Rallying Cry

Someone in the JEP was criticising the Jersey Rally the other day, saying that so many miles of public roads shouldn't be closed for motor racing enjoyed by so few people, proportionally per head of population.












Let's examine this. How many people enjoy the rally? Apart from the drivers and navigators themselves, organisers and numerous unpaid volunteer marshalls, we can only guess how many spectators there are. The Victoria Avenue stage was reported to have three to four thousand people enjoying the action (on a chilly damp evening), and other stages usually have plenty of little crowds assembled at good vantage points. Let's take a guess at 5,000 out of 90,000 islanders, and as we're guessing we'll be generous and round it down very slightly to 5.5% of us. Personally I think that may be a bit low, but I'm going for most believable credibility here.

Now, a quick websearch revealed that Jersey has about 350 miles of roads. So, proportionally, if our JEP commentator believes that it would be fair to close 5.5% of Jersey roads, then that accounts for about 19 miles worth.

Now, I welcome being proved wrong, but the two or three stages active at any one time during the rally don't really appear to be 19 miles long, even taking into consideration all the through-routes temporarily blocked off, most of which do remain passable for access to premises.

So, nice try Mr Anti-Rally, but your sense of scale and proportion is somewhat lacking. Better luck next time!

Set in Stone

Was there really any need for his name to be immortalised in stone for this? Discuss!

Blog fault

Why aren't my latest postings showing up on other blogs via RSS properly? A much older entry is showing up instead!

This is problem has been reported by many people some time ago (see 'support' forums), and yet nothing has been done to fix it. In the editor to define the list of other blogs displayed here, many of them have a red cross with no explanation of why or what it means. Removing a blog address and adding it again makes no difference.

Until blogger/blogspot shows a bit more commitment, then I shall have to deduce that they don't really care, and treat the service accordingly. No more blogging until they get their act together.

Waiting....

The Ann Court question

Some 'white skies' pics from a dull day...

Along Providence Street to Belmont Road...






Looking left, halfway along... down Minden Place, with newly extended al fresco area on the right at the Arts Ctr.








.. and to the right, looking into the boarded up Ann Court.






Around into Ann Place, and the ironically named "No to the car park!" campaigner Ms. Storey lives on the left here... far be it for me to think... NIMBY! (NOT IN MY BACK YARD!)






Opposite Mary Ann Mews...








.. looking back right...








.. and forwards to the right again...







At the junction with Ann Street.. (I quite like the wide-angle leaning buildings effect actually)






.. looking back down Ann Place - note that the mews residents are OK for parking with their secure gated area!




My opinion is undoubtably worthless, but, correct me if I'm dense but surely towns developed for trade purposes, with people choosing to live there for convenience? Trade depends upon access, and, currently that access depends upon parking because we don't live in some communist hell hole and funnily enough we in the western world are generally free to provide our own personal transport if we can afford it. So we drive cars. A town that needs consumer 'footfall' therefore needs parking. Parking has to go somewhere. And I don't believe that people have an automatic God given right to live close by to ammenities - otherwise sheltered housing in the middle of nowhere would be banned in all the other parishes... and that's clearly not the case.

Bearing all that waffle in mind, I would say... I think this is the ideal location for a town park, if this part of town really needs one. Keep/rebuild Minden Place as nobody really benefits from a new open area there, develop parking in Gas Place where the residents are fewer and far between and already used to it, and Snow Hill would be a great place for a new multi with the added side effect of solving the access problem to Fort Regent.

But what do I know? :)

On-street Parking - NEW!

I had to pinch myself to see if I was dreaming - there's a new section of parking in Hill Street!! In recent years we've lost so many spaces because the Powers That Be seem to hate personal transport and want us to all add to the congestion driving around and around looking for those elusive spaces, pavement widening schemes like Conway St for example........ so it's a welcome surprise to actually find new parking. I'm even more amazed because I thought that the stretch there was part of a cycle route scheme against the traffic flow. I'm actually wondering if the Constable knows about it :)

Well done to the Parish of St.Helier, common sense at last. Hill Street used to be two lanes there, when traffic could turn off to the right by the church, so there was obviously room for parking as you have now finally proved.

Vile Blogs

As there seems to be some controversy about us plebs daring to have our say online, I'd just like to point out that there's nothing much to fear from me! In fact, I'm a getting a bit bored of blogs and forums (apart from one or two).

I toyed with the idea of scrapping this one, but I'll probably keep it for the occasional viewpoint here and there when I feel the need to get something off my chest.

As for local politics, I can't say I'm entirely impressed, but do concede that it could all be a lot worse. If issues are raised, the public are consulted, debate takes place, and votes are cast by elected representatives, then that's about the most reasonable system I can imagine. The problem is that the public are not often consulted, or the representatives don't pay any attention - but that's the electorate's problem if they don't bother complaining in numbers or turning out to vote.

In my leftie family I'm sometimes jokingly called a Tory because once upon a time in one of my more cynical moments I made a comment that right wing politics were more likely to work and find favour with the public because they are in tune with the dominant selfish side of human nature, but these days I am indeed veering away from my balanced middle of the road position and I'm starting to follow the family background by leaning more to the left, naively possibly, hopelessly idealistically maybe, because I'm so fed up with injustice and greed.

I could be tempted to support any moves to upset the old boys network, just because it seems the right thing to do. But I'm too wary of hassle, too lazy and unlikely to do anything about anything, except make comments here online to the extremely small audience who may chance across them. I'm just as guilty as almost everyone else of not wanting to rock the boat and draw unwanted attention to myself.

So don't worry about me being one of those "despicable enemies of free speech" (as the JEP calls them - stretching things quite a bit!). No satire here. No ribbing. No insults.

The worst I can do is shine a light on something, moan about it not being as good as it could be... and use my vote. That's not so vile, is it?