Disquiet turned up a notch in Queensferry - Bruce Whitehead
I’m lucky to live in Queensferry. The medieval cobbled High Street has timbered houses with marriage lintels dating from 1626. Coffee queues are a welcome obstacle to passers-by, and our charity shops rival The St James Quarter for window dressing.
But clouds are gathering. On Thursday council plans for a largely cosmetic £5m high street makeover, closing it for two years survived after a Conservative blocking amendment failed.
Locals, though are worried by the plan. Distrust has set in over a failure to guarantee services access during the works for the town's hotels, cafes and shops. There's concern over the cost of new paving, historians are worried about cobbles of different design, and the sheer impact of stone-cutting and drilling for such a long period could put off visitors.
But that's not all. Word of The Ferry's charms has reached the "burnout" community - motorcyclists and drivers with vehicles modified to make them as noisy as possible - who wake slumbering townsfolk with constant circuits. The noise is achieved by "special" tune-ups delivering a gunfire effect. Motorbikes are cheaper; just remove the baffles from the silencer, and hey presto, you can tour a sleeping town at 3am doing an impression of a World War Two "Doodlebug" (As I write, at 16.02, a loud motorbike is screeching along the Hawes carpark).
What motivates them isn't clear, but they come nightly from tea-time until the wee small hours. And make no mistake; it is an offence to breach the peace with modified vehicles, even below DfT decibel limits, if the noise is aggravated, persistent and targeted. And it's clearly all three. Sadly there's little police can do. In unmarked cars, they're swiftly spotted; if they're plainclothes, they can't apprehend offenders, and in all cases officers are at risk from bolshie crowds of drivers and their admiring petrolhead fans. Recently built "speed tables" now serve as a launch pad for jumping bikes.
Police mean well and promise they're on the case. But a crackdown last summer saw the offenders back again in days. So maybe the way forward is dialogue. Perhaps with a megaphone?!