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Originally Posted by Paul mabbott  This is interesting - shows how peoples' views vary. When I first came here we used to get all sorts of plants growing on the streets (nothing rare - centaury, ragwort, poppies &c) which attracted a lot of invertebrates. Most of us thought them very attractive and useful.
However, one political party took the same view that you do and now we have regular spraying (of glyphosate, I suppose) and bare streets (also bare patches in the gardens because they're not too careful). Some of us are pressing for the weed-killing to stop ... So, I would be happy with your situation but am sad about ours, which you, apparently would prefer .... It's a funny old world.
Ditto potholes in roads - I used to be furious to see a couple of men spending several days filling in little holes in the road - at great expense both financially and environmentally - when they could have been doing something more useful. As a cyclist, yes, I did have problems with potholes from time to time - just learned to ride more carefully! Obviously there are different grades of potholes and some are seriously bad but I do think that in most backstreets cars should not be travelling at more than 20mph and small holes in the tarmac are no problem. .... I have, nationally, been pleased to see that councils increasingly are not wasting money and energy smoothing out urban roads on an annual basis .... so, there we go, opposing views again!  |
Yes I can see your point and I suppose in an ideal world any greenery is better than none and money saved on filling pot holes is better spent on ’more important’ issues.
But it’s not an ideal world and all this erosion of roads causes problems for many people. If left pot holes would end up stretching the width of roads ( I can see and feel them getting bigger and deeper every week!) causing problems to motorist and cyclist alike . Be they experienced and careful drivers/riders , people driving/riding at night or more importantly young children being encouraged to get on their bikes. They shouldn’t be risking life and limb manoeuvring in traffic and watching where their tyres are going! Bike lanes would be another option, we have some but unfortunately none on the smaller streets where the pot holes tend to occur.
I’ve seen pot holes being filled in( not very often I must admit )and then a day later most of the substandard tar is strewn across the road again. Not very cost effective either.
I’ve just been investigating a little further about the weed control here and discovered that we actually have a street care team which look at the worst affected areas for weeds and then set about digging them out . This is because weed spraying has proved inadequate, good idea but must be very time consuming hence the number of weeds appearing everywhere else!
You’re right though this is a difficult problem with no real answer and I‘m sure everyone does have a differing opinion, but everything just seems to be going backwards here at the moment and it just makes me wonder what things will be like in the future.
It’ll probably resemble a pit filled jungle…..…plenty of photo opportunities though!!
