Pedestrian calls on council bosses to review shared walkway

Pedestrian Neil Oldfield is calling on council bosses to review a shared walkway after he was hit by a bicycle

Transcript

00:00 they should be actually asserting the rights of pedestrians on this on this

00:05 strip between Boundary Road and Woolmer. It's perfectly all right when you get

00:09 to Woolmer, towards the castle, because then you have dedicated paths for both

00:15 cyclists and pedestrians, but this cannot possibly be an effective way of managing

00:22 a shared path because it's way too narrow and if you have people who are

00:27 badly behaved, which clearly these people were, then essentially there's going to be

00:32 trouble. It's individuals, obviously it's not everybody, most people going down

00:37 here are sensible, polite and respectful, but clearly on this occasion I got some

00:42 baddens, as they like to say, and they couldn't give a damn about me, so I

00:47 thought I would just take this up with Kent County Council. So I want to know

00:51 what risk assessments they've done. It's not safe and I'm 67 years of age, there are

00:59 people far older than me, people in wheelchairs, younger people in pushchairs, and I just think there should be a better

01:06 understanding and management of this piece of the path. My wife is only five

01:11 foot tall. I'm a big strapping six foot three heavyweight, but you know my wife

01:16 is five foot tall, she could easily be knocked over by an idiot speeding along

01:21 or in this case two idiots who were riding side by side. You know basically

01:26 people have to go single file for passing people and preferably people

01:30 should pass people by using the gravel roadway, but of course they don't want to

01:36 do that because their precious bikes might get scratched. So you know I don't

01:41 know what to say. I'm a cyclist myself, as I said I use this path, but I show

01:45 absolute respect towards pedestrians and I think there needs to be

01:50 something done in terms of better signage, for example the type of

01:55 signage they have in Folkestone where they're encouraging cyclists to show

01:59 respect and to go at a reasonable speed and then you will mitigate or avoid

02:05 accidents like the one I had.