Dangerous Intersection
Reported in the Roads/highways category anonymously at 17:13, Fri 22 January 2016
Sent to Hackney Council 3 minutes later. FixMyStreet ref: 751326.
Turning right from Kenworthy Road onto Marsh Hill is an exercise in terror. Oncoming westbound traffic from Marsh Hill doesn't slow down, and a continuous flow of traffic from Homerton High Street means that without taking illegal and/or aggressive action, cars turning right could easily sit for tens of minutes at a time.
For cyclists and pedestrians, navigating this intersection is downright dangerous. For pedestrians, the intersection is dangerous due to cars turning right off of Homerton High Street onto Kentworthy Road are often aggressive, and fail to see the zebra crossing on Kenworthy Road.
For cyclists (and cars), the use of Homerton High Street as effectively two lanes means that even if a right-turning vehicle on Homerton High Street gives way to a cyclist or car turning right from Kenworthy Road, there are often oncoming vehicles passing the right-turn lane at high speed.
There are many possible fixes (e.g., a roundabout! A controlled intersection!) but in the meantime, the fact that there is no yellow box junction on the westbound lane of Marsh Hill in front of Kenworthy Road means that congestion is worse whilst the westbound lane queues (which happens often).
Updates
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Talk to your councillors. This is not within the scope of FMS (it's like pedestrian crossing and speed bumps, as mentioned on the help page). It almost certainly requires a traffic regulation order, which involves a public consultation process.
Posted anonymously at 19:16, Fri 22 January 2016
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Thanks, anonymous. The thing where fixmystreet contacts the council? Maybe *the council* should escalate, rather than citizens having to learn the dark back-alleyways of political process to get anything to change. (Which councillor should I contact, who has influence, who cares, etc). As I recall, that was the goal of mysociety - make government responsive.
Posted anonymously at 09:05, Sat 23 January 2016
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MySociety do another web site, https://www.writetothem.com/ which addresses the question of contacting local councillors.
FMS is just an automated way of reporting straightforward repairs that are the responsibility of the council, but which, without reports from the public, the council might not know need doing.
Comparing it with the sort of site that councils themselves use, and TfL's ReportIt site, MySociety seem to have gone for a policy of free text input. Producing an automated system that would deal with the intricacies of councils' management structures for arbitrary requests would require them to ask a large number of questions to properly classify the report, so would be very much a form filling approach. (It would also require a lot of effort to discover exactly the right place in each council).
My guess is that MySociety believe that, whilst a form filling approach would produce better quality reports, it would also scare off too many potential reporters.
Whilst they do not supply manpower to progress reports, one advantage that FMS has is that it does allow members of the public to comment, including suggesting better ways of dealing with the issue (in this case going through the councillors, although raising a local petition (you need 50-100 signatures) is another).
In the mean time, Hackney seem to describe the traffic regulation order process in http://www.hackney.gov.uk/ traffic-orders.htm#.VqNXb6RamMA Note that local councillors are first to be consulted, which is why it is best to get them to start the process, in the first place.
The best you can probably hope for with an FMS report is a note being added on the street record on the council database that someone has made the suggestion. It's unlikely to go beyond there, unless there are already many notes from other people, or they were thinking of doing it anyway.
Depending on what contact information FMS has for the Highways category, you may even find that the report goes direct to the pothole repair contractor. (If you use Brent's own web site for gly tips, it goes direct to Veolia, although all Brent reports on FMS go to their customer service email address.)
Posted anonymously at 10:59, Sat 23 January 2016
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