Richard Baum

I have once again been in discussions with the Council over their promised improvements to the ludicrous junction at St Ann’s Road and Bury New Road, which would doubtless take home the gold medal in the “Most Ridiculously Dangerous Road Junctions in Bury” competition, narrowly beating the one up the road at Hilton Lane.

As a reminder, this is the junction with two out-of-sync sets of traffic lights within 10 yards of each other, more or less forcing cars to plough into other cars like some kind of Council-sponsored box car derby. God knows why it was put there in the first place, and we’ve been campaigning to get it removed and reduced to one set for the last year. It may indeed be safer for pedestrians, but only because they’re glued to the spot in horror watching the passing cars career into each other.

We were promised that the work would be done to rectify the problem by the end of the financial year, but on chasing this up last week I was informed that the Council now  only “hoped to start” the work by the end of March. Let me say now that any delay to this work would be utterly unacceptable. The people of Prestwich suffer enough with filthy streets and pot-holed roads as the forgotten back-end of Bury. I am not going to let lethal road crossings join the list of Prestwich projects on the doomed list. I am sick of Council officers sitting idly on their thumbs as far as Prestwich is concerned, whilst I say the same things to them over and over again.

This junction should have been altered months ago, but was put off whilst they cancelled all road schemes for the duration of the Met line closure. That was fair enough, but you’d think they’d prioritise the backlog, would you not? Well, the line has been open for four months now and we’ve still got nowhere. I challenged the Council on their latest back-track, and am told that they do in fact hope to have contractors on site by March. But this really does need to be prioritised because it’s been put off long enough and I don’t want one of my constituents to be the next person sideswiped by a driver utterly flummoxed by the world’s most idiotic set of lights.

Rick