Touch-free to touch-me crossings: how one Perth councillor jeopardised public health during the pandemic

Back to pushing the button during covid - avoidable and unsafe.

This is the second of a series of pieces forming a record of some of the issues I was engaged with as part of Perth Area Living Streets (PALS) during 2020, the year of the covid pandemic.

In early 2020 Perth & Kinross council successfully bid for money from Sustrans' Spaces for People fund.  The idea was to give people more space during the pandemic and to improve cycling as an alternative to the obvious risks of public transport.  In apparently, a UK first, Perth and Kinross council used some of the money to implement pedestrian crossings activated by sensor, meaning people didn’t have to touch the buttons. This was obviously important to avoid infection from covid-19.

Shoppers try to maintain social distance during the covid pandemic, South St, Perth, June 2020.  Note the excellent implementation of touch-free sensors on the pedestrian crossing.

"Councillor removes covid-safe pedestrian crossings during the pandemic". It sounds bizarre, doesn't it?  Why do that?  

 

He said it was to improve air pollution but nobody we spoke to believed that for a minute.  We later received the official reason via an FOI request.  The councillor wasn't known for his pedestrian-friendly initiatives.  He'd just voted against Spaces for People initiatives.  But why did he do it?  It was so that drivers weren't inconvenienced. He thought pedestrians should wait  - breathing in exhaust fumes  and carcinogenic particulate matter - for drivers, not the other way around.  This is Perth.  Drivers first, duh!  This councillor was at the time and still is convener of the Joint Integration Board, the lead body on health & social integration in Perth and Kinross. 

There had been a few teething problems at the beginning with some drivers claiming the green man would come on when no-one was there and the crossings had been duly adjusted.   But that happened before.  People pressed the button then crossed without waiting for the green man or changed their mind and went somewhere else.  What was this?  Driver revenge?

The local officer responsible for the Spaces for People implementation had previously told PALS, which campaigns for an improved pedestrian environment, that the implementation of Spaces for People measures had been delayed in part because of the difficulty in getting agreement on the proposed measure from so many councillors.  There were also procurement problems.  Perhaps he shouldn't have gone to the trouble because once permission was obtained, as with the Battle of Balhousie and the pedestrianisation of the High St, the councillors started caving in, backtracking.  

I lived in the city and the soon to be covid-unsafe crossings affected us a lot.  Every time the kids pressed the button we risked getting covid and carrying it to my parents or the boys risked getting hit by traffic because they were dodging the traffic and not pushing the button. Forty thousand people live in Perth.  A majority in the city centre don't own a car.  This issue affected a lot of people.  The selfishness behind the impulse to remove the sensors beggared belief. In a personal capacity I wrote to the Courier about why it mattered:

But the sensors were turned off or removed.  I asked the Sustrans representative who was embedded with the Traffic and Network (T&N) team:

He said it was made by “senior management”. So I wrote to the head of T&N asking:

The reply came that we should take it up with Cllr Angus Forbes and PKC’s Chief Exec. So I wrote to them.

We heard nothing.

I put in a complaint.

We heard back. By now it was December.

But we never did hear back.

I could have taken it to the ombudsman and on a straightforward failure of the LA to follow its own procedures, probably would have won but it was clear from the Balhousie incident that councillor Forbes couldn’t care less about us and the CEO was on her way to another job. For the wearisome effort of going to the ombudsman, it didn’t seem worth it - and that is what councils count on.  But we didn't need vindication.  We wanted information.

So I put in an FOI request asking the same questions and that did eventually elicit a response.

We put out a press release about the results.

What did we discover? That hardly anyone had complained about the crossings - far fewer than the 234 that had replied to a petition asking the council to consult before removing the crossings. The councillor in his tweet claimed "improve traffic flow" (speeding up the traffic) by not stopping at the crossings would “reduce air pollution”.  “Driver frustration” was the official reason given in the FOI.  

What about pedestrian frustration waiting for long minutes in pollution?  What about pedestrian health, breathing those fumes, pressing that inevitably covid-ridden button.  Why do I keep seeing avoidance of "driver stress" and "driver frustration" given as official reasons for doing things - in Perth and Kinross and across Scotland?  Why does nobody consider the green, clean, long-suffering (often poorer) pedestrian?  Why does the LA instigate and maintain inequality between drivers and pedestrian?

No, they wouldn’t tell us which "senior managers" in the council made the decision. Why wasn't PALS, representing pedestrians, consulted? They consulted the Centre for Inclusive Living (disabled group) instead because they represented the group that would be impacted most. Wrong. Most affected would be the people who caught covid from the crossings, disabled or not. As it happens we now know that disabled people were more likely to be affected by covid, but this was not known at that time.  

For me this was one of the most clarifying moments of the year. We saw the true colours of the people making these decisions. We saw councillors and officials refusing to answer our questions or even our complaint. We saw a lack of consultation, contempt for democratic process, a reluctance to share information until forced to. We saw a councillor responsible for public health putting driver frustration above public health during a global pandemic despite - and being backed on that by officials who were never named. 

In practical terms we saw that decisions were made on complaints, pressure from online petitions with no way of checking how local people were, or whether they were completing the petition multiple times. Nobody assessed how happy people were with the various changes. There was just a knee jerk response to complaints. We saw both how much power our councillors had and yet how morally feeble they could be.

"Madam", the councillor in question remonstrated one day, on Twitter, never a good place to play out your disagreements, though perhaps better than the press.  But I'd had it with the double-dealing, the weasel words, the grandstanding, the talk and no action.  No politician I.  Enough.  You're blocked, sir.  And that was that.  One thing it did feel though, was honest.

So much for getting politicians onside.  But I've never been a great believer in conversion, talking people round.  People come round to things on their own, slowly, when they see the benefits, when the issue is kept alive and when they start to have, personally, those inclinations.  You're either the type who couldn't care less about leaving an engine running, or you're not. It's not conversion that changes people.  It's realisation.