The Lendal Bridge Saga - How not to close a bridge.

York City Council decided that it wanted to close Lendal Bridge to cars:

The traffic restriction trial aims to reduce daytime traffic across Lendal Bridge as part of a wider long-term vision to address city centre congestion and improve the reliability of public transport.

During the trial, Lendal Bridge will be open between 10.30am - 5pm to pedestrians, cyclists, buses, taxis, and emergency vehicles only.

The trial will test how the transport network operates and new road signs will warn drivers of the changes as they approach the bridge. Automatic number plate recognition cameras will enforce the new traffic measures.

And this is fine - there's a pretty strong case for reducing traffic in city centres and especially centres with narrow streets and plenty of pedestrians such as York. However, the City Council has demonstrated throughout this trial and since just how you shouldn't go about closing a bridge to cars.  It wasn't just the Facebook page with over 3000 'likes' nor the slightly arrogant attitude of York's Labour leadership or even the extremes to which the Council sought to enforce the ban. It was that, despite all this effort the Council completely cocked up the closure:

At a Traffic Penalty Tribunal it was concluded that the scheme, which was put in place last year, to stop drivers crossing the bridge during the day, and another one on Coppergate are not valid as the road cannot be described as a 'bus lane'.

The council has made at least £1.3 million from fines on Lendal Bridge alone.

That's a lot of fines that the Council may well have to pay back. Not to mention court costs, administration charges and officer time diverted from things that actually matter to local residents. Sadly this sort of outcome is all to typical of local authority initiatives especially 'radical' transport and traffic schemes.

In reality the York scheme was timid - they closed one bridge just to see what would happen to traffic. And this resulted in confusion made worse by inadequate (and possibly illegal) signage. What should sadden us is that the officers and councillors responsible will not examine their decision-making approaches, project management or even stand on the bridge and say "we got this one wrong didn't we".

But all we get is an anonymous statement saying:

“City of York Council is seeking independent legal advice in relation to the adjudicator’s decision on this specific appeal.

“The restrictions remain in place on Lendal Bridge and Coppergate and we would advise drivers to continue to adhere to these.”

Will local government ever learn? I'm not picking on York here (although this is premier league in the cock-up stakes), every Council makes these sorts of mistake and every council prefers to obfuscate rather than admit error.

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It's either incompetence or else they're lying...

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There's a chicken factory - run by an Irish-owned firm called HCF (Poultry) Ltd - in Cullingworth and today it stinks. I mean really stinks - the smell is actively unpleasant, you wouldn't want to spend any time outside near the factory.

In trying to resolve this situation - to provide some relief for the factory's neighbours and in anticipation of the Village Gala tomorrow on the nearby recreation ground - I discovered that not one public authority holds keyholder or management out-of-hours contact details for this plant. Not the Council's environmental health department, not the fire service and not the police.

Not only am I angry about this - what would happen in the case of a fire or a serious break in? What would happen in frustrated and annoyed neighbours decided to take the law into their own hands?

This is either incompetence or they're lying. It's really not good enough.

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Waiting for the result....

After seven hours of counting, interspersed with assorted periods of faffing about followed by best part of an hour sitting waiting for some bureaucratic numpty in Wakefield to "validate" the number of votes in the AV referendum, we got a result (see earlier blog post for details).

Just so you know, it shouldn't take seven hours to count fewer than 5000 votes - it really shouldn't. Even when there are three separate elections going on. Yet that was what it took - including well over an hour to validate the contents of just one ballot box. And, in the process 100 (well two bundles) of Bingley Rural postal votes turned up in the Bingley Town count and another 100 Conservative votes (that's my votes) were placed in the Labour pile.

When councils cut corners on organisation, when fussy (and unnecessary) national quangos like the Electoral Commission insist of daft second-guessing, and when lawyers crawl over the counting of votes the result is an unsatisfactory system characterised by mistrust, inefficiency and pointless secondary checks.

I was told that "...the priority is accuracy" - which given the number of errors we observed in the counting process is a glorious irony. I watched counting clerks check the same bundle of votes three - even four times - before banding them! And in one case we had to point out that following this check and recheck and recheck process there were still only 48 votes in the "50 vote" batch!

Seven hours is too long and, in my bones I know, the process was no more accurate than the process used in other places and in times past that took up a great deal less time! Maybe we shouldn't pay the staff by the hour?

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Government procurement incompetence - a reminder

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Sebastian James has published his review of education capital financing and has this to say:

In summary, I have found that the system of capital allocation and spending which has developed over at least the last decade has frequently resulted in poor use of resources, a bureaucratic system for providers and Local Authorities and a mixed – and at times poor - outcome for both parents and children.

And:

I believe that there are some very significant opportunities to increase the amount of schools regeneration that we can undertake for any given sum of money. To give you a flavour of this, the consensus view from our workshops was that as much as 30% of the total money spent could be saved and this is borne out by our initial pilot project in Doncaster.

I'm pretty confident that a similar review of NHS capital funding, housing PFI schemes and leisure investment strategies would show the same degree of waste and mismanagement. The was Labour's central strategy for capital investment - Brown's big idea - and it will cost us very dearly.

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