This letter writer is urging Bridport town planners to take heed of the French and provide safe pedestrian crossing points on local roads...

RE: Last week’s fortuitous conjunction of letters on ‘Leave it Alone’ and ‘Cross Safely’, another thing that the French do better than us is to provide pedestrian crossing points.

These are sometimes no more than black and white ‘zebra crossing’ stripes, sometimes just a central island.

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Hence they are cheap to install and maintain but there are plenty of them. (In the UK, an island costs about £5,000, a fully light-controlled crossing up to £100,000 – see www.cycling-embassy.org.uk/wiki/infastructure-costs).

They act as safe crossing points and also tend to calm the traffic flow without unduly interfering with it.

Contrary to our expectations, ‘mad French drivers’ do invariably give way at these marked crossings, while a central island allows for easy crossing elsewhere.

Locally, the crossing between the Esso Roundabout and the fire station on Sea Road South is the only ‘safe’ crossing on the A35 between Winterbourne Abbas and Chideock.

Residents of Bradpole/Jessopp Avenue wanting to visit, say Bothenhampton, can only reach it by walking up to the Co-op crossing, back down to the East Street crossing then over the Sea Road crossing. (These three crossings, plus the other local one on Burton Road, of course owe their existence to being on cycle routes rather than to meet the needs of pedestrians).

The alternative is to hope for simultaneous breaks in the traffic in both directions up by the garage.

Crossing three lanes of traffic twice to get to and from the islands at the roundabout is very risky.

Simple central islands would make all the difference if they were installed wherever a side road or major footpath meets any main road that had, say, a 40mph speed limit.

Alan Hobby

Jessopp Ave, Bridport