LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Putting pounds before safety

You identify a need, you advertise a service which you then provide at a user viable cost, and if it proves regular and reliable your customers come. There are no magic shortcuts. The pity is that when I lived and worked in Sheffield we had such a service. It was council run, comprehensively covered the entire area, was frequent and reliable, was so good it was world famous and we had study groups visiting from all over the world to learn from it, and ran successfully for over 40 years. Unfortunately it was destroyed for political reasons by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and we’ve never had so successful a transport system since, so maybe we should ask her present successors for the solution to the provision of an equally comprehensive system, as the alternatives they have left us with so far are visibly not working.

My other comment this week concerns a narrow country road on the outskirts of Hellaby called Cumwell Lane. This by-way has featured several times in this paper due to the number of accidents on the lane, and the subsequent calls of the local residents to RMBC for some form traffic restriction to try and reduce them.

It was with total incredulity therefore that I read of the acceptance by the casting vote of the planning committee chairman, Alan Atkin, of a scheme to build a £75 million warehouse at the Bawtry Road end of it. Has this man, one of I assume at least normal intelligence to hold the post he does, any comprehension of the effect of this development on this by-way or was he so dazzled by pound signs of the council revenue accruing from such a development that all considerations of congestion, traffic chaos, accident and possible death was driven from his mind?

When reading the article I imagined that the at least doubling of the width of Cumwell Lane would be included in the scheme, but a glance at the artist’s impression showed no such improvement, only a footnote that the present “left turn only” restriction at the junction with Bawtry Road was to be removed, a restriction put in place several years ago presumably because the crossing of the main highway by vehicles exiting the lane had become dangerous due to the increased traffic from the commercial park on the north side of Bawtry Road. The article speaks of 1,000 jobs created, but think of the number of vehicles needed to transport that number of employees to and from a site with no available public transport, let alone the number of daily HGV visits required to make a warehouse of this size viable.

The article talks of a petition by objectors to the development calling for urgent action on traffic congestion in the area. Let’s hope that any discussion of the petition will reveal the imbecility of this development in its present form.

Charles David Foulstone, Rotherham Green Party