Crossing the Rubicon, Part 3

Here’s an update on the pedestrian crossing situation.

After getting no response or as good as no response from the City Council, I went and contacted the local City Councillors. Here are the responses so far:

21/8/’08 Cllr. Mary Shields: “Dear Anna Marie, I will consult with my colleague-Councillor Terry Shannon in relation to this problem. He is the ward Councillor for the area in question and I know he will be very anxious to make sure this problem is addressed. We have a meeting of Roads Cimmittee on September 1st and I believe this is an ideal opportunity to bring up the problem and discuss it with Cork City Council Officials.”

22/8/0’08 Cllr. Mary Shields #2: “Dear Anna-Marie, I promise I will revert back to you after our meeting of Roads Committee on the evening of Sept 1st and I agree with your sentements but must hear the reasoning behind the move to obliterate the audio sounds at pedesrtian crossings from the officials.”

26/8/’08 Cllr. Mick Barry: “Dear Anne-Marie, Keep the pressure on the local councillors for your ward. There are Council elections next summer and you will find them all eager to please at this stage in the electoral cycle. If there is no change by mid-September it might be no harm to get the Disability Federation of Ireland to contact the Council and remind them of what happened in Dublin. Good luck.”

I have still not had a response from the NCBI so this must be chased but in addition the idea about contacting the Disability Federation of Ireland is good and will be followed up.

29/8/’08 Cllr. Lorraine Kingston: “Dear Ann-Marie, in response to your query I contacted Paddy O’ Neill in the traffic dept. he was aware of the situation and remembered your phone call. Unfortunately they only replaced like with like in other words audio tones weren’t put in.
Now he suggested if you contact Ian Winning he is the Senior Executive Engineer in The Traffic dept. and make a request for High Street to be installed with audio-visual there shouldn’t be a problem.
I will then follow that request up to be sure it happens.”

The problem here is that this is a nonsense. I have no idea what lights Mr O’Neill thinks he is talking about but the lights in question were originally audio-visual so they are patently not replacing like with like. So the options are that either this is an example of confusion or simply that it is a fob-off, to not mince words.

In addition, Mr Winning has been made aware of this by email on the 2nd, 14th & 28th July and has made no response or even acknowledgement of the correspondence yet.

I will keep you posted.