Kilian Bourke

There has been some progress on Mill Road’s accident reduction scheme in recent months; in particular, it looks likely that the broadway will finally receive new streetlights.   At last!  Catherine Smart and Sarah Ellis-Miller have been campaigning for these for many years.

Less welcome is news that the Conservatives are only planning to spend £200,000 of the allocated £400,000 on Mill Road this year.  This wouldn’t be a problem in itself, but they have refused to guarantee that the remainder of Mill Road’s funding will be made available next year.

My concern is that, given the mess the County’s finances are in, budgetary pressures will result in this money being siphoned off to pay for other accident schemes or deficits.   With a £5m overspend in adult care, the soaring cost of the Guided Busway to the taxpayer and the crisis in primary school places requiring emergency funding, I am worried that this money will quietly disappear.

Mill Road has one of the worst accident records in the county—127 accidents in the last four years.   Moreover, the worst accident black spots, like the junctions at Devonshire Road and Argyle Street, have not been addressed by the initial improvements.

It needs every penny of the £400,000 it was promised.

Kilian

Your Romsey councillors were furious when the resurfacing work in Romsey this Summer didn’t include the cycle-friendly gullies that we were promised, and we have been lobbying the County Council hard to deliver on its promise.

Finally, the Council has agreed to replace the existing gullies, which are often sunk into the ground, and can cause bicycles to slip in wet conditions, with cycle-friendly versions. These are carefully tailored and seamlessly integrated into the road surface, so that it is possible to cycle straight over them without noticing the difference from the regular road surface.

This is particularly helpful on a road like Mill Road, where space is at a premium, and cyclists often find themselves kerb-hugging, even though this shouldn’t be necessary.

The County Tories have been giving the City a bad deal on Highways improvements for the last dozen years or so, but I’d like to thank the officers for putting necessity above politics on this occasion. Their decency deserves recognition.

After a long, arduous and, all told, pretty tedious campaign, the County Council has kindly given in to pressure from your local Lib Dem team to have the pavements on Mill Road repaired.

They are in an awful state. On one occasion I witnessed an old lady using a zimmerframe trip up outside the post office and fall flat on her face, because of a protruding slab.

The Council has allocated £9,000 to repairing the worst parts of our pavements from Perne Road to East Road. In particular, I have requested them to sort out the areas surrounding the old persons’ home by the Post Office, the stretch around the Black Cat Cafe, and some patches in Brookfields as well.

If you have any suggestions for other parts of Mill Road where the pavements need resurfacing, please email me at: kilian.bourke@gmail.com

Please contribute to the consultation on Mill Road’s accident reduction scheme by filling in the online questionairre. You can access it by clicking on this link.

The main points I put in the “comments” section were:

1/ I want the 20mph speed limit to encompass ALL of Mill Road, not just part of it.

2/ I support cycle-and-bus-friendly “raised crossings” (which pedestrianise the space) but not ugly speed cushions.

3/ The materials used need to be both attractive - to enhance, not degrade, the environment - and durable - so as not to collapse over time, as on Catharine Street.

4/ Removing the lines in the middle of the road is a good idea, but double yellow lines should be placed between lanes on the railway bridge, to prevent overtaking.

Kilian

Despite widespread opposition, Tesco opens on Mill Road today.

Having been opposed to the store from the beginning on the grounds of its unsuitability for the site and the unworkability of its dangerous delivery system, I find this depressing.

The dangerousness of the delivery system was remarked upon by the government inspector who rejected Tesco’s appeal to extend the store. He said “the use of the loop (through Catharine Street and Sedgwick Street) and rear yard by Tesco lorries would pose unacceptable risks to highway safety … and would pose a significant increase in the risk of accidents, damage and injury to vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians round the loop.”

We are thus in the extraordinary situation of being able to see that the delivery system would be dangerous, and having central government confirm this, but with no power to prevent it from going ahead.

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The Liberal Democrats have revealed that Cambridgeshire taxpayers have paid out £2.9 million in compensation payouts for accidents on the county’s pavements over the last five years.

Cambridgeshire’s Conservative run County Council is ranked 94th highest out of 99 English councils for the amount paid out on pavement compensation claims over the last five years, according to information gathered by the Liberal Democrats under the Freedom of Information Act. Indeed, this year’s figure of £707,000 in pavement compensation is the third worst of the councils surveyed.

Neighbouring county councils have fared better: Essex, with twice the population of Cambridgeshire paid out only £1.5 million; the figure for Hertfordshire was £1.3 million and for Suffolk a mere £267,000.

These figures are extremely worrying. It’s ridiculous that we are all paying out on compensation instead of investing money in the maintenance of our highways. This is just the tip of the iceberg - the state of cycle lanes, footpaths and road surfaces is often very poor as well.

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I was re-elected to the County Council in June.  Thank you for your support, or for voting at all. There’s so much negativity over the MP’s expenses scandal that turnouts were depressed across the country; it’s great that voter turnout increased in Romsey.

The results were:

Kilian Bourke (Lib Dem) 34.4% 829
Chris Freeman (Labour) 20.46% 493
Tom Woodcock (Independent) 17.63% 425
Phil Richards (Green) 12.32% 297
Sam Barker (Conservative) 11.2% 270
Marjorie Barr (UKIP) 3.98% 96

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It’s been a busy couple of months for me, especially with the County Council election approaching,  but apart from campaigning I’ve been working hard on other fronts: 

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Good news.  At last night’s East Area Committee it was decided that funding would be made available to plant two large London Plane trees (see picture right) on the expanded grass verges on Cromwell Road.

We have been pushing for this for nearly six months now, so we are very happy it is going to happen.  “Trial holes” to assess the potential for additional tree planting on Cromwell Road will also be going ahead, although this will be part of the Accident Reduction Scheme road-works.

Our other bids for environmental improvements in the ward have not been unsuccesful, but have been put on a waiting list on the East Area Committee.  (Each of the four wards was allowed to select one scheme to go ahead, with further ones being postponed until the next such meeting.)

Mill Road’s “hanging baskets” of flowers are also on their way, hopefully in the coming weeks.

Good news.  Having secured the extensive resurfacing of Mill Road, Cllr Nichola Harrison (Petersfield) and I have been pressing the County Council Highways Authority to accelerate the process.  Although the exact date has yet to be confirmed Senior Officers have assured me that the works will now be commencing this summer - possibly as early as June.

This is another significant win, although I am still pushing for the scheme to be extended to encompass the junction of Mill Road and Vinery Road, much of Brookfields, and the junction with Brooks/Perne Road, where there is considerable disintegration and sinkage.

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