Sir;- Thank you for the latest WLD print edition 19. May I make a comment on the Airedale Mills development which you featured on page 10?
As a volunteer at the Rodley Nature Reserve for many years I am familiar with access problems to the reserve and have often wondered how access to this new development would work.
As your readers are no doubt aware, a new canal bridge was built, apparently at great expense, to better facilitate access to the proposed new houses of the development.
This new bridge has a very serious Achilles Heel in that it is manually operated. If a solo boat operator wants to pass it, he or she can’t without help from a passer-by.
The reason is that the bridge requires 60 turns of a smallish wheel to open, once the Byzantine instructions have been followed to the letter, to do so.
The boat operator will then find themselves on the opposite side of the canal from their boat with no means of getting back to it other than closing the bridge! That is also presuming that they are not already exhausted by the effort of turning the wheel 60 times in the first place.
Should they be fortunate to have help, they will then have to go through the purgatory of another 60 turns to close the bridge plus a lot of huffing and puffing to achieve the final lock which allows the access barriers to be raised so that vehicles can then cross the canal.
As you can imagine, all this can take a great deal of time and often requires the summoning of an official to complete the process satisfactorily.
So what happens during this time? As many visitors to the reserve can attest, vehicles trying to leave the site are frequently queued up back into the reserve while vehicles trying to access the reserve are queuing along the access lane, Rodley Lane and all points south!
- Bruce Budd, Pudsey.
Sponsored content
You would be a fool to buy or rent one of these houses whilst this “amateur” bridge routine remains, as the writer says, what happens in an emergency?
You’d have to be insane to want to live on this site, that bridge was never built for purpose
This land should have been left for the skate board community
The logical answer to this is a planning requirement for the bridge to be automated with the handle in reserve in case of a power cut, to be completed before any construction starts!
Yorkshire water stipulated it had to be manually operated, they owned the bridge before it transferred to a new company!!!