Three traffic wardens for one car

I watched a pack of traffic wardens surround a car in Market Street, Oxford this afternoon. I guess only one gets the bonus and perhaps they had all raced to get there, the fastest getting to do the job while the others stood around and chatted.

Or perhaps it really does take three of them – one to do the reedin, one for the ritin and one to operate the camera, with the reward money divvied up between them.

Desecrated Oxford in the Times

A letter under the title Oxford desecrated appeared in the Times of 19 May. The writer refers to the honeyed rhythm, curve, quality and dramatic punctuation of the High and says:

The road itself is not a smooth surface sending the eye to the gorgeous gold of the stone, but a pock-marked way, cluttered with signs, part-barriers and the other detritus of modern traffic management. It is as if some monstrous urban planner has, with calm deliberation, set upon a path of destruction. And it is impossible to believe that any other great city would visit such horrors on such beauty.

He wonders if we could engage some Oxford minds on the subject.

Oxfordshire transport head on High horse

There is a letter in this week’s Oxford Times from Steve Howell, Head of Transport at Oxfordshire County Council. He is terribly upset about complaints reported the previous week from the Warden of All Souls amongst others, who protested about the vandalism perpetrated the length of Oxford’s High Street by the uncultured, insensitive oafs of Oxfordshire County Council.

Howell boasts of the work already done to the High with paving and road surfaces improved with a de-cluttering of signage where possible. He goes on:

I, therefore, slightly resent the undertones that that we are cold and unfeeling towards the heritage of the High Street and its status as an Oxford gem.

I saw no such undertones in the reported comments. The paper’s short report included expressions like “vandalism”, “ill thought-out”, “too appalling to contemplate”, “a thoughtless proposal from engineers who have studied maps, not organisations or people”, “further vandalism of the High Street”, “a sorry sight in terms of signage, street furniture, eyesore boxes and machines”. If Howell thinks these are merely “undertones” then his skin is as thick as his head.

£13 million less to waste on roads in 2008

The Government has cut £13 million from the money which Oxfordshire County Council hoped to spend on transport schemes. In general one hopes for more rather than less to be diverted to one’s region by way of reciprocity for the huge sums one pays in tax, but this cut does at least spare us the sight of our money being thrown away before our eyes.

Social compact in New York streets

I was in New York recently, and marvelled at how it works compared with London or Oxford. Four things appealed in particular – the way the traffic flows across junctions, the absence of litter and the presence of policemen, and the fewness of nagging signs about things everyone knows anyway.

Now, I was in the better part of Manhattan where the street grid helps with the traffic, and New York is not exactly short of other signs and notices. The point about each of these observations is that it is policy, and not just (that is, not only) incompetent neglect, which makes the difference over here.

Digging up the Cowley Road again

It is only a few months since Oxfordshire County Council did major works in the Cowley Road. Their “improvements”, allegedly on grounds of safety, led a correspondent in the Oxford Times to ask if the highways officers were seeking revenge for some childhood injury at the hands of a cyclist by creating a series of death-traps.

Certainly I find it more dangerous as an occasional driver there, as cyclists negotiate the chicanes and dodge the buses. These used to proceed in a straight line, but now dart in and out of the expensively curved bays and round the obstructions deliberately placed in their way by the unthinking dead-heads of County Highways.

Expect more Highways junk at Aristotle Lane

My post Come to see how not to do it at Aristotle Lane is answered by a reader who saw a similar group of local authority types standing at the end of Aristotle Lane on a different occasion last week. Like me, he fears another round of expensive unnecessary works here.

The usual pattern is that someone complains that her little boy is due to start at the school next year and might be afraid of the possibility that he might come within yards of being run over if he ran into the road when a car was anywhere near. She is joined by that regiment of North Oxford busybodies who forever think that “something must be done”. We pay all that money in Council Tax, they say, oblivious to the fact that if less money was wasted on unnecessary road works the Council Tax might actually go down.

Come to see how not to do it at Aristotle Lane

I came across this little party yesterday afternoon, standing amongst the 15 pillars, posts and other clutter which Oxfordshire County Council has dumped at the end of Aristotle Lane.

Small groups hanging around in Aristotle Lane are usually waiting for their dealer to arrive, but not generally at school-out time, not at the primary school anyway. They look like local authority employees, I decided – that look of tired-biscuits-left-on-a-dusty-shelf which identifies those who trudge the corridors of councils everywhere.

What a load of bollards in Oriel Square

Oriel Square was a bustling, pretty little place when I first knew it, as an undergraduate in the 1970s. I lived round the corner for two years and crossed it every day. Oriel College is beautiful even amongst its peers, in large part because you can stand back and look at it across the square. You could park there then, and the place was alive with cars, bikes and pedestrians.

It is a soulless place now, dragged down by the dead hand of council bureaucrats for whom it is just a street, by dim, dull little people with no cultural roots, no sensibility or sensitivity, no faculties to appreciate beautiful things.

Welcome to Summertown

There used to be a notice at each end of Summertown saying “Welcome to Summertown”. There were various reasons for disliking these, apart from the vulgarity of that superfluous “Welcome to” – for a start, it doubled the amount of metalwork in a road already full of silly little signs.

The main reason, though was the mismatch between the proclaimed welcome and the reality. Here, for example is what you find if you actually try and visit Summertown.

Capital ignorance at the Plain

My post Gents in St Giles Oxford referred in passing to “the screaming capitals so beloved of officious plonkers in council offices” – the habit of council pen-pushers of beginning words with Capital Letters to Emphasise their Importance. In that case, the capitalisation was the least part of the offensive ignorance shown in the notice in question.

Here is one where the capitals – and the lack of them – is the main point.

Pedestrians cross here

A recent post called Rubbish and Graffiti by the Oxford Canal looked at the bridge which carries Frenchay Road across the Oxford Canal. Planners, developers, highways officers, British Waterways and the police have, by their acts or their omissions, turned this little stretch of canal into an urban pit of bad design, graffiti, notices, overflowing bins and general neglect.

I said in that context that it seemed that “a little man from Oxfordshire County Council goes down the pavements with a tape measure and fills every gap of more than a certain length with a pole and a notice”. Only two such notices are visible from the towpath, but this proves to be just a small selection.

You can see that the little man was a bit stuck for a suitable sign to put on the end of the bridge, but desperate to fill the space. “Pedestrians cross here” appears at first sight to be a statement of the obvious – pretty well everyone is cross at the mess made here by the various officious bodies.

Oxford models Health and Safety nonsense

“We have them here in droves at Oxford City Council and Oxfordshire County Council. The councillor who chopped down the willow trees of Osney with no warning or consultation (or, as it turned out, any evidence of actual danger from most of them) is a good example. The officer who plastered the banks of the Thames with big red notices after someone drowned is another. Oxfordshire Highways is entirely staffed by people like this.

When they plead health and safety, what they usually mean is that they are scared of being blamed, too thick to analyse likely patterns of cause and effect, too dim to distinguish between hazard and risk, too idle to take anything but the safe course which allows them to to ignore all arguments. “Elf ‘n safety” they say. “Get a life”, said Bill Callaghan once.”

This is an extract from a post on our sister site Oxford Agenda. Called HSE buries its towels slip it reports on the oft-reiterated claims by Sir Bill Callaghan, the Chairman of the Health and Safety Commission, that the “negative stories about…over-bureaucracy” derive largely from over-empowered and under-brained little prats in local authorities, not from the Health and Safety Executive.

He may be right about the relative stupidity, although the post shows that the HSE has its own share of wasteful intervention in non-issues. Oxford provides some examples of what he is talking about.

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Rubbish and Graffiti by the Oxford Canal

The photograph below encapsulates quite a lot of Oxford’s neglect in one go.

We see a hideous bridge across the Oxford Canal. It is covered in graffiti. Next to it is an overflowing bin. On it are two traffic signs. All around are weeds. The bridge we are stuck with, this generation’s blight on the area for a century or more. The others could be fixed tomorrow with no great application of thought or money.

The story of the bridge, which lies at the end of old Frenchay Road and runs across to the Berkeley Homes Waterways estate, is told in a post called A bridge too big on the Oxford Canal. This post deals with the bin, the graffiti and the notices.

Signs to ignore in Oxford

The picture below was taken at Medley Weir at the end of June 2007. The bright red sign first went up at the end of January, when a boy drowned in the River Thames just behind the left-hand gate post.

The notice might arguably have served some purpose in January. The river was very swollen and over-ran the path along the river. The path itself had been neglected for years – one of those situations where responsibility was divided between several authorities so none of them did anything.

Plain unnecessary works

Oxfordshire Highways, which is a kind of blind-leading-the-lame joint venture between Oxfordshire County Council and two other organisations, has started work at the Plain, the critical junction which connects East Oxford, London and Vladivostok with Oxford city centre.

This is the third and final stage in the long-drawn-out “improvement” to the High Street, which started at Carfax a year ago. The aim is threefold – to restore the surface which has been patched for years and does actually need attention, to bugger up the traffic flow at the roundabout, and to replace the existing set of signs and lines with a bigger, shinier set.

Signs obscuring the sights of Oxford

The photograph shows the Clarendon Building in Oxford, a fine stone building erected in 1711-1713 to the designs of Nicholas Hawksmoor. Hawksmoor was responsible for the towers of All Souls, for the front to Westminster Abbey, for some beautiful East London churches and for finishing off Blenheim Palace.

It is beautiful. It is important for itself, for its architect and for the man after whom it was named, Lord Clarendon, whose History of the Great Rebellion partly paid for it.

To the thick oaf in charge of signage and street furniture in central Oxford , it is just a building, a pile of old stone. He has split the view of its facade with a tall pole adorned with big bright signs.The really obtrusive one, the big blue cycle route sign pointing to the left, is new.

Oxford traffic lights could come down

“City traffic lights could come down” screams the Oxford Times headline. “Radical shared space scheme being considered”. The implication is that Oxfordshire County Council may consider the removal of some traffic lights and the other junk which they have spent the last 30 years sticking up all over Oxford.

Port Meadow party rubbish

The answer to rubbish left on Port Meadow is not officiousness from council or police but more bins.

This time of year always brings parties on Port Meadow. Some are sedate affairs with chilled wine and sandwiches on warm afternoons. Others involve hordes of young people with plastic bags full of cheap plonk and beer, enjoying themselves and each other in the grass until dawn when they tramp noisily back into town.

In a heavily-regulated age, where most outdoor entertainment is corporate or state-sponsored, they are an outpost of freedom – freedom from exams, from parents and from authority. Ten years of Blair has seen a shift from the British idea that everything is allowed which is not prohibited to a world where official permission is needed for everything, with a fee to pay to a functionary – an insidious erosion of freedom which is cumulatively quite as damaging as Blair’s more defined attacks on liberty.

Swim at your own risk

A correspondent suggests that the garish red sign of which I complained (Signs of danger in the University Parks) might be less offensive if it read “Swim at your own risk”.

Indeed it would, though a literal-minded pen-pusher (and all pen-pushers are literal-minded, if “mind” is the right word) would object that some might construe this as an encouragement to swim, or even a command.