Roads and flounders…

CHRIS BENNETT dwells on the troubled days of one of the country’s most charming towns.

I WAS delighted to read Shona Aylward’s admirable front page story in last week’s South Coast Herald. It was a response to an article in a national paper describing Margate as, among other things, tacky. Frankly, this is not a bad description, albeit a bit unfair.

On several occasions during the almost eight years that I have had the privilege of writing this column I have written about Margate, a town of which I am very fond. 

The points under discussion in both the recent columns are similar: the town, please not a city, has suffered from an insidious neglect, a neglect for which local politicians are to a large extent accountable in that they are too slow to react, and seemingly to grasp, the urgency of major situations. 

I suspect that much of the problem of “vanishing Margate” lies at the door of the council in control when the highway, the R61, was built bypassing the town.

There can be few examples of towns which have successfully overcome the anaesthetising effect of a bypass, but they do exist and Margate should be one of them. The bypass was to the town’s advantage. 

I still support those who believe not building on/off ramps at Wartski Drive was an error of biblical proportions. 

Wartski Drive is the address of the CBD, the Margate Police Station, the Margate Hospital and other medical suites, the Hibiscus Centre, and the Margate Airport. And yet Wartski Drive has no on/off ramps. 

Instead there are ramps at Alford Road, a charming and once sleepy residential road of pleasant homes belonging to people who have worked hard to live in such bucolic surroundings. The ramps ensure that it is easy for visitors who want to get into Margate, with no effort, can get lost in Ramsgate instead. 

Some years ago I researched this for my column and called a gentleman in Pietermaritzburg whose lot it was to field questions from idiot journalists. He told me that to build at Wartski Drive would have been possible, but the Seaslopes and Wartski ramps would have been too close together. For whom, I wondered. 

A second major problem for this pretty little town is the traffic flow, the inconvenience and troublesomeness of which seems to have taken more than half a century to penetrate the fogged minds of our leaders.

One would not have thought that it was beyond the wit of man to solve this problem. As usual it is addressed rather than solved, and having been addressed it is promptly forgotten.       

Previously I have suggested that it might be worth looking at creating, for the seasonal holidays, a circular system of traffic flow. Why not have the north bound traffic on the highway and the south bound on Marine Drive from the Izotsha Road to Seaslopes Road? 

Of course there would be problems; not the least of which would be an outcry from the business community. But following last week’s excellent article even they may see the better of the two evils here is the route of survival.

Having garnered much well deserved praise for the wonderful, if a tad slow, job done with the town’s splendid fishing pier, a shining example of democracy working as it should, the local authorities would be well advised to solve these problems before it is too late. 

Margate should not be allowed to die.

CB

12/8/11