Tag: poor

#365daysofbiking Waiting on the line

December 10th – I spend a lot of time waiting at traffic lights, and of all of them, I think I like the ones on the Arboretum Junction on Walsall’s new ring road least of all.

Ostensibly heuristic and adaptive, the loop sensors here don’t always pick up my bike, and often I watch a whole cycle take place before the lights allow me to go.

Tonight was just such a night – because the controller didn’t find me, my phase of the lights was completely absent first time around.

Nothing to do but shuffle the bike on the loop and swear…

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#365daysofbiking Puddled

November 26th – And in Telford, the lift on the Shrewsbury side of the new bridge had failed again, so I had to shoulder my bike and clime up the stairs.

It seems the drainage holes added still haven’t cured the formation of puddles on the deck of this ‘21st Century Bridge of which any town would be proud’.

I wonder if this is the shallow end?

Is it me or is everything connected with modern railways in this country utterly crap these days?

In the place that was made famous by a state of the art bridge, the state of this art is appalling.

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#365daysofbiking Stark, bollock naked

October 28th – Telford’s new footbridge linking town and railway station – built to replace an older one rendered unsuitable for wheelchair users – is still plagued with standing water, despite attempts to alleviate it by drilling holes in the bridge deck.

In a total admission of design failure, large diameter holes have now been cut into the floor with grilles like plughole in them. I guess this has to work, if they’re in the right place.

Sadly there is no guttering or drain on the whole structure, and to put it bluntly the drained water will piss onto the commuters standing on the platform below.

Quite how a council and railway management company can allow a huge structure – getting on for 10 million pounds worth – to be built and commissioned with no rainwater control whatsoever is utterly beyond me.

Recently there were posters around the station begging passengers to vote for this ill thought out, awful bodge in some or other architecture competition.

A lot of Telford seems quite fond of this dysfunctional mess.

Telford, your emperor is stark bollock naked.

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December 20th – Spotted in Telford on a very brief visit at the new footbridge project, this will only be of interest to those into civil engineering.

The absolute worst sheet metal piling job I’ve ever seen. Not the varying depths – that can be normal, and they’d but cut level afterward; but the sheets are designed to go in true and interlock.

Were they piling guys on the pop?

December 3rd – A quick, snatched photo taken while on an errand to the shops, my only bike ride of the day. It was much, much warmer, and quick damp: The sorry of oily, greasy, muddy day that leaves everything filthy and wet without raining properly. It was dismal.

At the moment I’m up to my ears in financial stuff for work, as I am at this time every year, but this year it’s worse as we’ve been busier and there’s lots more of it.

I slid out as darkness fell, and took some photos around the Pier Street footbridge that I though would be good. They are all grainy, out of focus mush. 

Which could equally describe my brain right now, too… still, soon be over.

May 7th – First decent ride out for a week or to, to be honest. An afternoon spin up through Lichfield, Alrewas and Cotton to Rosliston Forestry Centre for tea and cake, then back via Coton in the Elms, Netherseal, Chilcote, Honey Hill and Harlaston.

A harsh northern was challenging, but blew me home, and the sights were beautiful in the warm sun. The ducks are still about at Coton and if that one doesn’t have the spirit of Elvis in him, I’m a Dutch uncle.

Not sure what I did to offend the striped cat at Whittington, but it was well cross with me…

A lovely ride, marred only by the unwelcoming attitude, poor cake and service at Rosliston: a piece of advice to fellow cyclists – go to the Honeypot instead. Not only was I served heavy, poor cake in a polystyrene takeaway box, but was treated like an irritation at 4:30pm when advertised closing is 5pm, but staff having a break discussing how ‘cyclists shouldn’t be on the road’ made me vow never to give the place my custom ever again. 

May 5th – One of the reasons I haven’t been this way much in the last few months is that the canal aqueduct over the railway between Leamore and Harden has been closed so the structure can be refurbished, and has only just reopened.

I do hope that this loose, non-compacted shale isn’t the final preparation for the towpath surface – it’s uncomfortable to walk on, dangerous to ride on and just a plain shoddy job.

Take care if you’re riding this section – the loose nature of the surface steels wheels.

June 23rd – By the new pond at Clayhanger, the pear tree I found last year seems to have a reasonable crop, but it’s under attack from something bruising or otherwise damaging the fruit.

I’ve not seen anything like this before; the pears grown here last year were small, but well formed and without blemishes. 

My grandfather used to say that a late frost catching the fruit blossom would ruin a crop. I wonder if this is what that looks like – after all, we did have a late and quite heavy frost this year?

June 20th – One for the occasional series on the silliness of advertising billboards.

I find myself paying more attention to roadside ads when cycling, as they take me longer to pass than if driving and some, after a few weeks, really begin to irritate. This one is a particularly fine example of the Photoshop failure art form – this example is on the Walsall Road in Darlaston.

This is an advert for the BMW Mini Cooper. Nothing wrong with that (unless you can remember how much character the original had…) but this ad exists in several forms for different length billboards. Notice the bike in the background? In all but it’s longest format, the lamppost is slightly behind the car, and you can only see the rear of the bike, a steel 1980s racing bike. 

In common with most 80s bikes, it has a self-added prop stand, mounted off the rear wheel nut, and an aluminium circular spoke guard between the gears and wheel on the back axle.

Quite what’s passing through the wheel at ground level I have no idea.

Now look at the front wheel. It has the ghost of the propstand mount, rotated around 105 degrees. The aluminium spoke guard is on the front too. The end of the front fork is straight, with no dropout.

The forks and position of the wheel suggest the top tube (between handlebar quill and saddle) is unfeasibly huge.

The front of the bike is not real. It’s been created in photoshop, by someone unfamiliar with bikes, purely to fill space when the ad was stretched.

What a load of old tut. This has been rubbing me up the wrong way for a week now.

November 19th – The Queen herself today travelled to Birmingham (by train, which won’t have been delayed and will have had a working toilet) to open a station that hadn’t closed and has merely been subject to having a retail opportunity badly assembled on top, and is still unfinished.

Brenda won’t have had to walk up a static escalator, or pull a pushchair up the stairs. She won’t have seen the dingy, grim end of platforms where the 1980s access bridge hasn’t even been granted a clean down.

Someone once said that Royalty must think everywhere smells of fresh paint. In Birmingham tonight, on a late journey from home, the overpowering smell was more reminiscent of the farmyard.

Oh, and Phil – we do speak English. Chances are Shakespeare would sound more like our tongue than the fabricated received English of the Windsors (and spousal attachments).