MacDonald Road Safety Measures

Friday 16th July

As we all know by now, the country has a massive debt to clear. Personally, I believe that the 'repayment' of that debt will be ably assisted by the recovery of market forces, income generation & subsequent taxation and by the necessary and ineviatble inflation into the future. Lets not forget that the country generally runs with an albeit smaller budget deficit and had had war debts dating back to 1945 and 1918 that have only recently been repaid: 'UK Limited' still has a great covenant for investment going into the future.
However, the Exchequer still needs to strive to come back to a manageable level of debt and thats part of the reason that cuts still need to be made to a public service engorged by 13 years of Labour control.

Surrey County Council has a budget to balance too. Putting to one side the inequiatble way money has flowed out of the county over recent years - 80% of the business rate take for example is NOT spent in Surrey - cuts have already been made centrally and so the County has had to take action to re-address the new balances.

The result of this is that a number of the things that the County has responsibility for will suffer in the short term. You will no doubt have read about Michael Gove's unfortunate announcement on school buildings for example - which is frankly not a positive note - but I believe that if we accept that cuts are necessary, we would all rather see those sort of cuts rather than in the departments that care for vulnerable children, just as another example.

Elsewhere, local government in general is seeking efficiences in all areas. From phone bills all the way to a review of member allowances. Roads are likely to suffer too. The decrepit state of some of Surrey's road network isn't likely to get any better in the short term. I think that I've written elsewhere that there is a serious backlog of maintenance and some works programmes are likely to be curtailed for the next year.

So where am I going with this. Well, I'm starting at home with an element of road safety. You will have read earlier on this blog about the 1989 Jag that I've used over the last 12 months as a workhorse and this week came a crunch decision about whether to keep the rusty old bucket as it faced an MOT. Incredibly, £100 of welding was all that was required to keep it on the road, which helped, and a subsequently low insurance renewal didn't hurt either. However, the killer punch was one of road safety. I've parked the car on the road outside our house many times and it has a demonstrably calming effect on the traffic. Rather than belt past our place - on the Lightwater MacDonald Road M3 rat run as it happens - traffic is forced to stop, or at least slow and carefully negotiate around the parked vehicle.
As such, the old has become a de facto traffic calming measure.
At least until the next MOT anyway.




PS - I've just had the road duty renewal notices on our family vehicles. Interestingly and surprisingly in fact, the old Jag engine produces less harmful gases than a state of the art diesel, with the result that there is a £80 tax differential between the two vehicles over the year.