Throughout the whole of 2010, road and pavement works were carried out in Station Road especially between College Road and Sheepcote Road.

While those works were in progress, there was very little traffic in that area, and certainly no buses. There were occasional reports in the Harrow Times, principally about shopkeepers complaining about the noise and disruption caused by those works and putting off customers visiting their shops. But I don’t recall any mention in those reports about the kerb in that section of Station Road being removed so that the pavement area and the road are now level, with just a narrow corduroy strip of tactile paving dividing the pavement area from the road.

Harrow Council, like every other council, is strapped for cash and is cutting back on important services, and yet those road and pavement works must have cost millions of pounds.

Now that those road and pavement works are virtualy completed, Anthony Wood, chairman of the Harrow Transport Users’ Association, is pleased that buses are again running along that section of Station Road. Well, I am not pleased. I think it’s a crazy idea, and here’s why I think so.

I am blind, and do my main weekly shopping in Harrow, accompanied by a sighted lady friend. On Friday, April 1, we were walking along Station Road from College Road towards Sheepcote Road, when my friend said there were 15 buses in a long row all heading in the same direction while, in the opposite direction, there was just one bus trying to get past a parked vehicle. In my view, this stretch of Station Road is far too narrow for traffic in both directions.

And that’s not all. Only a few days after opening up Station Road to two-way traffic, there was a serious accident on Station Road at the junction with St Ann’s Road, between a lady pedestrian and a number 140 bus. How is that lady getting on?

I wonder whether that accident has anything to do with the removal of the kerb along that stretch of Station Road and replacement of the kerb with a tactile corduroy strip? Who could have thought up such a dangerous and crazy scheme? And how could Harrow Council have approved it? You will never again get me walking along that stretch of Station Road on my own, without being accompanied by a sighted guide.

Anthony Wood claimed that shops in Station Road had lost a lot of business while works on removal of the kerb had been in progress, because fewer people were walking there. I would like to know, how is custom in the shops going to improve if people are sitting in stationary buses rather than walking the pavements?

Finally, what has happened to the beautiful Katie statue which stood at the bottom of St Ann’s Road? I knew the late Don Green, who was Mayor of Harrow when the statue was erected. I think Don would be very unhappy to know that such a lovely statue is no longer there.

Edward E Herbert
Priory Avenue, Sudbury Hill