Say Nay To Pay And Display

Last week, Stockton Borough Council's Labour / IBIS coalition cabinet voted to introduce parking charges to Yarm High Street.

Stockton council would like me to stress that their argument for replacing the existing disk controlled zone with parking meters is not to raise revenue (honestly, they kept straight faces when they said it and everything), but because the great British public don't have the wit to understand the nuanced technicalities of a disk controlled zone.

As though this wasn't bad enough, they are looking to install meters virtually the full length of the High Street, with the loss of the vast majority of the 127 unrestricted parking spaces relied on by residents of the High Street.

With Stockton's annual madcap parking proposals in danger of becoming an unwelcome tradition, you could be excused for thinking that the situation in Yarm was complicated. That there was no straightforward solution.  Well you'd be wrong.  Both the problem and the answer are breathtakingly simple.

Problem:  Yarm doesn't have enough parking spaces
Solution:  Create more parking spaces

Forgive my being glib, but that really is the crux of the matter.  Now don't get me wrong, I am not saying the solution is simple to implement.  Where could we put a new car park?  From where would we access it?  Who will pay for it?  These are difficult problems to solve - if they weren't, this matter would have been put to bed years ago - but that does not detract from the fact that the answer is simply to create more parking spaces.

Meandering back to the point of the article, I'll put this equally simply:

Stockton's proposals to introduce a tax on those visitors to Yarm that had the audacity to drive there won't achieve anything but deter shoppers from visiting Yarm.  Granted, that's one way of solving traffic congestion in Yarm but it has the one minor drawback that we would likely end up with a High Street which looks something like Stockton's in no time at all.

As for their plan to convert free long stay spaces into charged short stay spaces, Stockton would have you believe that this will boost business, by encouraging and enabling more shoppers to visit the town. My response to that is...well, just re-read the previous paragraph.  Not only that, in their misguided attempt to help the High Street what they will actually do is ensure that some 100 residents won't be able to park anywhere near their own home.

Furthermore, 100 or so people that work on the High Street that rely on these spaces to park during the day will just park elsewhere.  On West Street. On Worsall Road.  In Eaglescliffe.  Stockton would have you believe this won't happen, but it already does - ask the residents of Butts Lane, Eaglescliffe how much they enjoy Yarm Fair week.

I could go on - the report to cabinet was so full of holes one would need to write something of a similar length to correct it - but I won't.  Put simply, these recommendations are the veritable unholy trinity - they're bad for residents, bad for traders, bad for commuters.

I'll leave you with one last thought.  Mary "queen of shops" Portas recently completed her research into the state of the nation's High Streets and has made a number of suggestions.  One of these was to call for councils to "implement free controlled parking schemes".

It's not clear if she based her recommendation on the current arrangement in Yarm specifically, but we would already seem to be exactly what she's recommending.  But you never know, I suppose it's possible that Mary Portas' recommendations (and common sense) are wrong, and that Stockton Borough Council know what they are doing...