Eastfield Road

Last week's coverage of Eastfield Road raised a comment by kebablog

I'm often on that road, don't usually have a problem with that particular car. The one that parks on the corner by the garage or the massive caravan thing poking out are much worse.


Odd also how there is no mention of the 3-4 bicycles that are often chained up at the bottom of the road, between them all being shackled to the railings and lamppost they manage to block the whole pavement. I make sure to give them a nice kick on the way past.

Well, we always respond to customer feedback. This weekend the caravan looks OK, but yes, there is a van on the corner

However, as this is a quiet road for walking down, the van WF05YFG is not inconveniencing anyone.

The other side of the road, yes, the bicycles and the bins are a problem. Especially with that little street sign thing making it hard to get round.

If you look closely at the bikes, you can see that the back wheel of one is toast and these thing are not in active use. They are possibly abandoned by the previous years' students -who have moved onto proper jobs with proper transport- and are now left to clog up our streets.

This is another argument in favour of bicycle registration and taxing: you'd be able to recognise an abandoned bicycle by its expired license and so remove it immediately, the way the DVLA clamp cars. No printed/human readable tags though, nowhere for them. RFID tags embedded into the frames. Easy to scan, easy to track, a nice source of data.

This also shows another potential problem with the cycle city program. If the council want's to get people out and about on their bicycles, that means getting the bicycles out, which means that residents may not want to carry them up stairs -parking on the pavement is the remaining option.It's bad enough with their bike stands taking up space on shopping streets, even the back roads will suffer.