After pressure from CRC members, Cambridgeshire County Council has made it a little easier to report problems with public rights of way online. If you open the ‘Public rights of Way’ home page on the County Council’s website, there is a new link to ‘report a highways problem’ in the text. This takes you to the highways page with a menu for identifying issues. The vital point now is to have an Ordnance Survey map handy! Select ‘Report a pothole or other highways fault’ (yes, really!). Question 1 is ‘What is the problem?’ The drop-down menu will then let you select ‘public rights of way’. From this point you will need to select the parish where you think the problem is; all parishes are listed alphabetically under ‘town’. Then you zoom into the accompanying map in order to identify the actual path, which you then select under ‘street’. If you can give a grid reference under ‘describe the location of the problem’ that will be helpful to Rights of Way staff. Hopefully the rest of the form is easier to complete.
The County Council will have just 3 Rights of Way officers in post from 1st April and they have a tough task monitoring and sorting out issues affecting all the paths in the county. It is even more vital than in the past that we report any problems; if we don’t, it is very unlikely that the officers will ever find out about them.
