Email
September 6
We moved into El Verger some twelve years ago and managed to reform a townhouse a hundred metres from the town hall.
The house is on a narrow street with one person width pavements, two-way traffic with a traffic direction priority sign, so vehicles are supposed to travel one at a time.
Outside three of the houses on the street including ours, the road narrows even more down to a single lane.
Over the years we have witnessed many accidents on the street caused by high speed or drivers simply ignoring the one-way direction priority signs and trying to pass each other in too narrow a space.
When this happens, drivers use the pavement to try and gain additional passing room.
We have complained to the town hall and its four different mayors over the years and some attempts have been made to try and fix the problem.
We have been suggesting speed reducing humps be installed, but this was rejected on the basis that parades pass down the street; despite there being speed reducing humps installed on other parade streets in the village?
The town hall has tried to use posts, a stop sign and various separators between the road and very narrow pavement but nothing has worked.
Indeed, the posts themselves, meant to prevent cars crossing onto the pavement, have many times been knocked out of their fittings and narrowly missed people on the pavements and crashed into house walls.
On one occasion three separate posts were hit by one car and they are 10 feet apart!
One day it is a certainty that a pedestrian will be either struck directly by a vehicle or a flying post.
As you lift our front door ‘persiana’ to leave, you need to check that there is no traffic likely to hit a post or indeed cyclists using the pavement to travel down the road before you exit onto the pavement. Both of which have happened several times.
Simple solutions would be to make the street one way, install speed reducing humps or put a traffic camera with a speed indicator, all of which seems simple enough yet despite this none of these have been applied.
So, it continues with little sign of the people in authority being willing or able to find a solution.
Regards
Richard Millington.
