams”.
As I’ve said before, the tram is a monumental and pointless waste of money. It isn’t green, and it isn’t pretty. The extra carbon emissions created by the traffic jams (especially the £2m cock-up last week) during construction will take decades to be offset – and that’s even assuming that there is any positive impact on emissions from the tram once it begins operating, which is unlikely (except in Council justification documents).
wait for a GP referral slot. I tried to get there, but a journey which would normally have taken 10 minutes had to be aborted after only managing to travel less than 1 mile in 45 minutes. To make matters worse, when I called the NHS – which has to run the City Council and NET a close second for stupidity – I was told they couldn’t access my records without a password (so I couldn’t even tell them I was sorry that I couldn’t get in), and that this should have been provided with my referral letter from my GP. I explained I didn’t get a referral letter, and that the GP had done it directly, and was told that my surgery would be able to provide it. Of course, when I phoned my surgery the only person with access to the password system was stuck in the bloody traffic!
appears to have been a 30mph road (listening to the traffic reports) near Wilford. All of this was before, during, and after the rush hour.
Another “charity”