ONE of my constituents, who has been a friend and colleague since the early 80s, has over the past few years been going progressively blind due to incurable glaucoma.

He is now at the stage where, as he says himself, he is functionally blind in one eye and can barely see a thing with the other.

Perhaps fortunately he has lived in the same area of the Southside for decades and knows every inch of the community in which he lives in his mind’s eye.

He also, and I am not grassing him up here, knows intimately the route from Central Station to various city centre hostelries and has negotiated his way home with varying levels of sensory impairment since he was eighteen.

One of my fellow Labour Councillors, Robert Mooney, also happens to be blind and, has been since birth. Robert is a longstanding advocate and activist on behalf of the visually impaired community.

From both of these colleagues, I have become increasingly aware and concerned at the numerous barriers that those with sight loss face in negotiating their way around their own community and, most particularly the city centre.

Some of these barriers are the result of carelessness or lack of consideration by those of us with near 20/20 vision.

Other barriers are the direct product of poor planning, poor maintenance or poor consultation with the blind community.

I can see an adult cyclist tanking along the pavement towards me, a blind person cannot.

It is relatively simple for me to avoid an awkwardly placed A-board outside a shop but the visually impaired person could easily come a cropper.

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Recent projects initiated by Glasgow City Council have highlighted many of the concerns that organisations such as RNIB have been raising for years.

Spaces where cars have been banned but pedestrians and bikes or even motorised scooters freely mix may be fine for most of us but they are an accident waiting to happen for others.

The Labour Group has constantly raised the issue of proper consultation on developments such as that in Sauchiehall Street. We are always told that consultation has taken place. The RNIB and the National Federation of the Blind would disagree.

Not a single pedestrian crossing on Hope Street, for example, is fitted with a vibrating cone which allows a blind person to know that it is safe to cross.

The same is true for other crossings throughout the city. In many areas of the city centre, it is virtually impossible for an unaccompanied blind person to negotiate their way safely. As a result, many simply avoid the city centre entirely.

As a city council, we have a responsibility to make our city centre, our communities and our housing estates safe and accessible for all our citizens.

We have a duty to ensure that changes and innovations which we introduce do not actually make things worse for certain minority groups even if it looks prettier or is more convenient for the rest of us.

As a minimum, we must commit to full and proper consultation with all disability groups when we develop public realm projects.

Secondly, there needs to be a city-wide audit of existing infrastructure to identify where simple solutions can be implemented to remove barriers and eliminate avoidable dangers.

Our blind and visually impaired citizens should not be excluded or put at risk through council neglect. They deserve better.