Road to nowhere - and solution is a dead end too!

One of those dilemmas where commonsense should prevail - but doesn’t - is facing today’s meeting of BTAC – the Boston Town Area Committee.
It concerns residents in Punchbowl Lane who are besieged by anti social behaviour by people using an access route from Ingelow Avenue.
As our screenshot from Google Maps shows, it really seems to be a road to nowhere, and we are baffled as to why anyone would want to use it at all.
But because of the problems – which included a particularly nasty burglary – Boston’s Policy and Projects Committee asked the Cabinet to consider the access.
But formal legal advice decided the access was a public highway which the council couldn’t close – so the buck hawas  passed back to BTAC because it’s on their patch.
To make matters worse, although the access is a public highway, it doesn’t make it a highway maintainable at the public’s expense.
To try to get this changed, a member of the public has applied to include the access on the Definitive Map for Lincolnshire. But the plea is currently ranked 141st out of 143 on the County Council’s waiting list  - which means it could be years before it is dealt with.
Meanwhile, complaints keep coming in, and the council’s Anti-Social Behaviour team become involved from time to time.
This is the same anti-social behaviour team which posed larger than life in a recent poster campaign, with the apparently incorrect pledge that no one need suffer from anti-social behaviour.
There are three main options that BTAC could follow.
• note the situation and do nothing.
• formally ask the County Council to put the access on the Definitive Map, and maintain it as a highway at public expense, which it may not agree to do, and
• use BTAC cash to improve security in the area.
If it wasn’t silly enough already, then this is where it gets sillier.
Putting the access on the Definitive Map would still not make it possible to close the access or to maintain it to a decent standard.
So it seems to be down to whether BTAC wants to throw any money at the problem
A report to the committee says: “Security measures are many and various, range from low to very high cost and have varying degrees of ‘success’. Other than resources being available to relocate a swing gate from the middle of the route, no other budgets currently exist to do anything new to, or with, the access.”
The report also says: “The issues faced by those living immediately adjacent to the access are without doubt significant to those affected. Closing the route however - the optimum solution for those subject to the alleged anti-social behaviour  - is not within the gift of the council nor the county council. "Existing services will continue to work with residents at an appropriate level and within the resources available."
To us this makes a mockery of the so-called concerns that local authorities have for the quality of life of their residents.
This access is not the A1.
It is a pointless path to nowhere used by people who do not know better to make the lives of their neighbours a misery.
The county council as the highways authority must be able to address this problem. If not, then it should ask the Highways Agency to do something.
All that is happening at present is that the system is creating busywork for the boys and girls at district and county level – when what is needed is determination and commonsense.


You can write to us at boston.eye@googlemail.com   Your e-mails will be treated in confidence and published anonymously if requested.