A blog by Luke Akehurst about politics, elections, and the Labour Party - With subtitles for the Hard of Left. Just for the record: all the views expressed here are entirely personal and do not necessarily represent the positions of any organisations I am a member of.

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Pavement Politics



This picture probably doesn't mean anything to anyone except the residents of Stevens Avenue E9 and the neighbouring Morningside Estate but I'm very proud of it.

Stevens Avenue used to be - due to historical accident - an un-adopted road (i.e. not owned by the Council) cratered with potholes, unlit and unsafe.

After a campaign by residents and the three of us as ward councillors, we've suceeded in getting the council to take responsibility for it and repave the pavements, resurface the road and install proper lighting. The work is in progress as shown in the picture. This will vastly improve life for the residents and provide a safer route through to Morning Lane for residents of the Morningside Estate.

You can't get much more pavement politics than that.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Luke

Well done, but I'm envious. We have hundreds of unadopted roads in Calderdale (well, 1600 according to the Council) and as a result they cannot risk adopting any of them because of opening the floodgates.

It's one of the issues where there is a real north / south divide - for historical reasons, there area areas of West and South Yorkshire with hundreds of unadopted roads. When I was a councillor in Leicestershire it was a pretty unusual problem.

7:19 pm, October 12, 2006

 
Blogger Luke Akehurst said...

Ditto in Castle Point where I was PPC - about 2/3 of the roads on Canvey Island are unadopted.

9:25 am, October 13, 2006

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Excellent - pavements for people. No council should be afraid of adopting roads because they have the power to charge the residents for installing the road and a good new road should last between 25 and 50 years.

4:35 pm, October 18, 2006

 

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