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Newmarket Road fatal collision sign, Norwich (credit: Peter Silburn)Cycling campaigners slam “outrageous” council plan to hold road scheme meetings in secret, arguing it will “erode trust”
Cycling activists in Norwich have hit out at a recent council decision to hold discussions about road and transport schemes behind closed doors, claiming that the perceived lack of transparency will “erode public trust”, less than a month after three cyclists died in the space of a week on Norfolk roads.
Earlier this week, Norfolk County Council decided to disband a committee of councillors which met publicly to discuss highways projects, replacing it instead with a steering group that will hold meetings in private, the Eastern Daily Press reports.
The contentious decision, made by Graham Plant, the Conservative-run council’s cabinet member for highways, infrastructure, and transport, has been defended by members of the local authority, who claim that meetings of the Transport for Norwich joint committee were all too often mired in controversy. One meeting in May was abandoned after Labour city councillor Ian Stutely walked out, along with the rest of his party, in protest at how the advisory committee was being run.
That particular ill-fated meeting was itself the result of blunders on the part of the joint committee concerning protocol, after it emerged last year that councillors gave the go-ahead to a range of roads projects, despite not technically having the power to do so.
The new steering group, which replaces the joint committee, will be made up of members drawn from the county council, city council, and two district councils. While it will not meet in public, the council says Mr Plant’s decisions – the result of the committee’s recommendations – will be published.
However, that concession has not proved enough for the Norwich Cycling Campaign, which criticised the new arrangements and argued that “transparency” in how roads schemes are concocted is necessary for vulnerable road users to have “faith” in policy makers.
“It is crucial that councillors have the opportunity to suggest amendments to proposed schemes and for the public to see that a proper discussion is taking place in the open for all to see,” the campaign’s chair, Peter Silburn, told the Eastern Daily Press.
“As a campaign group, we rely on transparency to have faith in the process.”
Silburn’s criticism has also been echoed by a number of opposition councillors.
“It is outrageous and it is taking accountability even further away from the local people affected,” Emma Corlett, deputy leader of the county council Labour group, said.
“These road and transport schemes should be open to more public scrutiny, not less. Doing things in secret only undermines public confidence in local government.”
Ben Price, the leader of the Greens in the county council, added: “Following a series of poorly-designed traffic schemes, the need for transparent decision-making with local involvement is very clear.
“It is very disappointing that instead of allowing local people to have a meaningful say on what they need for local transport and the road changes that affect them, the Conservatives are taking decisions behind closed doors.”
> Locals demand safety action after two cyclists killed in collision on "treacherous" road
The criticism of the council’s decision to hold important roads meetings away from the public gaze comes less than a month after councillors and campaigners united in calling for better protective measures for cyclists in the county, such as segregated bike lanes and 20mph speed limits, after three cyclists died in the space of a week on Norfolk roads. Three other people were also killed riding their bikes in the county earlier this year.
Responding to the most recent wave of tragic deaths on Norfolk’s roads, Liam Calvert, Green councillor for Wensum ward, said: “Another death on our streets is a tragedy that will ripple across communities for years to come. So we are calling for three major areas of change.
“Firstly, we need high-quality routes physically separating those on bikes from the dangers posed by vehicles. Secondly, we want to see urban street limits of 20mph, especially where full segregation has not yet been achieved, with a significantly increased enforcement of these limits. Finally, a reduction in traffic on smaller residential streets where people live, so that they can leave their homes without the safety concerns that high traffic volumes create.
“People shouldn’t have to fear for the safety of loved ones as they make everyday trips across the city.”
However, the county council’s highways chief Plant defended the local authority’s record for providing safe infrastructure for cyclists and vulnerable road users, arguing that the council is “constantly working to improve highway safety”.
Plant also said that the council was in the final stages of implementing a £66m Transforming Cities project and was recently awarded £3m in active travel funding from the government, though Green councillor Calvert claimed that the local authority still wasn’t taking the issue “seriously enough”.
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
Latest Comments
- rogerwb 1 hour 53 sec ago
Generalisations are valid in this case; there are enough boomers with negative attitudes to young people to be able to block good things like this....
- mattw 5 hours 59 min ago
This risks turning me into a hanger and flogger....
- wtjs 9 hours 59 min ago
In SE London, psychopath riders are the majority of people on bicycles Oh dear! another festive stealth anti-cyclist ☃️
- wtjs 10 hours 4 min ago
Well, you know the BMW drivers' saying: knock that house (hospital, social housing, care home, hospital...) down, could save 30 seconds on the trip!
- Spangly Shiny 11 hours 39 min ago
I had the pleasure of owning two of the featured builders here, in my history. When I joined the Army in 1971, I took with me my curly Hetchins:...
- Username 12 hours 44 min ago
Could Siobhán paint it red and noone would notice it?
- Spangly Shiny 1 day 3 hours ago
To paraphrase Field of Dreams, "Build it right and they will come: and use it!"
- Rendel Harris 1 day 5 hours ago
And a Happy Christmas to you, road.cc staff!
- Rendel Harris 1 day 6 hours ago
The odds of not being able to find a single pedestrian - just one, note, "any pedestrian" - in an area containing more than about ten of them who...
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11 comments
Our [ Tory ] council promote car use as the only real way to travel in Walsall, they love bikes as a leisure thing, helping obesity and mental health but you have to drive to the park to use the place of course. Ignoring complaints about pavement parking and the like.... refusing to even answer questions about clearing cars out of cycle lanes despite making a big scene about repainting some pointless lines. Absolute charlatans and cartards with only a couple of exceptions.
So an incompetent tory administration (is there any other kind?) decides to hold their meetings in private to hide their incompetence. That's democracy for you! Not sure how it could erode trust, though, as nobody trusts a tory.
Is it even legal? Surely the public have a right to know how such fundamentally important decisions are made, not just be told the result of biased councillors, who have already demonstrated their dire incompetence.
If I lived there my councillors would get no peace.
A small lecksher on the meanings of trust and faith might help.
To have trust in something or someone is to have historically acquired evidence enabling a judgement about their likely future behaviours, attitudes and other manifestations concerning various things the somethings or someones habitually do or have a responsibilty for.
For example, I trust Len the Fish and Becky the Fruit to, respectively, sell me fish and fruit that is of good quality and fair price, as they have done so a hundred times before. I also trust that a certain acquintance will exagerate or make stuff up in attempts to get me to do what he wants, as he's done so dozens of times before.
Generally, you can trust that Toryspivs will attempt to make policies and decisions that benefit them and their pals at the expense of citizens at large - those they supposedly represent - as they've done so for decades, with plenty of evidence to demonstrate the fact.
*********
Faith is an assumption of faux-trust in the absence of any historical evidence, one way or another, that a something or someone will behave as they say they will in the future. If we meet someone unknown, we tend to intially have faith that they'll behave towrds us within the basic tenets of civilised behaviour, which will eventually become a trust they genrally will, if they do so; or a trust that they'll do the opposite if they habitually do so.
Faith should be a strictly temporary means of agreeing to allow a something or someone to proceed, with evidence of their actual behaviours gradually accumulating post-events to form a pukka trust that they'll behave as we come to see them behave over time.
***********
These Toryspivs on the council are wanting to make decisions in secret; and for the citizens to have faith that they'll do so in good faith (that is, do what they claim they'll do - make policies good for the citizens they represent) ..... probably so that the Toryspivs can make policies not in the interests of the citizens, in a fashion that sees such policies established before the citizens realise it and form a pukka trust that Toryspiv will generally not represent their interests.
The fatal flaw in this Toryspiv tactic is that most of the citizens with any sense have already formed a trust that the Toryspivs will lie, cheat, feather their own nests and generally trash things for profit or reasons of ideological dogma.
Toryspivs have long ago lost the means to successfully expect anyone to have faith in them when they promise to be good, having acquired a wide-spread reputation of a kind that means sensible citizens will trust only that these pinstriped criminal types will continue to do what they've always done - broken Britain and every part of it to serve themselves and their big business and finance familiars, justifying the trashing with a ridiculous idealogy of long-defunct economics and class prejudices.
We must be using different units if you think that is small. Being succinct is a useful skill.
Being succinct is usually a means to reduce a complex matter to a meaningless, useless, ambiguous or plain stupid soundbite - one of the many curses lying upon post-modern folk reduced to pseudo-communicating with nothing but cheep-cheep-cheeps. But I suppose that in a world of cheepers, cheeping must be "a useful skill" - although the products that such a shallow wordcraft produce seem rather mundane.
The "succinct" posts remind me of those amateur Christmas cards made of pre-produced & glued bits of cliched paper cut-out shapes stuck on a bit of 2-colour thin card, perhaps sprinkled with some plastic glitter that immediately falls off; and inclusive of a hackneyed twee phrase that makes one cringe when read.
Sadly, the succinct writings often represent even more succinct "thinking".
There's really no need to keep proving that prolix isn't good and succinct is.
Yes, it's always more complicated than that, but ... "It's the audience, stupid". Often these are humans. If they left or dozed off your pearls were wasted.
As poets, editors and (alas) politicians know - quantity's easy, quality not.
Perhaps it's "right" that verse lingers, and the Gettysburg Address is more quoted than the Gettysburgh Oration?
But of course there is a balance to be struck. Had Lincoln said, for example, "Thanks for coming, now can we get back to the war" it would certainly have been brief, but perhaps not quite so effective or memorable.
But there again I've never been accused of using one word where three would do, so perhaps I'm not best placed to judge!
Yes.
My own informing principle is: why use a picture when 2000 words will do?
But many do find their eye and brain sliding into a neutral idle as they get to the 12th word of any sentence. Their gaze loses focus; the brain goes clack-clack-clack as it fails to engage one cog with another. They flick the page, to find a more exciting cartoon or perhaps some novel swearing to stimulate their jaded interest.
Perhaps "succinct" now just means, "Use a string of currently fashionable trigger words + a sarky cartoon"? Even soundbites are now too tedious to parse, it seems.
No. The difference between succinct and prolix is that the former is effective.