From Penny McGuire.
A FEW days ago a car careered down Val Plaisant from the traffic lights at the Robin Hood junction to the traffic lights at the junction with Midvale Road. It shot the lights and turned left down David Place.
I and other pedestrians flattened ourselves against the walls. The car, which was going too fast for me to read the number plate, rode the central line and I estimate it was going at nearly 70 mph.
I am writing because although speeding between these two sets of lights is a common occurrence, particularly late at night,this was not the only shockingly fast car I saw in this street that day.
The area is mainly residential and the street has so narrow a pavement on either side that two people cannot walk abreast. It is a passage through the day for local shoppers (to and from the Co-op), tourists from the local hotel, the old as well as schoolchildren – there are a lot of them in the street after school – and mothers and childminders with wide pushchairs.
When, as a resident of Val Plaisant, I have complained to the police about incredibly noisy motorbike racing in the street late at night, I’ve had a singularly unsympathetic response.
We need the full apparatus: speed cameras – very common elsewhere in Jersey, and why not here, where we really need them? – and a pedestrian crossing. The danger for residents and their children, the elderly, and the (presumably) economically valuable tourists is getting harder to bear.
Holland House,
Val Plaisant,
St Helier.
