Democracy at work

For us folks living in the western half of Epsom, Malden Rushett is our way out into the wider world. The junction we go through to get to Claremont, Wisley, Exeter, Tunbridge Wells and other important places. A junction which was probably a real pain for those who wanted to use it during the morning or evening rush hours.

Always a good topic of conversation at the bar of pubs, it has now been the subject of improvement works for just about three months. Given that the junction has been at least partially closed for much of this period, causing much disruption (not least to footfall at the nearby Chessington Garden Centre), people are starting to ask whether it was all worth while.

So I thought it was time to take a peek and instead of hanging my usual right at Horton Lane, carried on to said junction, where there was plenty going on. Cappagh was not going to make the published end date of 27th March by a long chalk. Penalty, penalty!

I mentioned chain saw action at reference 1, action which now looks decidedly amateurish compared with what Cappagh can manage, with considerable devastation along the south side of Rushett Lane, that is to say the road running between Epsom and the junction. Lots of trees large and small swept away. Not at all obvious to what end. Is it all a plot to soften us up for road widening, at the expense of green belt?

Get to the junction, walk all around it and decide that the main change must have been the widening of the exit from Rushett Lane, that is to say where the large white lorry is in the illustration (taken from google maps). Given all the open land to the north of the junction why did they not make a roundabout? I started to think that it was all a bit feeble for all the disruption involved and the large amount of money that must have been spent.

Home via the water tower in the new housing estate - which does, I have to say, look rather well as such places go, with lots of handsome buildings and lots of handsome mature trees. Contractors occupying the lower stories of the water tower, pigeons occupying the upper stories and no sign of any of the falcons noticed at reference 4. But a chap working nearby assured me that the falcons had been there the previous week; he knew because of the amount of squawking. Presumably pigeons do not bother about falcons unless they are in sight - and perhaps even not then unless they look hungry. I read somewhere that zebras will happily graze next to lions which they know have just killed. He also said that there had been chaps with big cameras, so taking the two points together it seemed likely that the falcons were not far away.

Once home asked google all about Malden Rushett to find that TFL had put lots of stuff up on their website (see reference 2). There had been an elaborate consultation. They had thought about a roundabout and decided against. What they had done, was widen both the Rushett Lane exit (which I had noticed) and the Fairoak Lane exit (which I had not). This meant that all four arms of the cross roads now had four lanes each, two in each direction, and the idea was that with cunning traffic lights, flow should be considerably improved. Left turns out of the junction should be considerably speeded up. The only catch being that it was not possible to widen the northbound exit at the southwestern corner, there being a house in the way, with the result that those two lanes remain a bit pinched.

But thinking about it again this morning, I thought that maybe they knew what they were at. Maybe they were accomplishing the sort of traffic mixing and matching that might otherwise have been achieved with a roundabout. It was all a question of giving it the right sort of managed area in which to concourse. With the difference from railway stations, that cars are lethal instruments while passengers, generally speaking, are not.

The only thing missing to my mind was costs. There was a measured and balanced discussion of all the options, but they chose not to include the costs, costs which must have been taken into account in coming to the decision. Why did they not publish the costs where I could find them? Is it not about time that the Great British public was educated in the matter of allocating scarce resources to plentiful problems? Without which they are not going to move off the first and untenable base of saying that life and death decisions should not be made behind closed doors by the bean counters.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/chain-saw-action.html.

Reference 2: https://consultations.tfl.gov.uk/streets/malden-rushett.

Reference 3: http://www.cappagh.co.uk/.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/wartocracy-resumed-or-wartological-tweet.html.