Parking Round Up

Results from the Residents Parking Scheme survey carried out this summer may emerge this Thursday when the Sustainable Development and Transport Scrutiny Commission receive a verbal report which may tell us which areas have shown support for the proposed RPS. If so this will catapult the issue back into the headlines so it seems timely to revisit the parking issue.



Bristol Traffic and Southville Roads continue to do excellent work highlighting just how hopeless the situation has become with almost universal contempt shown for parking regulations which simply aren't enforced. Southville Roads has raised its game by printing business cards which can be left on windscreens to congratulate motorists on their inclusion in the blog.



Thanks to those blogs there's now quite a substantial database of offenders building up which opens up the possibilities for Parking Snap! For example Bristol Traffic identified this monstrosity contributing to congestion around Clifton -




- while I've just recorded it in its regular 'home' in the middle of a pedestrian refuge near the Cumberland Basin. So Googling WR56UUH will soon produce a growing collection of entries for this one.



We can also have a little competition to see which area of Bristol exhibits the worst parking behaviour. I'm specialising in Clifton, Hotwells and Harbourside but my more occasional forays into other areas produce some interesting results, particularly around Ashton Gate on match days. Here's V960JBH showing how to put Bristol City Council's investment in safe and convenient pedestrian crossings to good use, just outside the City ground.



Back on my regular patch Ambra Vale provides rich pickings, with the inevitable Range Rover T525AJB obliging by almost completely obstructing the pavement -



- while Fiat OV58EYK sets a new paradigm for avoiding parking on double-yellows. Just park in the middle of the road, why don't you. Actually I shouldn't complain about this since it provides cyclists with a convenient, protected traffic-free lane to negotiate the steep climb.



Finally we have a rare thing, what appears to be an official sign forbidding pavement parking, this one down on Broad Weir near Carboot Circus.



However the affect is somewhat spoiled by the police car WX07VDG parked on the pavement just 50 metres away!

Carboot Circus eclipsed

Carboot Circus, barely 2½ weeks old, is about to face a newer, bigger more avaricious competitor. At the end of this month the Westfield Centre in west London opens and is set to put poor little Carboot Circus firmly in the shade. It's everything that Carboot Circus is, but much more so. Westfield Centre has 1.6 million square feet of space, 260 stores, 50 restaurants, a 13 screen cinema, parking for 4,500 cars, several new tube, rail and bus stations (60% of visitors are expected to use public transport) and is costing £1.6 billion to build.



Westfield is aiming for exactly the same market as Carboot Circus, with 'anchor' stores including House of Fraser, Marks & Spencers, Debenhams, Next and Waitrose, plus a range of prestigious high-end names like Louis Vuitton in its exclusive 'Village' area (definitely no peasants). It also has a wavy roof of glass panels, multi-levels and proper hanging gardens, but that much more impressive in scale. If you believe such nonsence, it will create 7,000 new jobs (or rather transfer them from other ares, including no doubt a few from Carboot Circus).

Carboot Circus made much of their catchment area extending to areas like Swindon and the Cotswolds, but for such areas west London is only a little further and public transport connections are that much better. So many shoppers, particularly the high spenders for whom train fares are small beer, may look disdainfully at Westfield's poor imitation in Bristol. Carboot Circus' brief reign as having a unique style is already coming to an end.

Meanwhile Carboot Circus suffered another mishap on Sunday evening when a power cut halted the showing of films at the Showcase Cinema, forcing hundreds of customers to be ushered out. Another example of over hasty construction leading to faults?

Cycling City Crisis

Why is it that everything with the initials CC in its name turns out to be such a let down for cyclists? We have Carboot Circus, (Bristol) City Council, and of course Cycling City.

Bizarrely the City Council were awarded Cycling City status back in June even though they continue to back profoundly unpopular plans by West of England Partnership to convert the city's one outstanding cycle route, the Bristol & Bath Railway Path, into a Bus Rapid Transit route.

Not an auspicious start for the 3 year project and things have continued in much the same vein, with local democracy being an early victim as vested interests position themselves to pocket the £20 million of taxpayers' money being thrown at Cycling City. Ordinary cyclists have found themselves very much out in the cold, even to the extent of being refused entry to consultative meetings.

So anxious are the Council to keep trouble makers (i.e. anyone who doesn't agree with what they say) out of the decision making process that they went so far as to nominate the person who they wished to be the representative of the Bristol Cycling Campaign (hmm, another CC) on the Cycling City Stakeholders' Panel, an outrageous presumption that the Cycling Campaign meekly accepted.



But there are thankfully a few local cyclists who take exception to the arrogance of the Council and their acolytes. Led by the redoubtable Joshua Hart (above), they are making a last ditch attempt to gain some influence over the process of determining where the funding should go at a meeting of the Stakeholders' Forum (no, not the Stakeholders' Panel - confusing, isn't it? It's meant to be.) to be held at Fairfield High School, Allfoxton Road, Horfield this Wednesday at 6pm.

It has to be said that the prospects do not look good. Word is that the spending plan has already been stitched up amongst the vested interests, including of course local charities like Sustrans, who will no doubt find themselves with substantial roles (and funding) in the Cycling City project. The termination of the project in a little more than 2½ years makes for rushed decisions and short term thinking.

But who dares wins, in the end. So now is the time for the city's cyclists to ask themselves whether they are content to have their tax money spent to bolster the prestige of the incumbent vested interests or whether they want their tax money spent in a manner that is targeted firmly at making Bristol better for cyclists. If they don't show what they're made of now they may never get another chance.

Car park is "evil" - Ferguson

I have to admit that sometimes George Ferguson hits the nail on the head. So it is in his latest By George column in the Evening Post. Talking about the new Carboot Circus development Ferguson refers to the giant 2,600 space car park as "the necessary evil" to make the shopping centre work.



I'd have hesitated to go so far as calling a mass of steel and concrete "evil" myself, but then I'm not a famous architect. So thanks to George for reminding us what it's all about. Forget about Park & Ride, buses, walking and cycling - it's all about the 7-days-a-week influx of thousands of cars and having a really flash place to park them all.

2,600 is a hell of a lot of parking spaces (over 10 times what George manages to cram into his Chocolate Factory development). Even so my own casual observations suggest that for every car parked at some expense in the state-of-the-art multistorey car park there will be another parked for free in the streets of St Jude's and St Paul's. Residents of River Street are particularly hard hit, having the monstrous car park looming over them (below) and all the extra traffic noise and pollution blighting their lives, but also finding that they and their visitors will be lucky to find a place to park within walking distance.



Similarly cyclists find that places to park and securely lock their bicycles are few and far between at Carboot Circus. It seems that since they won't be able to carry as much useless, overpriced tat away with them compared to motorists they are not to be made welcome at the Cathedral of Commerce. Nevertheless some appear to be visiting (perhaps taking a break from the futile search for a safe and convenient way of cycling through or around a development which has obliterated so many formerly useful cycle routes) and have had to improvise when it comes to cycle parking.

Is Nothing Sacred?

It's one thing for our new Big Brother organisation Carboot Circus, who've taken over control of some of Bristol's most historic public open spaces, to boot out riff-raff like smokers and bygone religious nutters, but now things have really gone too far. It seems that even Zombies are persona non grata down at Carboot Circus.



Yesterday morning a group of Zombies, who surely have as much right to enjoy the delights of Carboot Circus as anyone else, gathered in Castle Park (not yet under the auspices of Big Brother) and wandered down to the new Mecca* but were prevented from entering by "the men in dark suits" who normally lurk discretely but ominously in the background.



Presumably "the management" took the view that nothing should distract from the prescribed form of Mammon worship, although the Zombies own moral vacuity would seem to make them natural co-religionists. But such intolerance of even the slightest deviation from religious orthodoxy has always been the hallmark of religious sects reveling in their supremacy.

Thanks to Perlmonger for the pics.

(* just to be equally offensive to all religions. No discrimination here.)

Quakers expelled from Quakers Friars

Just picked this up from a video link on Indymedia. Apparently some of Bristol's Quakers were distributing leaflets in Quakers Friars, where for 200 years they used to hold their meetings, to publicise a public meeting that they are organising to debate the impact of the new Cabot Circus shopping mall. This former public space has been privatised and is now owned by the mall developers who obviously took a dim view of freedom of thought being promoted in their private realm and "turfed" the Quakers out. Welcome to Carboot Circus.

The Mall Mentality

I came, I saw and I concurred - with most of what I and other bloggers had already written about Cabot Circus. It is indeed impressive in its scale and inspired in its design (but what do I know about architecture?*). I liked the way the middle street arrives at the circus at a higher level to the side streets, the way that the multiple levels give you so many different viewpoints and the way that it tries to blend in with the old Broadmead. It could easily have been worse.



Comments liking it to a Cathedral of Commerce were closer to the mark than I expected. In scale it is very cathedral like, and in the way that its aisles are lined with chapels to the various saints (saint starbucks, saint next, santa costa, saint yo sushi). Worshipers can make their votive offerings to their favoured saint, donating a few pounds here and there, very much in the Catholic tradition. Of course the major deities Jesus of Fraser and Harvey Virgin Mary take centre stage but most worshipers will feel that they have a more personal relationship with their own patron saint.

As I walked back home I was struck by how run down and neglected the older part of Broadmead now looked. And not just Broadmead but much of central Bristol now appeared tacky and uncared for by comparison. That worried me, because I've always felt that we should focus our efforts on making the public realm, particularly our main streets, more attractive as places to be, less dominated by traffic and better cared for. Yet the initial impact of Cabot Circus seems to be to make the public realm look even more squalid.



Cabot Circus is essentially a shopping mall, albeit with a more porous perimeter in the Broadmead direction. The essence of a mall is that within it you walk in a pleasant environment, weather free, traffic free, noise and pollution free, untroubled by undesirables like beggars and muggers. But outside the environment is actually degraded by the mall. Not only are vast areas and/or resources given over to car parking but the traffic generated by the mall dictates that the surrounding area must be dedicated to accommodating that traffic.

Contrast this with the traditional shopping street like Gloucester Road or Whiteladies Road. Such streets are multifunctional and messy but organic. They have grown without any significant planning as a result of thousands of individual actions. Small local businesses can flourish because within the unplanned complexity they can find a niche that suits their scale. There's no place for such small businesses in Cabot Circus and the future prospects of traditional shopping streets can hardly be improved by the arrival of the brash big brother down the road.



Cabot Circus, we are told, has created 4,000 "new" jobs. Does that include jobs with House of Fraser and others already based in Bristol who have merely moved eastwards? Even those jobs that are genuinely new to Bristol may well be at the expense of other jobs in existing businesses that fail or have to scale back as a result of the competition from Cabot Circus. Or are we all suddenly going to spend so much more money, in the teeth of a recession, that the 4,000 jobs really will be in addition to what already exists?

According to the Evening Post the "greatest threat to Bristol's new city centre appears to come from ... a small minority who appear to have a perverse desire to see Cabot Circus fail". Something of an overstatement I think, but they are clearly referring to bloggers such as me and the Bristol Blogger. In an emotional piece worthy of Churchill railing against the nazi bombers of 194o, the Post refers to our "doom-laden cynicism". Fair comment, but in the end we need a rational debate about the impact of Cabot Circus, not the Spanish Inquisition headed by Mike Norton.

(*answer - about as much as George Ferguson knows about planning for cyclists.)