The Bastard

Sniggering at the irony in being accused of sock puppetry by Kevlar's account, with its magnificent history of 16 total posts I post as myself, not as any other account. I'm argumentative, but I'm usually right. There's usually so many potholes in the arguments on here that you could drive a bus through them.

The street isn't "falling to bits" though. It's got some potholes, it's not disappearing into the harbour. They've patched the potholes. When money is available, and there are less pressing problems in high-traffic areas, maybe they'll consider resurfacing it. Paranoid nonsense. I have no other accounts and have never posted on behalf of anyone or any organisation. If I'm winding people up, it's because I have a different opinion that doesn't align with the miserable glass-half-empty-and-it's-on-fire-and-broken depressive attitude. It's a few potholes filled with Tarmac. It doesn't need to be done to a Rolls-Royce standard , and as I said, to do a huge job on it will probably involve road closures which needs time and planning. In the meantime, a bit of Tarmac in the holes isn't a bad thing, is it ? Roads always need fixing. They're built to a budget, break down over time and get fixed on a budget. VED money isn't distributed according to who pays the rates, it all goes into a central pot with all other taxes. The money paid in VAT and VED in PSM doesn't just stay in PSM - thankfully so, since it would never cover a major project, which would need to be subsidised by the rest of the island. In these constrained times, budgets are low, so it doesn't surprise me that road repairs are down the list.

There is traffic, but it's still not that busy when you compare with Douglas for example. if you're going to spend major money to fix roads, it's logical to start where there is most traffic and most people affected. A fishing village isn't that.

That's the hysteria that I was referring to. Temporarily patching some potholes with Tarmac doesn't need Rolls-Royce workmanship. It literally needs the hole clearing out, some sealant adding and some Tarmac adding in. Job done, temporary patch in place. If you want to close the road for a couple of weeks and dig it all out down to base layer and fill it, then that needs project planning and engagement with transport, businesses and the public who'll be affected. No doubt that'll be on the cards at some point.

We can quibble about facts. One bus an hour meets the definition of "occasional" in the sense of "infrequent". If it was one bus every couple of minutes, like on Lord Street, then it'd be a different animal. Regardless, talking PSM up into a metropolis worthy of major infrastructure investment isn't going to happen.

double post.

Quibbling. It's a village of less than 2,000 people, doesn't exactly have buses queuing to unload massed hordes of businesspeople and wide-eyed tourists. The bus service isn't there because of the massive demand to go to PSM, it's an adjunct to a wider service to the South. Let's be honest, because of the small number of passengers and small size of PSM, buses could easily stop at the crossroads with no major loss of service.

That's too simplistic. When you pay VED in Port St. Mary, it doesn't mean that your money goes into the local Port St. Mary Tarmac fund for local people. It goes into the same budget as all other sources of Tax, part of which is allocated for the roads. If you pay VAT on a pint of milk, some of that is allocated to the roads, even if you've never owned a car. The road budget is limited, and it gets allocated according to priority. For a small village with a low volume of traffic, there isn't a justification for a major scheme every few years. It would be unsurprising that potholes get temporarily filled at minimum cost on quiet routes - but extending that to all the jobs completed by DOI over the past few years is a big stretch.

It's not been discounted. The fact remains it's not a major road, it may have occasional buses on it, but it's a quiet road to a quiet village. There are other priorities. other potholed roads that get far more traffic on main routes, and should obviously be higher up the list where major repairs that are going to cost hundreds of thousands are involved. People might not be happy with the repairs, but they're not giving a professional opinion and they have no idea what's planned, so it's largely just noise.

Moan moan. There's no obligation for a Rolls Royce job, just needs some Tarmac in the holes to sort the problem for the moment. Presumably they're planning something for it.

I'm not. But the potholes got filled with Tarmac, that's all that was required from the start. Might only be a temporary fix, but it solves the problem until a bigger fix, which is the important thing. All this hysteria solves nothing.

I think we can be reasonably confident that a full resurface of Port St. Banjo would be far more than £6,500 though. That's peanuts in comparison.

True, might be a bit crap, but it's quick and cheap. Money for the road budget is far better spent elsewhere than on giving a Rolls Royce resurface for a one-horse town. People whinged endlessly about the Sloc (they're still moaning about it here after all these years) but a full resurface for banjo village when there are far more important candidates would be ridiculous.

It's on a bus route through a small, quiet fishing village. There are better candidates for a limited road patching budget.

It's only PSM. There's not a huge volume of traffic, and it's pretty slow, so it shouldn't be a priority. There are better candidates - Lake Road in Douglas is badly potholed, and with the thousands of daily visitors to Tesco, that's a far better candidate for spending limited repair funds than a small fishing village with a vocal MHK.

A bit of unfair projection there !! It's the daftness, the sheer stunt-iness I object to. It's been done many times before, and it's on Radio 2 now, more adverse publicity for the island, and another own goal. There's a lack of action on potholes (as there is all over the UK) mainly for budgetary reasons, but there are ways to get things done without damaging every party involved. IMHO a concerned person would be better off filling it with B&Q Tarmac if they're actually serious about the potholes and vehicle damage, but where there's a politico involved they can't resist the urge for self-promotion and political point-scoring.

Disappointed that they didn't get some road repair compound and fill the PSM potholes themselves, which would have been a pragmatic solution until the DOI repairs the whole surface. The whole daffodil nonsense just smacks of attention-seeking rather than actually doing something about it, like the people who whinge on facebook about litter, but don't pick it up. Doesn't solve the problem, and makes everyone involved look bad.

The glacial North has been eroding for thousands of years, in fact since it was deposited. Back in the time of the vikings, the west coast would have extended some distance out to sea. In the past couple of hundred years we've lost ancient churches and cemeteries to erosion on the west coast. Protection doesn't necessarily have to mean concrete barriers though. Near Blackpool, 90 metres of dunes have been rebuilt using discarded Christmas trees to trap windblown sand. We're not short of pines and firs thanks to the plantations. Must be worth trying it out.

If they have no convictions, then you pass them. If they have a history of convictions, you don't. You can only deal with what you know. Doesn't stop incidents from non-offenders, but if someone has a history of violent threats and harassment, they're obviously not the person you want picking up vulnerable people late at night.

Saw this on FB today. Makes the point very well about the loss of generations in the name of the empire.

Presumably not a very thorough one. There used to be a prominent taxi driver who had a history of convictions for harassing women and threatening behaviour, which you'd think would be a no-no for someone in that trade. Doesn't sound like it's on the radar.

There's a set of standards used by the UK for crossing placement that the IoM probably also uses, and that place would seem to break a number of those recommendations. Would also interfere with traffic flow at a busy junction. Sometimes it's better just to let people cross, but make it safer. The cycle lane connects to the Heritage Trail through the Bowl and NSC, so it does do something useful.

I think there was more to it than just cycling. Crossing the road from the Bowl carpark to the gyms/businesses in the old Downwards estate used to be like taking your life in your hands - blind crest over the bridge, vehicles accelerating hard from the lights, three lanes of traffic to cross. Was an accident waiting to happen, and with the narrowing of the road, it hugely improved your chances of getting across in one piece. You'd never be able to put a pedestrian crossing over the brow of the bridge, and pedestrians would tend to take the most direct route anyway.

We're highlighting the same thing from different perspectives I think. English initially became pervasive on the island after imposition of an alien "ruling class", and a wave of immigration of minor nobles, officials, military and household staff into a small population, much as French supplanted English after the wave of Norman immigration in England. Like Manx, Germanic English was definitely on the path to extinction in England for a while, and contemporary English is now a bastardised mix of old Germanic and Norman French. I'd argue that Manx emigration was also driven by immigration and the difficulties of land ownership after revestment. Some of the letters from emigrants highlighted the poorest being able to purchase land in America, in contrast to the situation at home where they were priced off the land. An ordinary Manxie can't buy property outside of town these days, since you need an offshore-company director salary to buy one, so it's an ongoing issue. The survival of English was in a low-class working population, the same strata as Manx. It wasn't due to a volume of literature though - languages survive through speech. Thanks to centuries of immigration, it just became uneconomic to invest time in Manx, in the same way that English was once the language of peasants grubbing up turnips. English came back from the brink though, which shows that as long as a language is spoken, it has potential to survive.

Yeah, unlike yourself I'm not constantly on here begging for attention of any kind