A date has been set for the removal of the temporary cycle lane along Old Shoreham Road in Hove.
Brighton and Hove City Council has scheduled the work to start on Friday 17 September.
Conservative councillor Dawn Barnett said: “It went in overnight. It’s already been weeks since the decision.
“It’s beginning to look as though they don’t have any respect for a democratic decision.”
Councillor Barnett said that she understood the need to schedule a crew of road workers for part of the job.
But she said that the council should at least remove the “wands” and cover the signs.
She would be happy to work with volunteers from the community to carry out that part of the job, she said.
And she added that there would be no shortage of local volunteers willing to pain out the markings if the council put it off for much longer.
Well the council certainly dragged its heels over this but at least we have a date. We’ll done to Cllr Barnett for keeping the pressure on.
It is pretty clear what is going on here. With schools going back on the 3rd, there will be two weeks’ of campaign groups mustering as many parents as they can to get their children cycling on specific days when the media has been invited. Mark my words.
Of course they will – the obsessive pro-cycling groups don’t believe in democracy, or have any empathy for the disabled, the elderly, businesses, tradesmen, residents or other road users.
As confirmed in discussions with Bricycles chairman Chris Williams a couple of weeks ago, they don’t care that cyclists don’t use the lanes, or that it causes problems for other road users.
To them, cycling must be promoted at all costs – apparently to save the world as it will, apparently, solve the climate crisis on it’s own, and it seems that removal of one barely used temporary cycle lanes is a major risk to this plan!
For any cyclist wanting to find the best routes in the city, perhaps try http://www.brightonandhovecyclemap.co.uk/ – this rarely chooses any part of the A270 – which is reflected in what happens with all the normal cyclists who treat bikes as just another method of transport.
But the issue is the collusion between the council and the campaign/pressure groups. They have deliberately delayed the removal to allow for the final media campaign after schools reopen.
Ah yes those evil councillors and pressure groups delaying the removal of the cycle lane so children can cycle to school.
What a dark sad world you inhabit.
“delaying the removal of the cycle lane that no children use to cycle to school, as well as no one else”
Fixed!!
If you love ghost lanes and unused spaces I suggest you build a wall to isolate half your own home, so you can use the other half.
Whilst it’s laudable of Cllr Barnett to offer to paint-out the white bike designs on the tarmac of the OSR cycle lane she might actually need to research the technicalities of the issue?
It appears that evil-minded (or just plain incompetent?) council officers specified the use of semi-permanent hot molten white paste for marking the tarmac?
Yes, long-life highway markings for a so-called “Temporary” cycle lane!
And the problem with that?
Well, because the white paste, once set, has a thickness of several millimetres, markings made with that product need to be removed by a specialist grit-blasting contractor – thus incurring a significant extra expense for taxpayers, compared to a correct scenario!
And such an alternative scenario? Simply, for temporary highway markings, the use of traditional white paint for roads, which has a barely-measurable thickness, and thus can easily be obliterated by a quickly applied appropriate black coating.
Naturally, if indeed the current white markings were made with traditional white tarmac paint, then any DIY guerrillas intent on implementing Cllr Barnett’s offer to paint-out tarmac markings need to be aware of the need to use a durable epoxy-based coating (a bit pricey!) which has been seeded with fine grit, to ensure it is and remains non-slip, and does not become polished and slippery from vehicles driving over it.
We cannot have another debacle similar to the slippery gloss paint which was applied by our Council to a part of the temporary Madeira Drive cycle lane, surely?
Also a seemingly a curious aspect of the OSR situation is council officers, opposed to scrapping of the OSR cycle lane, apparently saying that costly repairs to the tarmac will be needed, before vehicles can once again drive on that part of the OSR?
What damage could the riding of a few bicycles have done to the OSR’s tarmac? Or have cycling zealots been going so far as to actually damage parts of the tarmac to make it unsuitable for use by motor vehicles?
More likely it was possibly intellectually-dishonest council officers trying to use the opportunity of no traffic to conduct long-delayed highway maintenance, but to dishonestly charge the costs of that to the special ‘Active Travel’ grants, rather than to the regular highways maintenance budget?
And meanwhile we await the waste of more than a million pounds on ‘Vanity Project’ works to Western Road, Brighton – which are almost totally unnecessary from the point-of-view of almost every category of user permitted in that controlled section, with the needless (whither sustainsbility?) ripping-up of what are probably the highest quality footpaths/pavements our City currently has!
And all this waste without adequate public consultation (because the flimsy one held early in 2021 did not clearly explain what specific problems were felt to need addressing (probably because there’s hardly any, due to the extremely successful re-design of Western Road which City residents paid for about 15 years ago!), and because design proposals were only drawn-up about 2 months after this fake ‘consultation’ ended!).
So we lose financially; there’s disruption during these needless money-wasting works; and there’s a pointless and significant use of new paving material made from ecologically-unacceptable Portland cement!
Looks like the only winners might be the contractors (and possibly those select council officers to whom the contractors might express their gratitude with a nice case of wine or somesuch at Christmas-time?).
Just when will a majority of our elected Councillors begin to act with common-sense to genuinely SERVE the best interests of City residents and taxpayers?
I inhabit the same world as you. Due democratic process has decided that the cycle lane is to be removed. You may not agree, but that’s politics, and it’s going. What is the point of allowing it to be used for a further two weeks before its removal, other than being a cynical attempt to drive up further antagonism between those who wish it to remain and those who don’t, again using children as a weapon? And I say again, the council has colluded with pressure groups to facilitate this.
And now may we please have a rethink about the ridiculous cycle lanes along the seafront, where we have one running west to east, with two going in the opposite direction, one of them on the pavement. Three lanes, for heavens sake!
Will somebody please let us know what part of the brain has to be missing in order to secure a job as a Green councillor?
I think you’re incorrect. There’s one cycle lane on the pavement going east to west and one cycle lane on the road going east to west. I don’t know where the third lane is that you write about.