WORK begins next month on resurfacing Huddersfield Road and Woodhead Road in Honley as part of a £3.8m improvements plan.
Other areas to benefit will include Holmfirth, Lockwood and Chapel Hill.
All of the roads due to be resurfaced are expected to be named in October as part of the Tour de France route through Yorkshire next year.
In other words, Kirklees Council is concentrating its meagre resources on those few roads in the district which will be whooshed over by Chris Froome and co next summer.
But most of us in Huddersfield don’t live on the Tour de France route. The only well-known cyclist likely to whoosh over our roads is Clr Martyn Bolt. So we’ll just have to get in to the long queue for pothole surgery.
It reminds me of Prince Philip’s visit to the Primrose Hill eco-homes development back in 2007.
A few days before the royal arrival Kirklees resurfaced a stretch of Lawton Street over which the regal limo was due to glide.
But the rest of the road – over which Prince Philip was not driven – was left as an obstacle course. So much of what’s wrong with this country is revealed by that one small example of kowtowing to inherited privilege while treating the plebs with contempt.
Let’s put it right in 2014 by leaving all those roads in Honley, Holmfirth and Lockwood as they are for the visiting cyclists.
I thought the Tour de France was supposed to be a challenge to see which cyclist can cope best with the local conditions, whether that’s the weather, the gradient or the road surface.
Wouldn’t it be more fun – and more just – to watch the world’s greatest cyclists hurtling along Woodhead Road desperately trying to avoid the craters which have been carefully cultivated by Kirklees over many years?
