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!

County Council appeal for funds to maintain footbridges

Dear Jane

Thank you for the email of yesterday that does not move things forward.

I can only appeal to your sense of unease (I hope!) in allowing the collapse of the nearby 18th century aqueduct, brick bridge and Grade 2 listed structure.  It is yielding to the ravages of time and county council officer and member neglect, as we have known for many years.  And the same thing is now slowly wrecking the 3rd bridge over the railway.

Therefore, I would like to suggest this in the absence of funding by the authorities.  Could your officers, with less money to spend on doing their jobs be, at least, asked to organise an appeal for wealthy taxpayers in Shropshire, like me to help fund footbridge repairs?  I have promised £1,000 for the R Rea crossing replacement and I don't even live in Shropshire.  There are very many, very wealthy people who have done extremely well under the last eleven years of austerity, economic growth and, from Theresa May's magic money tree.

I think, Jane that it really does need you and your colleagues to organise and inspire us into parting with a little of our wealth to leave a legacy for our children and grandchildren of repaired and new footbridges for them to enjoy.  We all know you will never find more than a pittance for PROW maintenance, apart from safety work.  Safety work on bridges that take no vehicular traffic means permanent closure and loss of rights of way, as we all know.  Therefore, you really do need to appeal for voluntary donations that will be forthcoming if only you will take the initiative, please.  And work with the district and parish councils, of course.  Target for help all our very wealthy landowners in the county, please.  Especially the owner of the 3rd bridge.

Please will you discuss my suggestion with other senior officers and members of the Council?

Can Pete Banford take the lead, perhaps in appealing for footbridge funds?

With every good wish

COLLAPSING PUBLIC HIGHWAY OVER R REA, 1 mile NE of Newnham Bridge

30 September 2020

Dear VIPs

I would like this matter taken seriously, please and not dismissed completely, out of hand.  To that end, could Cllr Simon, Paul, Alan and Snr Rights of Way Officer, Jon White please discuss my concerns and suggestions, here and come back to me?

Although all UK local authorities have suffered cuts with ten years of austerity, many wealthy individuals have benefitted greatly with growing income from property and investments.  I am asking that, perhaps in a 20 mile radius, they should be tapped for assistance with sorting out the R Rea crumbling aqueduct and public highway, near Newnham Bridge.  Obviously, people like me would not give financially for greater security to stop walkers crossing or for demolition but I, for one, would help if a wire cable suspension bridge was achieved, as at Symonds Yat, mentioned to me by Jon White.  Access for construction traffic might be by the nearby dismantled railway line, to then remain as a permissive bridleway.  Fossil fuel-free walking must be massively boosted, with cycling and travel by horseback, as one important way of dealing with this century's coming shortages of oil and gas and, with lessening the Covid/Climate/Ecological emergency.

I am also very concerned about the unacceptable number of wrongly drawn public rights of way on the Definitive Map that lead walkers into straying off the path and trespassing.  Five in one square kilometre, near the aqueduct!  One, even goes straight through someone's home at New Brick Barns (path 507)!  What should be done?  Another encourages trespass at the old (Worcestershire CC once more) Hunnington railway station, near me.  Yet, nothing ever gets changed!  Reform is needed.

Please discuss the way forward over which of the three options, below you think is best.  There is a fourth - continue with 'do nothing'.

Best wishes

Tim Weller

COPIED TO THE LEADER OF WORCESTERSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL who is ultimately responsible.

Recent work opens the way for more walking groups and individuals to take a look at the very unusual, indeed special and, one of only two surviving, 18th-century brick-built aqueducts in the land.  It makes it even more likely that keen walkers/inquisitive explorers like me, will come across the 'closed' bridge, make their own assessment and, with some, quickly and easily cross.  Many must have done so over the years since the partial collapse in 2013.  But, endangering their lives.  I think, to prevent this, you must demolish what remains; or, put up effective, secure barriers that cannot be got round; or, put in a cheaper, suspension bridge like the one that Jon White, Snr Rights of Way Officer, told me about at Symonds Yat, Forest of Dean.  You must share the costs of whatever you do with Shropshire County Council - copied to Richard Knight of that council.  I understand it is jointly owned with the boundary down the middle of the river and through the centre of the bridge aqueduct.

Why not make a financial appeal to all Shropshire and Worcestershire council taxpayers, landowners and residents within a certain radius - 20 miles?  There are very many extremely wealthy landowners and individuals in the two counties.  I have offered £1,000 towards the costs of the suspension bridge crossing and I live over 20 miles away in Halesowen.  Making such an appeal would raise the necessary funds and greatly encourage the donors to park their cars, put their boots on and WALK to see what they have helped to fund!  Walking is now called 'active travel' and is the future in these times of finite fossil fuels enhancing disastrously, the natural greenhouse effect.

You have legally washed your hands of all liabilities for death or injury but, not your moral responsibility to competently care for the safety of the public on this public highway.  You must act expeditiously to prevent harm from coming to the public over a high river crossing that both councils have neglected for very many decades.  No maintenance whatsoever.  And, twenty years of doing nothing since Grade 2 listing of the unusual structure.  The district and county councils are wholly responsible for this shameful negligence.  You now have a moral duty to act.

I would like a positive reply, please from the Leader and Chief Executive of Worcestershire County Council.  Your council seems to be taking the lead and acting on behalf of Shropshire CC in this matter.

Yours sincerely

Tim Weller

This Land is Made of Money

3 October 2018

Should this be called stealing from the nation's taxpayers?  And an abuse of trust?

In a time of continued austerity, hundreds of millions of pounds (£1,380 million to 2026) are being spent on converting some lengths of main line railway AND bus routes into tram lines.  Other bus routes are being turned into super special Sprint diesel bus routes with limited stops that mean today’s, less flamboyant buses will still have to be provided for the stops that the Sprint misses out.  Both Metro trams and Sprint, "Metro's little sister", are phenomenally expensive to buy and install. At over £60 m/Km for replacing buses, electric trams are the second most expensive transport mode after HS2 (apart from two Japanese maglev lines).  See my ‘Transport costs per kilometre’.

In addition, buildings are still planned for the tracks and the ONLY feasible site for the re-opening of Dudley Castle Hill main line station.  This idiocy, mind you, on a principal line that Network Rail and the Department for Transport maintain is "a railway of national strategic significance" (letter to self, dated 8 March 2018, from Network Rail and Dept of Transport).

Today, the Shropshire Star has highlighted how West Midlands Railway has caused travel chaos with too few trains and one that broke down.  Would there be more trains to and from Shropshire if the line from Snow Hill to Wolverhampton Low Level had not been turned into a tram line, with the attendant loss of platform 4 at Snow Hill, Low Level station closed, plus 4 or 5 Kms of track?

I call it stunning ineptitude, corporate stupidity and financial illiteracy to disregard the costs of trams for taxpayers when the 120 Kms Black Country Railway desperately needs the return of its commuter and regional trains and stations - NOT  “bus on rails”, trams. It is criminal theft by the governing elite. If they cannot be more honest, they should be locked up. The stolen money should go to extend free bus travel for all (not just the young, the disabled and elderly, like me) and to give electric buses for all.  NO MORE ELECTRIC TRAMS!

Tim Weller (full contact details at the very foot)

timweller1@gmail.com 0791 380 4363       6 October 2018