HAVE WE GONE BATS?
The first four miles of the Northern Distributor Road are now open. It is a week or two since the first cars were let on the new tarmac, and I can make my first assessment of the NDR. It will save us few minutes going to Spowston (where Molly sings at a concert two or three times a year) but otherwise it seems of little use so far as we are concerned. This is not just my opinion; when I went along it there was very little traffic; one or two cars at most, except for the five hundred yards where the Holt Road has been diverted onto the bypass. I suspect that most of the few cars that we encountered were using it to drive along to have a look at the new road. There was no commercial traffic at all. Articulated lorries still approach the roundabouts from the Fakenham and Reepham Roads, but continue along their old accustomed routes into the city or the Newmarket Road. Why would they not? Even when it is finished only lorries going east to Yarmouth from North Norfolk will use the road, and I don’t anticipate a huge number of them; not enough to justify all the expense and upheaval of building the new road anyway. Anyone going west-abouts from the North already has all the new road they are going get, and it doesn’t appear to have done them much good. Whatever the road signs will say, no one is going to go on a detour of almost 25 miles to end up on the A 47 at Easton, a couple of miles from where they started. Have we been sold a pup? Time will tell.
I have dealt with the NDR in previous posts, but what I really wanted to talk about are ‘bat bridges’. There are two of the things in just four miles on this first part of the NDR. What are bat bridges? They are netting structures strung across the road to prevent bats from flying into passing vehicles. Does that sound strange? Yes. Do they work? No. What will encourage the nocturnal mammals to use them? Nobody knows. Have they cost us hundreds of thousands of pounds? Yes. Have we lost our senses? Definitely.
As far as I am aware a bat has never been observed to fly anywhere near a ‘bat bridge’. It doesn’t surprise me in the least: what self-respecting animal would? In spite of the ineffectiveness of bat bridges I do not think the roadsides are littered with the corpses of battered bats; could it be that they have rather more sense than conservationists? I never thought that bat bridges were anything but a crazy idea. No one will admit to inventing them, and bat bridges are now universally derided as a massive waste of public money. What I find odd is that they are still being put up on brand new road schemes like the NDR. It can only be as a sop to the influential wildlife lobby. The pathetic highways department would rather erect these pointless and expensive monstrosities every few miles than face the wrath of the friends of the bat. It is for a similar reason that the one thing that would make the NDR a genuine part of the Norwich traffic management solution, the construction of a road bridge across the river Wensum, is still as far away as ever. It is stated to a priority of Norfolk County Council, which means the earliest we can hope to see it is about 2035; a bit late for me. In this case we cannot blame the bat; we may never get one at all if the friends of the newt get their way.
Interior of Paston barn; this fine view us now reserved for bats!
Do not get me wrong; I quite like bats (rather more than newts as it happens), or a least I like the idea of them, but I think they get rather too much attention. Never mind the fact that bats have the run of Paston tithe barn for the next fifty years at least; what about the congregations of country churches who can do nothing to stop bats from urinating on them as they pray for fear of disturbing the creatures. What with that and all those useless bat bridges, I think our priorities might have gone a little bit astray.
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