Residents' Association Forum

There's a small pot of money in SCC to apply to sundry road maintenance tasks (of a fairly minor nature)

Each county councillor has been asked for a list of defects. Input from residents would be useful. 

Categories of defect could include e.g. (but not exclusively): 

1 Road defects ...Surface dressing  (as recently done in Summer Road) potholes etc 
2.Tree stumps 
3.Drains/gullies 
4 Dirty Road signs 
5 Trees (epicormic growth, pollarding etc) 
6. Street lights 
7 Road markings 

& Misc.

I would like to put on the list levelling of the many defects and surface dressing of the pavements along Ashley Road, for example.

Please add your own suggestions below - this list has to be compiled by Peter Hickman fairly swiftly, say a week.

The speed hump outside the Red Lion by the bend!

1) Very rough and uneven road surface under the railway bridge - probably ineffectively repaired potholes starting to open up.

2) The humps in Embercourt Road between Thistledene and Hampton Court Way are much more jolting than humps in other locations, even at speeds below 20 mph.   Please can they be adjusted to match the rest ?

Forget small defects.the whole road from Thames Ditton station down to the George and Dragon needs resurfacing.Riding down that on a motorbike, the road cambers badly towards the path on one side.Dont start me on the potholes!

All very well to say "forget small defects" but that is what the current exercise is about, as I gather the pot of money amounts to a total of just £45000.

The whole High St needs resurfacing, but we are pushing separately on that one I believe.

Small concrete mounds on pavement on Edwardian House side of Station Road to stop people speeding along the pavement,( or even driving slowing along the pavement,) when two cars can't pass each other on Station Road.  4x4s, people carriers, lorries and vans obviously think its Ok to drive at speed along the pavement - small concrete mounds would stop them.  Got to be a good use of money if it stops someone from being knocked down on pavement.

Resurfacing of pavements (and eventually the road) on Basingfield road. It is a  very busy walkway for both schools, as well as commuters and a number of tree roots have made the pavements very bumpy and unsafe. i have seen many children stumble and fall, including my own.

Resurfacing (not much surface left) of Longmead Rd. I know I keep on about this but it's worse than some of the farm tracks I recently went on in S. France!

Our Weston Green councillor Ruth Bruce has submitted to Surrey a list of items great and small for road maintenance in Weston Green which you may download here as an Excel spreadsheet. (http://residents-association.com/pdfs/Road_Audit_West0on_Green_2012.xls)

It represents a great deal of time spent trudging around the entire ward with a clipboard - all part of what our Residents' councillors do "in their spare time".  Well done, Ruth.

If you have items to add please contact her by email copied to Peter Hickman, who has done a similar study cycling round Thames Ditton and Long Ditton (I don't yet have the spreadsheet for that).

Here I go, banging on about commuter parking again but.................
Our side of Station Road no longer gets swept cos there are so many cars parked.  Not sure that there is an easy solution though unless the roadsweeper does a weekend shift?

I drove down Summer Road, yesterday and what an improvement especially with smoother bumps - it is a bit of a mystery why they have suddenly stopped though before the vicarage.

I also note that the wide bumps are still the best compared to the two bump types, if people have to park on the road than the two bump types can actually be quite dangerous, at with the ramps you get what you expect without screwing up your wheels / suspension.

Hopefully the Tarmac men will continue their good work.

This is a long-standing problem.  The mechanical sweepers weave in and out of parked cars so the more there are parked the fewer the bits of gutter cleaned.  Yet the contractor marks the road as 'swept' - what else can they do?  EBC's figures then show that such and such a road was cleaned x times in the past month/quarter.

The alternatives:

- get citizens all to remove their cars from a road by dawn on the day it is to be swept (difficult to enforce/administer, draconian, fines? towaways?  Picture the scene...)

- for problem roads, do one manual clean a quarter rather than twelve or 24 machine cleans a year (my preferred solution - manual cleaners do a better job but cost more, so less often within the budget).

I was going to say - maybe we should have street cleaning teams as per the snow shovelling teams - ie where the residents go out occasionally and sweep our own gutters.  Then I realised that we pay the council to do this for us .................................... 

Recently all the cars parked in the village centre had leaflets put under the wipers asking them to move them by to allow the road to be swept. On the assigned morning around half the cars still remained, leaflets undisturbed. It is a shame their owners can't make use of Ashley Rd car park and free up the spaces for potential shoppers. I believe it took quite a concerted effort to get the high street clear for the Summer Fair. 

When it was Summer Rd's turn to be swept the council dropped leaflets through everyone's front doors, but on the day many cars remained. I don't know if it was laziness or that they belong to people on the crowded side roads. It seems there is no easy solution other than to have them lifted by a tow truck and swept under - but the insurance risk is probably too high. 

There are still gaps on Summer Rd and Portsmouth Rd where resurfacing work went on around unmoved cars!