Useless plod.

[Steve Walker]

Yes. Some years ago, a cyclist was found unconscious on the main road here (he later died). They closed off the road to investigate, as no-one knew whether he'd simply fallen off, had a seizure or been hit by a vehicle.

I went to speak to the police, as the closure was just past our residential street and all the traffic, including buses, trucks and lots of cars were reaching the road closed sign and turning down our road, despite it being far too narrow, having many parked cars and our whole house shaking as trucks passed, plus there having already been a number of sewer collapses, without so many heavy vehicles.

All it would have taken was for the road closed sign to be moved back

200 metres, to where traffic could have used a large and much more suitable road instead.

Despite at least half a dozen of them just standing around chatting, the response I got was the police being totally uncaring about the problems of many large vehicles using our totally unsuitable road and instead being critical of me for suggesting it was a problem, just stating that "It was a serious incident" and "they were busy".

They simply had no thought at all about the obvious place to close the road and the damaging results of doing it right at the incident site instead.

A short while later, we were quoted 15K to repair our collapsed sewer, under the road. Luckily, it turned out that our neighbour's kitchen shared our sewer and, as it was pre-1937, it was the responsibility of United Utilities to put it right.

[Roland Perry]

In message <sjt387$sgt$ [e-mail], at 22:57:27 on Sat, 9 Oct 2021, Steve Walker [e-mail]> remarked:

A couple of years ago a car came off the road into someone's front garden, near where I live. It was just round a blind bend, albeit on a

30mph road. I discovered this, because there was a short queue of traffic clearly going nowhere and I could just see about see reflections of blue lights.

So I got out and walked the three or four car lengths so I could see round the bend, and there was a recovery vehicle blocking the road, plus a police car pulled across the also road blocking it.

I took a quick photo of the scene, and the policeman whose car it was approached and said I shouldn't have done that. I'm not aware of any law forbidding it. There were no dead bodies laying around, for example. So I walked back to my car while he wasn't exactly chasing me, but was keeping an eye on me.

Knowing the road would be blocked for some time, I started doing a three-point turn, and he ran up to me and banged on the driver's window. He then remonstrated that doing a three point turn so close to a blind bend was very dangerous.

Even though the road was closed by his car (let alone the recovery vehicle).

And I remember my driving instructor on the topic of blind bends, saying that one should drive round them in the anticipation of the possibility of finding a brick wall across the road (or in practice perhaps a lorry that's shed its load, or vehicle parked, or even, someone doing a three point turn).

If anything, of course, he was the one parked across the road just round a blind bend - and no temporary signage erected.

Fast forward to about a month ago, and a different blind bend, this time on a country road with a 50mph speed limit. And just round that was yet another vehicle (a white van this time) in someone's garden, and a police car blocking the road so a recovery vehicle could do his business. This time they *had* erected a temporary warning sign on the approach to the blind bend. The problem being, that sign was still there three days later!

"Police Slow" they say. Many a true word...

[Jonathan]

Some years ago on an A Road, I eventually passed a police cr parked on the other side of the road. The policment were directing the traffic but there was nothing that I could see as to why they had decided to stop there and cause a traffic jam.

Jonathan