Dripping Case: Police to Pay £78 15s. Costs
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COSTS of £78 15s. were awarded against Flintshire county police, last week, when they failed to obtain convictions against road hauliers and drivers for allowing water to drop from lorries on to the highway. This resulted from strong representations by the North Western (Western) Area of the Road Haulage Association to Mold magistrates.
The actual charges in question alleged: "Using on the highway a motor lorry laden with wet sand so that it created, or was likely to create, danger or nuisance to persons or traffic, in that, by reason of the wetness of the load, or the condition of the lorry, water dropped or leaked on to the highway."
Mr. A. Rankin, for 11 defendants, during the hearing of the first case, against Mr. T. M. Jones, Ffynnongroew, objected to the wording of the summonses in that they were "bad for duplicity," by alleging a number of separate offences in the same summons, in the hope of getting a conviction on one.
He added that it was apparently the only area in the country where people were prosecuted for allowing small quantities of water to drip on to the highway.
Agreeing that the by-law was verbose, Mr. G. P. Griffiths, prosecuting, asked leave to amend the charge to "creating a nuisance to traffic."
After hearing the evidence, and a submission by Mr. Rankin that no nuisance had been proved, the magistrates dismissed the case and declined to allow the remaining summonses to be amended.
Mr. Hadyn Roberts, secretary of the Wrexham sub-area, told The Commercial Motor that special instructions had been given to the police to watch for lorries laden with wet sand from local quarries, and that drivers could have been prosecuted up to four times in any one day. Hauliers would have refused to go to the quarries and it could seriously have affected the local employment position.
The sub-area are to keep the situation under review, and are prepared to fight cases in other parts of north Wales should similar methods be adopted.
LONDON MAY NO LONGER BE THE CAPITAL
LONDON would cease to be Britain's natural capital if new traffic plans were not drawn up at once. M.P.s belonging to the All-panty Roads Study Group were told this on Tuesday by six engineers, architects and town planners— winners of £4,000 prize money in the Roads Campaign Council's." New Ways for London" competition.
They claimed that London had no traffic plan. The London County Council development plan was obsolete and based on the academic Abercrombie plan of 1944, drawn up when little was known of motor traffic, they said.
A new scientific long-term scheme was needed. The experts called for fullstandard motorways in London, segregation of traffic moving at different speeds, and the divorce of pedestrian and vehicular traffic.