Bumping into the glass door of bureaucracy

This just in... you can't intone the Living Streets ethos if you appear to be living. Quality of life is not a material consideration when it comes to road safety. Having raised a solid example of a local traffic hotspot with local councillors they passed the issue to Transport and Highways. On the eve of their Head of Service meeting with local residents this was the response:

"Dear Councillor Qadar

Thank you for your email of 20 May to John Bann regarding speeding and parking issues on Osborne Road.

As you know, inconsiderate parking and speeding issues are concerns regularly raised by residents in all parts of the City. However, our resources for road safety schemes are limited, and at the moment have to be prioritised for use at locations experiencing a history of injury accidents. According to our records, four slight injury accidents have been reported on Osborne Road in the last five years, two at the junction with St Andrews Road and two at the junction with Union Road . None of these accidents were speed related. Unfortunately there are many other roads in Sheffield experiencing a higher rate of injury accidents, and these have a greater need for road safety schemes. I am therefore afraid I have to tell you that Osborne Road is not on our priority list for any road safety measures at the present time.

I will forward your concerns about parking issues to Parking Services and ask them to enforce the parking restrictions in place on Osborne Road.

I hope this is helpful.

Yours sincerely

Nigel Robson
Road Safety Manager (Acting)"

The Sleeping Policeman says:

No Nigel, it's not helpful. The basic message seems to be 'It's rubbish everywhere, so be glad you're not being run-over and go away?'. So, nothing will be done unless we have more injury accidents. Probably best then not to mention the 15 to 20-plus collisions with parked vehicles in the last six months. Nobody stopped, so only residents' wallets were injured.

If Transport and Highways had bothered to engage with the issues they would know that there are few transgressions of parking restrictions on the exemplar stretch of local road. However, there are too many inconsiderately, if not stupidly, parked cars. That said they slow down some of the more reckless drivers. But on the other hand they obscure pedestrians! Solve one problem, create another!