More walking and cycling to preserve your Highways for you!

16 August 2021

More walking and cycling to preserve your Highways for you!

You want more spending on Highway repairs, which is certainly needed.  However, I want to remind you of the 9 Aug IPCC report that, yet again, told us of the urgency to change our priorities from the industrial growth and economic expansion that has gone on for 250 years.  It is bringing disastrous changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere to threaten all life on earth.  Yet, climate science was born in the 1850s and has been confirmed as being correct ever since.  But it has changed nothing.

We can help ourselves by showing self-restraint, by cutting back on our own movement around the planet and, by giving top priority, instead to food freight and other urgent supplies.  I am setting a fine example of what I think we all need to do, by cutting my car mileage by 50% on what I drove in 2019, keeping to 65 mph on 70 mph roads to return over 70 mpg in my diesel car - and, by cutting out all short trips.  I am not driving when I can walk, cycle electric free or, use buses and trains.

I am driving into north Worcestershire and south Shropshire instead of much further afield; then, using my 100% self-powered bike to begin the start of my walk to further cut back on my own greenhouse gas emissions.  In doing so, I have discovered the missing and closed footbridges in Shropshire that then lead to closed public rights of way on either side of the unusable/missing bridges.  The R Rea is a case in point; one Grade 2 listed canal bridge collapsing completely and, one missing south of Neen Sollars to Newnham Bridge.  My suggestion is this.

All of you proper politicians want taxes kept as low as possible, even for the wealthy like me.  Therefore, you don't have the money to maintain public rights of way and footbridges that are all part of the public Highway.  Perhaps, you could have a campaign to appeal to taxpayers like me to sponsor a particular bridge or adopt footpaths in a division of Shropshire.  What do you think?  Many of the wealthy have more money than they know what to do with.  You have a duty to encourage them to use the money responsibly, than wastefully accumulating it to no good end.

I have already promised to your Richard Knight and Lezley Picton £1,000 towards the reinstatement of the long since washed away bridge, near Neen Sollars and Marlbrook.  Find 50 more people like me and the public footpath and bridge will be reopened.  Then, you will need to re-point, the fast deteriorating 19th-century brick bridge that carries the same public right of way over the wasted railway line from Cleobury Mortimer to Newnham Bridge.  Or, do that job first, please!

We need to quickly move out of the unfortunately finite and foolish, fossil fuel age.  I can see no alternative than using feet, cycles and horses, once more.  Your fine Highway of public rights of way will then become pretty essential!