Looks like I was far too slow off the mark to enter this competition, although I'm familiar with broken glass on cycle routes (luckily no punctures yet this year), and the council don't seem to do anything about it.
There's also an infrequent but regular problem with trees on the cycle routes in West Swindon. Every so often, one of the trees planted around our nice green coridoors / cycle routes keels over due to high winds or whatever, and falls across the path. Annoying to pedestrians, and highly inconvenient to cyclists. Not that I blame the trees, you understand.
The subsequent events seem to follow a pattern.
1) The tree gradually gets dragged clear of the path by a succession of unknown passers-by (including myself), who put various amounts of effort into the task, presumably depending on the amount of effort involved in moving it so that they can get past it compared to the amount of effort involved in getting past it as it is (and some unknown factor relating to their public-spiritedness).
2) The tree suddenly resumes almost its original position across the path. Possibly the same people responsible for the broken glass are also responsible for this, although I have no evidence for this.
3) Repeat (1) and (2) a few times
4) After a month or so, the offending tree has been removed from the site completely. Presumably this is the council's doing, although I couldn't be sure.
I was talking to Cllr Greenhalgh recently and he said that I ought to report things like this to the council when they happen, so that they know they need to do something, although from Alex's experience, it doesn't seem that there's much point in doing so.
I notice during the winter months when I'm too much of a wimp to cycle to work, and I catch the bus instead, that there's always one of those street-sweeper vehicles active both in the morning and the evening, but only in the town centre. They ought to be taking a regular tour of the cycle routes as well, but as far as I can tell the only thing which clears debris from cycle routes at the moment is the feet and tyres of the traffic on those routes, and the occasional public spirited passer-by.
I'd like to draw a contrast here with the regularity with which the council re-paint the walls of the underpasses around the West Swindon Centre, presumably to obscure the works of the artist known as
FNOK and his/her contemporaries, and to provide them with a blank canvas to resume their tagging afresh (usually the same day).
Regardless of whatever received opinion has to say about graffiti, it doesn't obstruct the cycle routes. Fallen trees and broken glass do, and I feel SBC have their priorities wrong here.