Wrong side of the road in Peterborough

Northern cycle route exit from Long Causeway

The previous cycle route ran to the RIGHT of the vehicular one. (It was one of two city centre roads which require moving to the wrong side of the roads and was a top local knowledge quiz question.) It was used by cyclists to EXIT Long Causeway onto Broadway. During recent new surfacing work, inexplicably the old route has been blocked off by a new bit of fence.

Long Causeway is one way for vehicles but two way for cyclists.

No entry signs at the EXIT of Long Causeway don’t make sense, even to car drivers, who wouldn’t see them, if they were driving in the right direction. The road is one way for cars, (isn’t it?) which would be coming towards you in this picture. The only vehicular exit is via Cathedral Square. Which is behind you.

Only council permitted vehicles are allowed in past the rising bollards. Although they are not currently working, it looks as if a new monitor has been installed.

An exit is required onto Broadway for cyclists. At the moment cyclists are cycling straight past the completely pointless no entry sign and over the potentially rising bollards.

Is the council planning to

• reinstate the previous cycle route and remove the fence? This would separate cars from bikes and leave a favourite quiz question intact.

• remove the no entry signs?

• add a cycling contraflow sign (as at the roundabout end of Cowgate)? But if it is going to do this will it explain how it intends to ensure cyclists aren’t accidentally impaled on a rising bollard they haven’t noticed?

We did have a Council Leader who wanted to abolish cycling in the whole city centre. He lost his seat in May.

While he is gone, I for one am hoping the Council will be able to resolve this particular road sign nonsense quickly, sensibly and constructively. And if whoever is responsible for traffic signs in the city wants to comment below, he or she is very welcome.

There is hope.  The view in the other direction makes a little bit more sense, (except for the temporary signage).

Long Causeway towards the Cathedral

 

Peterborough hustings venues

This is a list of publicly owned (that means we the public own them) venues which are made available by statute free of charge by the city council for people to hold hustings in.   Venues for Hustings – for Candidates 2015

Stewart Jackson, Darren Bisby-Boyd and Chris Ash at Thomas Deacon Academy parliamentary hustings 15th April 2015. This hustings was held in a large auditorium filled with Kings School and TDA sixth formers, but was also livecast internally to several hundred students. I don’t know if the video was recorded as well.

Peterborough’s best hustings are often held in churches or schools.  These can be public or closed events.  Hustings they can be held anywhere and by any organisation.  A school event is particularly interesting: because children often see politics as something which only happens on the television or on the radio.  You are never too young to vote.  You are never too young to debate a issue.

The person hosting the hustings will probably need a candidate to apply for one of these venues.  The legislation (statute) governing this provision is the Representation of the People Act.

This hustings will happen later this week and there are rules (below the picture) about how to ask a question.  The organisation of the hustings is up to the host.

Peterborough Parish Church hustings to take place on Friday 24th April at 7:30

Click here for further details about the St Johns hustings

Haddon Hustings 18 April 2015 Nick Thulbourn, Nicola Day, George Martin (chairing) & Nick Sandford

I have never attended a hustings which got out of hand (close, but the well behaved sixth formers and their teachers worked hard to persuade candidates perhaps not to resort to fisticuffs).  A calm, friendly and firm person in the chair will help ensure a hustings keeps its hair on.  However the history of violence and intimidation within and working against the British democratic process is substantial and centuries old. This is well understood by parliament itself.  So to help keep things peaceful and calm, legislation makes a police presence available to hustings organisers if they feel they need one.  A very important, but perhaps not well understood statutory duty of the police is to uphold the democratic process, of which the hustings form a very important important part.

Peterborough Pensioners Hustings 2014

twinkle twinkle polished car

Interesting row of three cars parked across the south bound cycle lane in Park Road. I wonder if they are attending a Tory event in that newly poster boarded house?

View up the road from the cycle lane looking north. Ah! This car is a jag. Nice clean well tended car.

Second and third car. Hum. Another fancy, perfectly groomed car.

Not sure if this car is part of what looks a bit like a set

Car number two. Oh a a Peterborough City Council ELECTED MEMBER badge on this one!

Picture of the ELECTED MEMBER badge. Difficult to forge: (shares some attributes with a bank note.)

twinkle twinkle polished car

Cllr Peach did not opt to move his car while I was there: to this day I don’t know how well he can get in and out of driveways. But this is not the first time I’ve seen him use the cycle route for stopping on.

Owner of car number one (the jag) comes out and not sure how but that car moves from behind me into that driveway as fast as lightning. He tells me “We’re pale green, you know.” Good Afternoon, Cllr Fitzgerald. Behind his right shoulder Tory candidate for Park Ward Steve Allen with a stunning smile and friendly folded arms

Cllr Fitzgerald enjoying the lovely warm sun, with his car newly tucked into the drive.

You see, our Park Ward councillor team (two Labour, one Conservative) went for what they describe as “aggressive pavement cyclists” recently and tasked the police with talking to shocked children and middle aged women cycling along gently as well as people who couldn’t speak English. (My sample was tiny: but I did one.) They fined about a third of the people they stopped: most of them probably incapable of being polite and apologising nicely to a policeman.  (Some offenders just got warned, although whether or not cycling on a pavement is an offence in all circumstances is a moot point.)  So I think it only fair to point out that cycling on the pavement can be a perfectly logical and reasonable response to dangerous junctions, roads and cycle lanes and is a better place to cycle if your lights have just packed up.

Cars which park in the Park Road cycle lane, or across it or on the pavement are a regular feature of life at this end of Park Road and I for one don’t think it is safe.  I think badly behaved drivers are one of a number of contributory factors encouraging “pavement cycling”.

I didn’t paint in the double yellow lines (which most people don’t even believe are there any more: they are virtually worn out).  The Conservative council did.  So I think elected Conservative members of all people should be able to show us how we can all live happily with their decisions.

Will anybody in Peterborough see tomorrow’s solar eclipse?

For a second day running it has not been possible to see the sun in Peterborough at 09:30.  I had made a note to check where it would be on Friday (tomorrow) when there is a chance to witness a near total solar eclipse. People have made plans and some have plotted parties and bought cameras, filters, projectors and protective eye wear, ready for the big day.

“It will begin in the UK at 8.45am. The maximum eclipse, when the moon is nearest the middle of the sun, will be at 9.31am. The event will end at 10.41am.” 

Instead we have “fog”. This is a polite word for particulate laden and polluted air.  It might be a lot more accurate to call it “smog”.  Yesterday it almost lifted just after lunch and shafts of sunlight penetrated into the city centre. Today we have what looks like heavy cloud. But it is more likely that the smog has simply floated up a bit. The government website is predicting worse pollution levels on Friday than today.

I joined the Green Party in 2007 as I tried to reverse Peterborough City Council’s decision to support the incineration of domestic waste. This was a battle which we campaigners lost. We saw a neighbouring proposal fall in the face of a far more successful campaign. Lessons were learned, as they say. And I started to consider the vexed question of what exactly drives politics in Peterborough.

A key supporter of incineration of waste is Cllr Marco Cereste (he is also a director of Peterborough Renewable Energy Limited which builds slightly cleaner incinerators than the one the council is building).  As leader of the council he personally attracts huge amounts of anger, frustration and suspicion: some of it reasonable, some of it less so.  But in the last couple of weeks he has told the story of his signing (on behalf of the city he represents) a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on his facebook profile (shared with his facebook friends).  This MoU is with an entity locals understand is a Chinese government funded organisation, possibly what we’d call in the UK, an “NGO” (non governmental organisation).

Then in an online discussion elsewhere entirely about this morning’s fog, someone shared this video which I hadn’t come across previously. The story of this video’s making and removal from Chinese social media is available online. I just wish that we’d had this video at the time the council’s decision was still not made. At the notorious moment when Pam Kreling (then one of the councillors making the crucial decision about whether or not to use incineration) said words to the effect that if she couldn’t see anything emerging from a stack, then there was nothing there and there was by implication nothing which could do anyone any harm. As campaigners we weren’t allowed to speak at critical moments in meetings: in fact the chair of one of the meetings offered to have me and Richard Olive thrown out when we stood up to tell them they were being hopelessly misinformed by their advisors. But as I observed this pantomime (there was no beadle to implement the Chair’s desire) I was left reeling from a deeper revelation. I still wonder how people in key positions got through even basic level schooling, what exactly went on in their science lessons and what their marks were.  

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