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TRAFFIC CENSUS
It seems that Derby City Council are
once more displaying their single inability to
govern without being pointed in the right
direction by the general public. The barking idea
to carry out a traffic survey at peak times of
entry to the city, lasting from Monday to Friday
during which selected (by whom?) roads into the
city will be coned off and motorists flagged down
by the police and council officials where they
will be REQUIRED to take part in a two minute
interview, or given a questionnaire which they
can take away and fill in later, to be returned
in a prepaid envelope, reaches new heights of
bureaucratic lunacy.
This pointless exercise is supposed to provide
the City Council with the statistics it requires
to prepare a report on the future of transport
requirements for Derby, and, in doing so, the
council is attempting to acquire extra government
money by carrying out the exercise! Councillor
Lucy Care, cabinet member for planning,
transportation and environment is quoted as
saying, "Inevitably, doing surveys like this
can cause delays, for which we apologise in
advance. However, the information people give
helps the council to plan where money should be
spent to make journeys easier whether people
drive, cycle, walk or catch the bus".
So there you have it in black and white! The
council haven't got a clue what the transport
requirements of the city they are supposed to
govern, actually are! Of course we already knew
this but, this just reaffirms that belief. Just
like all the other (now then, how shall we play
this now we have been appointed?) fiascos have
turned out, here is more deliberate, planned
chaos by the very people who were voted in to be
making life in this town (sorry, city), run more
smoothly. Just like a little child which asks
it's mother if it's behaviour is acceptable, the
council runs to the electorate to ask them if
it's alright to govern the town (sorry, city!).
This is just another example of bureaucracy out
of control. As well as all the rest of the delays
caused by road works, badly conceived traffic
control (Five Lamps, Pride Park on match days),
the City Council is taking it upon itself to stop
motorists and ask them banal questions about
where they are going! (sic!), in the hope of
receiving government funds for doing so, and,
presumably, gaining brownie points along the way.
Now it seems, they are going to apply the same
hare-brained theories to the fiasco at Five
Lamps. There seem to be two schools of thought in
local government today, both of them redundant,
and a complete waste of (us!) the taxpayer's
money.
The first of these 'we haven't got a clue, what
are we going to do now?' approaches is the
'public consultation' exercise. This is usually
leaked to the newspapers as 'The public finally
get their chance to have a say in such and such a
project'. There then follows a lengthy and
expensive (taxpayer's money!), and also probably
fruitless attempt to solve a local problem by the
most expensive and least effective way possible.
This penchant for disaster seems to spread down
from national government and permeate those
places where people take office but no longer
seem to have to have the skills and ability to
solve these problems on behalf of the people who
elected them.
Proof of this (if you have been sleeping for the
last hundred years and haven't observed it at
first hand), is the other weapon in the arsenal
of local government. Officials who are spending
OUR money and not their own! This is the
widespread activity of putting out contracts to
private consultancies to answer the questions
that they themselves no longer seem able to
answer - a prime example of this is the recently
reported survey in North Derbyshire where the
council concerned are allegedly paying out
£20,000 of public money to discover the best
places in Buxton to charge motorists for parking!
Naturally, this profligate waste of taxpayer's
money is not to try and discover how to create
wealth - an admirable entrepreneurial skill that
might deserve our support, but which seems beyond
the ken of the majority of local government
officials - it is merely yet another cynical way
of gleaning yet more tax from people. No doubt
the people whose livelihood depends on tourism
(and who therefore have to cough up more in the
way of Dane geld - sorry, business tax to the
very same council!) in such areas will not let
their displeasure go unnoticed when it next comes
round to voting.
If only by doing so it would guarantee that one
set of short sighted idiots was not swapped for
another! The £20,000 spent by that particular
council could have gone towards something
worthwhile that the people of Buxton really need,
and the question of where to initiate such
charges could have been solved by someone from
the council actually getting off their backsides
and, armed with a pencil, a clipboard and a stout
pair of shoes, spending a couple of days walking
around the town taking note of who goes where!
Meanwhile, for the rest of us in the real world,
there is the prospect of being pulled to the side
of the road by traffic police, (or queueing
behind the people who are pulled to one side),
and forcibly detained whilst we answer the sort
of questions that the City council are supposed
to have been elected to answer themselves,
especially given all the means at their disposal.
One more thing - you are not obliged by law to
divulge such information - where you go, what you
do, and who you see is still not something that
you have to ask permission off the council or the
police for!
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