FROM East Lancashire's hot-spot for traffic calming controversy - Hyndburn - there now comes evidence that backs up the grudges of so many motorists' against it . . . that some of it is done so badly that roads are made more dangerous as a result.

And this, surely, is the root of much of the resistance to it - the belief, now receiving confirmation at the special meeting of Hyndburn's highways and transport committee, that a lot of it is over-prescriptively imposed on a we-know-best basis by traffic engineers and over-zealous councils when it turns out that many schemes are in fact flawed.

Many motorists have long held this view but not out of innate antipathy for things that slow them down because most, we believe, are all for increased road safety.

They feel this way because of everyday experience of traffic-calming excess and its evident faults.

It was, of course, the refusal of officialdom to heed the complaints and to steam-roller on with ever more traffic calming that lay behind the voters' backlash in Hyndburn at last May's local election when arch traffic calming advocate and council leader George Slynn was ousted and, piquantly, his chief critic, Adrian Shurmer, was left holding the balance power.

But if the losers could claim that this result was down to irresponsibly instinctive hostility to traffic schemes that save lives, how can they claim that now, when we find even the police saying that one particularly controversial scheme - that on Burnley Road in Accrington - has been badly laid out?

And when, for all its abundance of speed humps, chicanes, mini-roundabouts, build-outs and more, doubt is now cast on its value when it is revealed that East Lancashire has a road deaths toll 20 per cent higher than the rest of country?

This is not to say that all of it is worthless.

Indeed, the benefits of much of it are evident.

But was the nail not hit on the head by Councillor Malcolm Ranger, a critic of the Burnley Road scheme, when he said that more people are against traffic calming schemes than are for them and that if they are to be a success, the County Council must find a way to take the public with them?

Precisely.

And to us that would entail putting in schemes only where they are needed and wanted and designing them properly where they are introduced.

In short, what is needed is much more democracy and far less officious overkill.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.