One of the routes I often take my pupils on is along Spring Lane (from Mapperley) down to Lowdham, then back through Burton Joyce or off to the A46 (or the opposite way, depending on where they live). It passes the site of the old Gedling Colliery, which closed in 1991, and which has been used for some time as a dogs’ toilet by local people.
The route is important, since it is one of the few remaining roads where the idiot council hasn’t cut the national speed limit to 20mph, although it has reduced part of the road from NSL to 40mph. It enables learners to be taught how to handle the type of road where statistics tell us they are likely to have most of their accidents without having to travel 20 miles out of the council’s jurisdiction. But I am worried that might soon change.
Council stupidity goes far beyond introducing 20mph speed limits on roads which should be 30mph or more. In this example, it concerns their conversion of the old colliery site into a “country park”.
I don’t know about you, but to me a country walk means dirt tracks, old trees, brambles, and mud if it’s raining. And it means not many other people around. To the council, it means digging all that up and installing Tarmac (or some other artificial surface) footpaths and a nice big car park for people to drop litter in. It also means extra lighting and footpaths outside for “accessibility”. And this is exactly what they have been up to for the last six months, with all the associated road closures and restrictions. 
When I was young, people could lay several miles of new paved footpath in a week. As I say, it has taken them close to six months to lay 25 metres of Tarmac along part of Spring Lane, and temporary lights have been up all that time. Of course, this was carried out slap in in the middle of the tram works (which have overrun by about a year so far), the Ring Road improvements (which have created more traffic jams), and the grossly overrunning “Creative Quarter” road works on Manvers Street (where two lanes of city centre traffic now – and forever – will have to make do with just one, and where pedestrian crossings have been placed on blind bends for use by the kind of people for whom it is borderline that they should be allowed out unsupervised in the first place).
The “country park” also has a 34-acre expanse of solar panels at its heart (this was opposed by virtually everyone, but approved by Gedling Borough Council anyway – and it was built quicker than you could say “no, hold on a minute…”). The park narrowly escaped having a waste recycling plant built on it.
I won’t go on about the detrimental effect all this is likely to have on the diversity of species on the park, because for reasons best known to him, Terry Lock (the chairman of some group known as “Friends of Gedling Country Park”) who once saw a badger reckons it will increase diversity. So who am I to argue over such absolute scientific fact?
No. My point is that when I went past the place with a pupil last week, we rounded a corner to be met by rows of cars parked on either side of the road for about a quarter of a mile, creating a corridor that wasn’t wide enough for two vehicles to pass at the same time. I assumed it was some sort of opening ceremony, but given that Spring Lane is a narrow country lane (as this old Google Earth image shows) I thought how irresponsible it was of Gedling Borough Council to have allowed such dangerous parking.
However, when I went past on another lesson over the weekend we encountered the same thing, but with the additional problem of people blocking the road trying to get into the car park which was obviously full, otherwise those hundreds of other cars wouldn’t have been lined up outside. I noticed dozens of people out on an Easter “country walk” with their prams and designer wellies, wandering along the artificial paths that had been installed. The indiscriminate parking creates a long and continuous corridor with several bends, so you cannot see if anyone is coming the other way. It also means people are parking on grass verges outside residents’ homes and screwing up the grass borders.
So well done Gedling Borough Council for creating an absolute disaster-in-waiting. Someone will get killed and it’s all thanks you your bloody stupid ideas of what constitutes a “country park”, and your desire to attract the kind of morons who don’t give a f*** where they park as long as they get what they want.