End to this Sea Lane nonsense

The county council has finally put to bed the whole nonsense of road narrowing, pelican crossings and the like to enable the residents of St Bridget’s Cheshire Home to choose between TWO tailored routes to the village centre.

The issue of the single pavement in Sea Lane has been an obsession with Kenneth Grimes for some years now and, hopefully, his droning campaign letters for the expenditure of money that does not exist, for work that is not necessary, to produce traffic queues and congestion in the name of additional route options for a very few residents will surely now cease.

I think, in what I hope is his very last letter on the subject (Gazette, December 23), his scornful attempts to blame the plan’s rejection on councillor Graham Tyler is sulky, churlish and plain wrong. The plans were rejected by the committee because they were expensive nonsense.

I have lived my entire 50 years in Rustington and Littlehampton and cannot recall, in that time, a single accident involving cars and pedestrians around that cottage in Sea Lane. Surely the access to the village was properly considered when St Bridget’s was built. I would also query that those who drive mobility scooters are actually “pedestrians”.

The county highways department has worked hard for many years now, at huge cost, to try to ensure everyone gets reasonable access.

Improvements to the pavements all around the district, in terms of dropped kerbs, mean that wheelchairs and mobility scooters, even those travelling at illegal speeds above four miles per hour, can safely and easily negotiate Broadmark Lane, which provides a very straight forward link to the very centre of Rustington.

In an ideal world, everyone would have equal access to everything. But, Mr Grimes, this is not an ideal world.

These are particularly difficult times, financially, and our council tax money needs to be spent wisely.

With his pet project finally on the scrapheap, perhaps Mr Grimes would now consider the difficulty of access to communal resources that many more elderly and/or disabled residents have who live further out from the centre in private homes and have no carers, drivers, mobility scooters, etc., and have to use a more complex network of roads, paths and alleyways to gain access to the village centre.

Steve Harris

Tideway

Littlehampton