There is nothing more boring than potholes. I remember that from my own days as a parish councillor. It saps the spirit every time the subject comes up, makes you wish you could be anywhere other than this damned meeting.
How much more exciting it must have felt to have been the councillors in Cambridge who in 2020 gave Britain its first Dutch-style roundabout – a £2.3 million remodelling of an existing city roundabout with three concentric colour-coded circles. On the inside there is the road, outside of which stands a reddish cycle path, flanked by a footway with dashes of pink. It is an object of municipal beauty, if you like that sort of thing: a ground-breaking experiment in how to manage and merge three very different types of traffic.
Trouble is, it also seems to be a good deal less safe than the bog standard roundabout that preceded it. In the three years before its construction, there were six minor accidents at the junction. In the three years since, there have been ten collisions, three of them serious.
I can’t say I am surprised. I know the junction. Every time I use it I have a foreboding that something dreadful is going to happen, though I am never quite sure what. That is its problem: the proliferation of lines and colours creates confusion.
Theoretically, there are clearly defined rights of way. Cars give way to bicycles and pedestrians, both when entering and leaving the roundabout. Bicycles give way to pedestrians, both when entering and leaving, while pedestrians have the right of way, at least they do as long as they stay within the narrow footway that is designated for them and make the necessary diversions to reach the zebra crossings. But if you are driving it is all too easy to notice the zebra crossings without registering the cycle paths that lie in front of them. Cyclists, meanwhile, think they have the right of way and so don’t notice the zebra crossings they encounter a few yards later.
The irony is that while £2.3 million was frittered on this scheme, the state of the roads in Cambridge and the surrounding area has never been worse. Everywhere you go the tarmac is riven with deep and lethal potholes. A few weeks ago a friend, cycling home in the dark, plunged into one – so he thinks, as he suffered amnesia in his subsequent fall – and fractured his skull. According to Freedom of Information requests, Cambridgeshire has the second largest number of complaints about potholes of any county, after Cornwall.
Next up for Cambridge are – supposedly – a tram system that will tunnel under the city in places and a guided busway that will plough through a century-old orchard. That is on top of the existing guided busways on which a couple of cyclists have died in the past two years as they have fallen from the adjacent cycle path.
But will the condition of existing roads and footways improve? I doubt it, not when it is so much more interesting for councillors to go off on flights of fancy regarding a metro system with a proposed Underground-style map. Filling potholes, one gets the impression, is rather beneath our jumped up local government.
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