I mentioned a little while ago that Nottingham has become a horrible place to live in. It’s filthy, full of road works and trams, and has 20mph speed limits liberally and randomly distributed throughout. No one cleans up litter or fly-tipping properly. Buildings are ugly (they consistently demolish any that have character in favour of hideous “modern” constructions.
No one maintains the facades of city centre buildings, in spite of most having been been stupidly painted white or built with more glass than brick. Maid Marian Way – which has won awards for being hideous since the 60s – gets uglier with each new glass-fronted monstrosity they put there. They cut down trees and shrubs on roadsides simply so they don’t have to prune them. They ignore the public, preferring instead to build wind turbines, solar farms, housing estates, and recycling plants on green belt land, even after “public consultations” has shown mass opposition to their schemes. There is no warmth to any of their actions.
Well, this is now semi-official. Nottingham comes 8th in the top ten list of council areas having the most deprived neighbourhoods within their boundaries (where “deprivation” is indexed in terms of crime, health, and employment). Yes, I realise it isn’t a direct statement of what I’ve listed above, but I think we can all agree that “deprived areas” are not usually going to be given any design awards. Mind you, one thing that is becoming clear is that such areas are guaranteed to get the tram at some point – the idiots on the council seem to think they’ll turn into model communities by sending in the tram.
Another story which hammers in another nail has just appeared concerning last week’s marathon. Now, I thought I’d made adequate arrangements this year as far as my pupils were concerned. I normally steer well clear of the marathon route, anyway, even if it means taking a long detour, and that’s what I did for my first lesson on Marathon Sunday this year. I arrived about 5 minutes late in Carlton, even though I’d given myself an hour to get there (it would usually take 15 minutes by the normal route). During that lesson it became clear that the marathon route had changed. Furthermore, instead of roads being restricted (i.e. runners and traffic in a contraflow system), they had simply closed them to traffic this time around. By the end of that lesson, traffic trying to get out of the city had increased to the point where it was gridlock. I had to cancel my next lesson in Clifton, and then I got a call from my lesson after that in Top Valley informing me that traffic was at a standstill around her house. That lesson had to be cancelled, too.
What had happened is that there was no north-south route through Nottingham on the west side (i.e. via the ring road), and not access to that side through the city. As a result, everyone was having to head northwards to find a route around the blockade (I later discovered that it was the same on the west side, with people trying to go north having to detour elsewhere).
I often refer to the council as idiots. That word is simply too tame. They are complete wankers.
Quite a while ago in one of my tram articles I said that anyone who was in an ambulance (or who was waiting for one to arrive), and it was delayed because of the tram works, should consider suing the council for criminal incompetence. Well, the same goes for the fiasco during last week’s marathon. That BBC article illustrates why very clearly.
For anyone who doesn’t know, the Queen’s Medical Centre (QMC) is Nottingham’s main hospital. You can think of it as being a large square building, with each side bordering on to one of Derby Road, Abbey Street, Gregory Street, and the A52. Well, it turns out that the first three of those roads were closed completely to motor vehicles, and since two of them cross the A52 (the ring road at that point) – where everyone was trying to figure out how to bypass the closures that they knew nothing about when they set out that morning – traffic was at a standstill. The only ways into the QMC for emergency vehicles are off the ring road or one of the closed roads. The closures were, according to the signs, in place from 7am until “approximately” 4pm.
The BBC story relates how ambulance staff had to push a patient almost a mile in a wheelchair to get her to the hospital. A three-mile journey took ”more than an hour”. Race organisers claimed:
…there was a “permanent passage” to the hospital.
Listen, you twats, you cannot say there is a passage when traffic on that passage is gridlocked.
Since the ambulance was non-emergency, the same twats repeatedly exercised the power invested in them by the higher twats on the council and told it it couldn’t pass. The female patient was still in hospital on 1 October – four days after the marathon.
East Midlands Ambulance Service said on a few occasions, during the marathon, it had to use police escorts “to help navigate through the road closures safely”.
Yes, and I bet that in the gridlock that still didn’t improve travel times significantly. But in response, the twats running the marathon stated:
At no point was it radioed in that there were concerns surrounding this patient.
If there had been, they would have made sure she was blue-lighted immediately to the QMC.
We will use the learnings from this year’s race for planning for the future.
So there you have it. The last line simply states what everyone else can see: the marathon organisers screwed up big time, even though they’re trying to blame the ambulance staff!
As a footnote, I drove along a road in the opposite direction to runners (there were some contraflows), and they consisted of a lot of fat people walking and carrying those stupid round drinking bottles that hold about half a litre of fluid (approximately 3 litres less than a real runner should drink). Although I’m sure that they will, you can’t really claim to have “completed a marathon” if it took you over 8 hours and you walked most of it.