Not only do we have paved areas around the Millennium Park, we now have paving at the foot of Wellington Hill, Patriotic Street. and Payn Street. How many more of these crazy schemes are going to be carried out, and how many more people killed? Doing away with pavements and obliterating all barriers between roads and pavements just confuses people and leads to accidents and near accidents. Cars and people do not mix. You cannot have ‘shared spaces’. Roads are roads and pedestrians are pedestrians, the two cannot mix.
Already, the majority of pedestrians fail to look when crossing roads, more interested in their mobile phones or listening to music than being aware of the traffic around them. Few pay any attention to crossing lights. I doubt if they have ever learnt the Green Cross code or learnt how to cross safely as we were taught, and they are teaching their children their own dangerous habits. Blurring road markings simply encourages them to think that they can treat traffic with impunity.
Due to the fact that our Constable is so vehemently anti-car, we have roads closed, pavements widened and pedestrian crossings every few yards, causing chaos and bringing traffic to a halt. St Helier is not a twee visitor attraction like St Malo, it is a busy, working town and needs the traffic to be able to flow freely and easily and must not become choked up with cars spewing out fumes over the pedestrians as the cars are gridlocked and going nowhere.
Through-routes like New Street should be opened up, and roads like Broad Street and Charing Cross should not be snarled up with traffic-slowing measures and myriad pedestrian crossings every few yards.
The state of traffic in St Helier is diabolical, and introducing a speed limit of 20 mph within the ring road would mean the death of our town. Those who speed in town should be punished by enforcing existing laws, and cameras used at junctions to catch the red-light jumpers, but slowing down the traffic even further than it is with coloured paving and multiple crossings will kill the town stone dead. People need to drive into town and deliveries need to be made. We cannot turn back time and banish the car.
