|
Transport
- it's not just about being late for Work
|
|||
|
The last few weeks have been hellish in terms of traffic. It is easy to blame bureaucratic incompetence and a lack of a London wide transport plan. Easy and correct. Three key transport arteries have been closed or restricted over the period leading to the gridlock we see at the moment at the weekends. Hammersmith Council are quite content to leave people with the impression that the terrorist attack is the reason why Hammersmith Bridge is not open but, as Barnes resident and member of the Chartered Institute of Building, David Tomlin, pointed out in a recent letter to the Evening Standard the bomb damage was repaired in August. . He concludes by saying "The real story behind Hammersmith Bridge's closure is more likely council bureaucracy and the contractors pursuing the minimum cost option instead of repairing their defects in the shortest possible time." The refurbishment of Kew Bridge at a time when a neighbouring bridge is out of action seems to be an act of extreme folly. Perhaps the Highways Agency would argue that with the contract awarded they had little choice but to proceed. They would have been working on the original forecast completion date for Hammersmith Bridge. It is difficult to see how London Underground can explain away their action of scheduling engineering works for the Richmond line at this point. A quick phone call to the Highways Agency would have been enough to confirm that suspending the service and diverting passengers onto buses was a seriously flawed idea. Perhaps it could be argued that all this is a result of a series of unfortunate coincidences and that lessons will be learned and it won't happen again. Certainly London Underground seem to be backtracking fairly quickly on the idea of cutting the District Line service in half for February of next year for more engineering works. However even on a good day getting around is not great and traffic is a problem that wouldn't go away even if the people that control the system had an attack of competence. On a daily basis this manifests itself as inconvenience - the inability to get from A to B in a reasonable time. But the real concern should be the impact that it has on our health. According to figures from official sources Chiswick has one of the highest NO2 build-ups in Outer London. The result of this is an alarming incidence of asthma in the area. The following table is from a study by the Ealing, Hammersmith and Hounslow Health Authority which shows our area being well above other parts of the borough for cases of asthma particularly for children. The report suggests that asthma may not necessarily be caused by air pollution and that smoking is a major extra factor but, as they point out, smoking tends to be inversely related to income level. If this is accurate then affluent Chiswick would have a lower incidence of smoking strongly suggesting that the high asthma levels locally are to do with traffic pollution.
At this stage it looks like we have had to put up with an eyesore on the High Road plus related cost with no answer to the key question of how bad is the air quality. Conspiracy theorists will speculate that the numbers are too bad for us to hear about. One route to improvement of this situation is a quick and effective use of available funds by Hounslow Council. Alarmingly a council officer initially denied to ChiswickW4 even the existence of section 106 funds from the Chiswick Park development. There remains a great deal of ambiguity over what funds will be available. Chiswick has the worst traffic, a deficient public transport network and the highest incidence of pollution related illnesses in the borough. The ongoing transport plans of the Council should reflect this which means that, whatever the political instinct of the Council, the money should be spent where it is needed most. |
LINKS:
|
||
