As I wrote last month, Milton Keynes City Council makes all the right noises about looking after our grid roads and even building new ones. But its real agendum is somewhat different.
I think I have very adequately established in many columns here that there will never be any proper new grid roads, any new redways nor any new over- or underpasses. In recent years we have seen the council waste millions on schemes such as the now-long-unused bus-gate traffic lights near Junction 14 of the M1.
What I would like to know is just how much money was wasted, who is making money from these ludicrous projects and how can such utterly misguided spending ever be justified while the citizens of MK beg for new, safe, under- or overpasses.
All of that is bad enough but guess what? Our council now wishes to destroy several of the proper grid roads we still have left.
Many will be familiar with 40mph speed limits and, in some cases unnecessary traffic-lit crossings already imposed on roads such as parts of the V10 Brickhill Street; the Countess Way extension of H7 Chaffron Way, V7 Saxon Street near Stadium MK and V4 Watling Street where the Western Expansion Area has no grid roads despite the council’s many promises.
These limits have mostly been imposed using the excuse of road safety but the council has often then seized the opportunity to install traffic-lit pedestrian crossings too, perhaps to avoid building proper under- or overpasses as laid out in the original master plan for MK and as oft falsely promised by said council.
How is it that councils in Germany can totally rebuild beautiful medieval town centres destroyed by British bombers in the Second World War in exquisite detail and meanwhile the burghers of Milton Keynes are happy to destroy that which the people of this city have repeatedly told them we love.
One might reasonably argue that if there have been accidents on these roads while the speed limits were 60mph or 70mph (depending on whether single or dual carriageways) then perhaps other safety measures might have allowed them to keep traffic moving expeditiously, such as speed cameras, or other methods be used to make crossing by pedestrians safe. However, traffic moving at speed would not allow building right up to the road as we have already seen in Countess Way or installing traffic-lit crossings instead of under- or overpasses on the V10 or V4.
But now Milton Keynes City Council has launched another irrelevant consultation targeting several more grid roads and other road sections. They have the bit between their teeth now and wish to impose yet more speed restrictions and traffic lights, turning the wonderful, much copied internationally MK grid road system into a mere shadow of its brilliant self.
MKCC has now unveiled its proposed traffic order for the H5 Portway between V2 Tattenhoe Street and V3 Fulmer Street. The new disablements include yet another unnecessary 40mph speed restriction. It also proposes to slow H7 Chaffron Way at the Phoenix Drive junction at Leadenhall by installing more traffic lights as well as at H9 Groveway at the junction of Simpson Drive.
Oh… but the vandals have not finished yet… The council also proposes to slow the heartbeat of MK’s traffic by imposing speed limits on Haversham High Street – where a 20mph limit is planned – and on part of Old Wolverton Road where the council wants to reduce the speed limit to 40mph.
Forgive me if I once more mention Germany – this time one of its most famous philosophers and a major figure in German Idealism: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (born 1770 in Stuttgart, died 1831 in Berlin). It occurs to me that this all rather smacks of his Hegelian Dialectic which explains how, through an apparent search for truth and consensus, the unscrupulous in power can get what they want by frightening the public into demanding change and then offer the solution that they set out to achieve at the very start.
Reduced to its simplest form the Hegelian Dialectic could be summed up as Problem; Reaction; Solution. The “agent of change” employing the strategy – in this case MKCC – creates the problem or crisis, foments the reaction then attempts to control the outcome by providing the solution.
This might help to explain how MKCC is destroying every last inch of MK’s free-moving, national speed limit, grid road system but not why. For the answer, we must consider its plan to dump around 63,000 homes here between 2022-2050. This will require building on our grid roads’ wide, green, borders but only if the traffic is slowed from 70mph or 60mph to 40mph, even 20mph, and pedestrians are forced to cross ‘at grade’ risking their and their children’s lives.
Sadly, by the time you read this any chance to make comments on these schemes will have passed but we know your objections would be ignored anyway, don’t we?
Cheerio.