On May 6th at a MAG Awareness Day we displayed one of the new anti-skid manhole covers that Bristol City Council is trying out in the city centre redevelopment at the end of the M32.
On Tuesday July 4th, armed with my camera, I strolled round the development looking for evidence of the new covers being installed. I found several and, risking life and limb, photographed them. Here they are:
Frome Street is a small, tight left turn off of Newfoundland Road at the end of the M32 just by Staples Office supply shop. There are five of the new covers on this bend, as you can see.
Farther down Newfoundland Road towards the city centre, at a new junction where Bond Street has been bowed out to accommodate the development, I found another couple of the covers in the bus lane approaching the traffic lights.
That counts as a double for MAG because we originally campaigned to get PTWs use of bus lanes.
Congratulations go to Richard Stiling, who has run the Manhole Cover Campaign for as long as I can remember, and to Andy Derret who’s our liaison rep. with the Bristol Motorcycle Forum.
It’s not all over yet. These are just trials. I hope that the covers will prove successful and that this will lead to a change in policy nationwide on the installation of manhole covers in hazardous situations.
Today everyone seems to want to bang on about safety and how dangerous motorcycles are. Well what about the road we have to ride on? Manhole covers in particular present a very great hazard to motorcycles. We have all experienced ‘Oh my God’ moments and some people have been so frightened that they give up motorcycling all together. The current ‘apparatus’ used complies with the relevant BSI standard. It has also become apparent that the problems of PTW (powered two wheelers) use with regard to these devices is not perceived as an important factor. This seems to be because total or partial loss of control of PTW’s due to slippery manhole covers is not recorded anywhere!
As a regular PTW user my personal experience of negotiating manhole covers is a major concern at all times whilst I am riding. In dry conditions they are a serious change in the road surface and in the wet they are lethal. I have been told that local councils cannot insist on covers with a higher frictional coefficient unless national government has the relevant tests done to establish a standard, and they will not do this unless it is a problem. If it is not recorded it not a problem.
Information is needed to assess the need to change the nature of these covers. I believe that by highlighting these devices we can further the aims to have PTW’s included in future developments in highway design to make the road a safer environment. It may not be necessary to prove that huge numbers of people are being killed or injured, there would be a negative effect on the desirability of PTW use.
There are issues of social inclusion, if it can be shown that the design of highways does not include PTW use then that is reason enough that those procedures should be modified to include PTW’s. A thornier angle is that of accident liability. If a person loses control of his/her PTW as a result of traversing a manhole cover he/she is deemed to have lost control due to inappropriate speed for the conditions because the highway is constructed to current standards.
I would argue that there is a higher responsibility of Government to maintain a reasonably safe environment and that employing manhole covers to the current specifications can be shown to be an unacceptable danger. Measuring the coefficient of friction for a wet manhole cover can do this. Whilst no standard exists I am sure that this would be a suitable property that can be compared to measurements made on surfaces that are a recognised danger such as oil spills and grit/ debris covered surfaces. If it can be shown that there is equivalence then it is reasonable to assume equal danger and therefore equal measures to rectify the situation. From a safety point of view, bringing to the fore a positive campaign that emphasises the unnecessary dangers PTW users face will reduce the opinion that PTW are, per se, dangerous.
The link between manhole covers and actual accidents is a very difficult topic to discuss with council members as any evidence that would prove this would make them liable. This is something they will not do under any circumstance because the financial and moral implications would be very great. Imagine tomorrow they said that manhole covers caused accidents. The claims resulting may be huge, many being made retrospectively. A cover deemed dangerous today has been dangerous for as long as it has been there!
At a meeting of the Bristol City Council Motorcycle Forum I attended recently, the highways officers were interested in knowing where the ‘problem’ covers were. Local Councils are more willing to act on perceived dangers, i.e. if something can be expected to be a danger then they will do something about it. We need to raise their expectation of the dangers that manhole covers present without saying ‘you are killing us’. Good old letter writing to specific council officers may be the most direct and effective means of addressing the problem. If they feel that enough people want it they will do it.