Angie Booth, business owner of Valu-4-U in East Cowes, shares this response to made by Cllr Julia Baker-Smith’s email to council leader, Dave Stewart, last week over the Cowes floating bridge. Ed
First of all, councillors and officers don’t need to be qualified engineers to deduce that forcing pedestrians for the Cowes floating bridge to queue on East Cowes’ north pavement is dangerous. And how many advanced qualifications does one need to notice that there’s only one ground level sheltered pedestrian hold – not two – one on each side on the floating bridge?
In fact, the public warned the Council about many potential problems with design, health and safety, etc. over the last seven years, particularly 2013-2014.
No excuse
There are no excuses for such basic flaws and violations. Who approved the design that leaves people on disability scooters out in the rain because the pedestrian hold’s opening isn’t wide enough for relatively standard wheelchairs, scooters and prams? Who thought that an open-air, double decker bus model was the most efficient, safest and fastest method of exiting the bridge?
All you need to imagine is the common experience – how long it takes an overcrowded double decker bus to exit through one door, and to load a single decker bus on a rainy day at capacity and with prams in the way (‘move on down the bus’!)
Pedestrian charges
Then there is the issue of the pedestrian charges that do not raise the profits pretended in the 2014 Budget – £400,000 additional profit, because whoever poorly calculated that didn’t include expenditures and loss of revenue like ticket collectors, the IWC paying pensioners’ bus pass journeys going around, and lost revenue just from pedestrians not using the bridge just as much.
The “Council” still isn’t counting some of this!
Fault of specification
This isn’t just about the prows and the cars scraping. That is 100% a design flaw beyond Councillors’ and Officers’ expertise. But the other very many problems fall at the feet of whoever articulated the specifications, whoever discussed the design, and ultimately those who viewed and verbally approved and/or legally approved the final design.
Where was the public consultation? And why did the Councillors and Officers alike not listen to the people, including engineers, who did give advice and knowledge and expressed concerns and solutions?
We were ignored.
‘Red Funnel plan’ not an excuse
Regarding the East Cowes’ pavement, the ‘Red Funnel plan’ is not an excuse. That is an active road even with the Red Funnel plan or not, and no one should plan a design exclusively around a plan that has not been approved anyway.
The problem is forced queuing and requiring too many people to stand, walk onto and walk off of in a tiny space simultaneously next to a dangerous road.
Heading for political and legal trouble
Get rid of the charges, go back to letting people stand where they wish, and talk with us – and the rest of the public – for some advice on how to fix this, and where compromises can and can’t be made.
If you (“the Council”) try to fix all of this yourself without proper public input, you may be in both political and legal trouble.
