Let's put to one side that in densely-built urban areas, local rail networks beat the car hands down, or that it's nice to be within walking distance of the pub, the off licence, the post office and the café etc. I used to live in London Zone 3 and managed perfectly happily for fifteen years without a car.
As a matter of fact, most people go to work by car, do a weekly shop by car, drive to the seaside etc. In outer urban areas, people drive to the station by car and do "park and ride". And once I moved out to "the countryside", i.e. Zone 5, I soon realised that public transport or walking is totally impractical.
There is a temptation to somehow see car parks in urban areas as a something secondary, a bit of a sad waste of space or something squidged into the little gaps or on bomb sites, and some of them are genuinely ugly, just a patch of cracked asphalt with a meter or two. Others look quite nice, with little strips of shrubs and trees or surfaced with those little bricks which let the water drain off, I've even seen some with playgrounds, where Dad can take the kids while Mum finishes the shopping.
For some reason, many people have a romantic fascination with trains, train stations and harbours. There are some people who are "train spotters" and the architecture of many larger train stations is very impressive, be it Victorian Gothic ironwork or something flash and modern and underground. It's nice to sit in a restaurant overlooking the harbour watching the boats come and go. But nobody says "Ooh, what a lovely car park!" or advertises a flat by saying "Uninterrupted views over the car park".
Let's take the world as it actually is; on industrial estates at the edge of town, it is not unusual for three-quarters of the area to be used for employees' parking. With retail estates, the area of the car park is usually at least half the total area. Here's one a few miles down the road from me, which has lots of little trees and shrubberies and used to have a nice little playground next to the Burger King:
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The matter is more complicated with the really big shopping centres (or airports), the amount of parking space has to equal total shop space, but nobody wants to walk two miles across a car park, so they build multi-storey car parks (the car park is usually as high as the shopping centre itself), which are impressive in engineering terms but not nice places to be. Interestingly, airports make as much money from parking charges as they do from landing and take off fees, allegedly.
But car parks are vitally important if you want to "rejuvenate the town centre" (above and beyond collecting taxes from the rental value of land and not turnover or wages, and with LVT, there is all the more incentive to rejuvenate them, because that means more revenues, natch). One of the reasons people give for shopping "out of town" is that it is easier and cheaper to park your car.
So maybe one solution to declining town centres would be to knock down half the shops and build a multi-storey car park instead. Remember, the rental value of shops is limited by the amount of easily available parking spaces nearby; and the rental value of car parks is limited by the number of shops, places of work etc in the vicinity. Whether that rental value is collected directly with parking charges, or whether parking is "free" and the shops pay higher rents comes to the same thing.
So a town centre with just shops and no parking can never grow beyond "just enough for the daily or weekly needs of people within walking distance", if these people want more than that, they have to drive elsewhere. And a town centre with just a huge car park and no shops is pointless as well. It's a question of finding a balance, and as a rule of thumb, equal areas of car parks and of shops seems "about right".
Of course, if you think about it, nice looking car parks could be the "village green" for towns in the motoring age. You can use them for other stuff at weekends, like public events, Jubilee parties, demonstrations, outdoor concerts, fun fairs, car free days with a bouncy castle and face painting etc. Though of course, you'd need to organise public transport to those events :b
Triple layer tinfoil
3 hours ago
27 comments:
Theoretically, if councils dropped having anything to do with parking, LVT implemented, planning liberalized (allowing private parking to be built at will), parking space counting as fully developed (with regards to LVT), the "just right" amount of parking could sort itself out no?
Interesting. In our small ex-mining town there is a huge council car park which has been there forever.
The town centre still does reasonably well. There are plenty of small shops including two butchers.
A similar ex-mining town nearby has a tiny car park and loads of empty shops.
Right next to the Trondheim cathedral, a big tourist attraction, a catholic school rents out it's paved play area for parking on the weekend. They rake in. An example of the multi-use potential of car-parks/play areas, and of rents :)
Most declining town centres don't even have their surface level car parks full - the fact the council charges £1 an hour puts people off.
If you want to revive your town centre, allow an hour for free, up to 5 hours at £1, and only start to kick in with high charges for all-day stayers, i.e. commuters.
Commuters will generally be prepared to pay less for somewhere a little bit further out, but shoppers won't.
Kj, it's not just theory. In the long run, it all should level out.
On my street and round the corner, there are two car parks, and the total income from parking charges per square metre of car park is roughly the same as the rent on my house, per square metre of house/garden.
Problem is if there are a lot of small shops. There's no point knocking down one shop to make a small car park. You need to knock down five or six to have an efficient size car park.
AKH, I'm glad to hear that, it's evidence supporting my theory.
Kj, same thing in reverse, splendid idea.
C, good point about shoppers being sensitive to parking charges (they are a f-ing nuisance - do you pay on entry or exit, do you need to put your ticket in the machine near the cars or at the exit, etc?) but commuters not caring (once you have worked out the system, it's not so stressful).
But re commuters, that is the point. In theory, the local shopkeepers should be happy to buy up the car park and abolish parking charges for shoppers, because that gets them a lot more trade for little outlay.
"In outer urban areas, people drive to the station by car and do "park and ride"."
Do they? Having spent a lot of time in these outer areas this isn't my observation. Buses are very much well used to get to and from the stations.
"And once I moved out to "the countryside", i.e. Zone 5, I soon realised that public transport or walking is totally impractical."
This is a long way from being universal in zone 5 though. Considering some very big town centres with very good bus (and rail) links are located there or further out. In reality it depends on where you live as main roads tend to have relatively good bus links. Same with walking.
I think you massively under estimate how many people use public transport to get to the big suburban town centres in London.
"So maybe one solution to declining town centres would be to knock down half the shops and build a multi-storey car park instead."
Or accept that out-of-town shopping is designed for the car and our traditional town centres aren't?
I know you don't like encouraging public transport usage but building cheaper and more attractive public transport options such as trams or park & ride would be a good solution. There are plenty of tram proposals for London's suburbs.
Chr: "I think you massively under estimate how many people use public transport to get to the big suburban town centres in London."
Woah dude! I am, and have been for the last ten years, a fully paid up owner of an annual zone 1 to 5 (or Zone 1 to 3) London Travelcard and will always use Tube for getting into town to work or getting around town or travelling from town to clients. That's not the problem. The problem is going from where I live out of town or travelling in a non-radial direction!
"... or accept that out-of-town shopping is designed for the car and our traditional town centres aren't?"
No, the trick is to build "out of town" shopping centres in the middle of towns, i.e. half shops, half parking, preferably high rise.
If these shopping centres are accessible by public transport as well, then so much the better, but let's cater for pedestrians, bus users AND motorists! Let's not have "town centres" for people who live locally and walk there and "out of town" for motorists, that seems dreadfully inefficient.
"I know you don't like encouraging public transport usage..."
Again, woah dude!
In and around London (or any larger town) local public transport (in particular Metro or Tube or trams etc) is the best thing ever. The South Yorkshire SuperTram is awesome!
I am a huge fan of public transport. But the economics and so on do not stack up in "the countryside", and there is no point pretending they do. And neither do I seek to impose my "liberal metropolitan" views on the vast majority who like living in commuter suburbs and like travelling by car.
Mark,
One of the problems with town centres is that they are really designed for an age of buses, when few people had cars.
Out of town shopping centres are designed around cars. The car park is in the middle, the shops are around it.
I've pondered on whether French town centres have survived better because their car parking is underground, and so, when you leave the car park, you are right at the shops (it also makes towns less unsightly).
"The problem is going from where I live out of town or travelling in a non-radial direction"
That doesn't mean people don't do it though? And it doesn't mean people wouldn't do it if better options were provided.
"No, the trick is to build "out of town" shopping centres in the middle of towns, i.e. half shops, half parking, preferably high rise."
But what about road capacity? Most of these out of town shopping centres are built by dual carriageways and/or major road junctions. I don't see how you can make it easier for cars to access Sutton, Kingston, Bexleyheath or Croydon without rebuilding the road networks that surround them.
"But the economics and so on do not stack up in "the countryside", and there is no point pretending they do."
If by this you mean zone 5 then Croydon's over capacity trams not only show how suppressed demand is in outer London, but also that the economics do stack up (with LVT). Give people decent public transport and (if it goes where they want to go at a reasonable price) they will use it, then again I'm not saying we should get everyone in the suburbs out of their cars.
"the vast majority... like travelling by car."
I'd argue they like travelling on/in whatever mode is most convenient and/or cheapest for their planned journey.
'Railway' station please. We invented and named them first in the UK.
If you want something shorter then 'station' is acceptable, being first confers some privilege.
It is like the Forth estuary crossings. The brown one is 'The Forth Bridge', the grey one is' The Forth Road Bridge'.
TS, I've always believed that the French town centres have fared much better than the English ones, because the French are a more urban race and where we have town centres that are a retail desert, the French still live in their town centres. It's the inhabitants of the town, who can walk to all the shops and don't need a car who keep the boulangerie, the charcuterie etc going. Everyone else shops in the Carrefour outside the town.
TS, yes, people have to get from where they are to the "shopping centre", preferably along a smooth flowing dual carriageway. But given where people are starting from, why does it make a difference if the dual carriage way goes out of town or into town? Now, glance to the left of Leyton Mills shopping centre and what do you see..?
Chr, re road capacity, see my previous answer.
I don't want to get dragged into a debate where you accuse me of saying things I never said and then I have to point out that I never said it. First read what I actually have said, don't double guess and double think.
Croydon is clearly not "countryside" by any stretch of anybody's imagination. If you want to start a debate whereby you claim that I described it as such then I'm bored already.
JS, I thought they were synonymous. "Station" means "railway station" like "plane" means "aeroplane" (or "airplane" for our American readers) or "stop" means "bus stop".
B, people in other countries do lots of things better than we do. And we do some things better than everybody else.
The French and Italians and Germans do cracking town centres, the French do cracking retail parks. But British suburbs are truly world class.
Mark in British English, as JS points out, "station" is adequate and means "Tube station" (not that I heard anyone call them that, when I lived in London, they were referred to as "the Tube", as in "I live five minutes from the Tube".), DLR station and BR station and, just like "meat" in Chinese means "pork" and every other sort of meat is qualified, "cow meat" etc. every other form of station is qualified in British English, i.e. police, bus, petrol.
The Americans don't do this, possibly because they also call railway stations "depots", and "station" means "police station", so they have come up with the qualifier "train" for railway station.
B,
I've always believed that the French town centres have fared much better than the English ones, because the French are a more urban race and where we have town centres that are a retail desert, the French still live in their town centres.
It's that there is an aspiration in France to live in towns, where in the UK, there is the aspiration to live in the country.
I suspect this is partly that we did post-war modernisation so bloody badly, where the French did it rather well, as a rule. The French mostly stuck with the same architectural styles that they had before the war, but adding some modernisation to them, where we bought into the bollocks of Le Corbusier (there's some Le Corbusier in Paris, but not much elsewhere).
Zone 3!? Zone 5??!!
You must talk awful funny.
BE
JS, I really hope that the new crossing will be called The Third of Forth, just to wind up American tourists.
BE
MW
What Bayard said abour French towns
plus Resale Price Maintenance abolished in 1964 but which the retail architecture of the Uk is still based around.Once we get back, like the Americans have post-Leegin to paying the same for branded goods at the corner shop, the local shopping arcade,shops in the High Steet and the supermarkets all will be well.
Following from Bayards comment about french living in their towns. Lots of them work there to, we have exported jobs to out of town industrial areas just as we exported the shops out to other areas. Indeed I'm not even sure what the purpose of a town is any more - local government and charities in many cases.
TS, the town/country thing goes way back, even to the C16th. The English (well in those days, just the landed gentry and aristocracy) have always valued their ties to the country, whereas then and now, the French, by and large, consider that the countryside is for peasants, towns and, preferably, cities is where it's at.
W42, yes, we seem to have forgotten that towns were built primarily for people to live in, but that's not really surprising, given that so many of us want to live in the countryside. Our "world class suburbs" are simply a result of trying (and laregely succeeding) to have the best of both worlds.
B, I'll continue to call them "train stations" if it is necessary. I wasn't aware it was an Americanism.
TS, yes, on the whole, French and German towns look nice, even though it is mostly fake and built fairly recently.
BE, I'm lost now.
DCB, I don't agree and you know it. The Yanks have got the same problem with decaying cities and out of town malls. Anyway I was talking about CAR PARKS.
W42, good point. I was just saying that better and more pleasant parking might be a way of reversing the decline.
"why does it make a difference if the dual carriage way goes out of town or into town?"
Because in-town dual carriageways blight the landscape making it uninviting to anyone who doesn't drive. Have you ever tried to walk to Bluewater or Brent Cross? Not to mention despite the better road links congestion around Bluewater is just as bad as Bexleyheath.
"Croydon is clearly not "countryside" by any stretch of anybody's imagination. If you want to start a debate whereby you claim that I described it as such then I'm bored already."
I never said you did, but you did say: "And once I moved out to "the countryside", i.e. Zone 5, I soon realised that public transport or walking is totally impractical."
Which because it seems to be the basis of your philosophy led me to bring up Croydon (which is in Zone 5) to show that this isn't the case.
Chr, no, dual carriageways do not necessarily "blight the landscape".
No, I have never tried to walk to Bluewater or Brent Cross (although I have been to Lakeside by bus, yeuck, and by train, pretty cool, and I've been to Brent Cross by Tube and bus, which was OK). Why on earth would I want to walk from London to Bluewater?
Which is the whole point of the post! If "out of town" shopping centres were in the middle of town, with decent parking and by definition good public transport, pedestrian and car access, then everybody wins.
I'm thinking of the two Westfields in London or Meadowhall, which is a pleasant tram ride away from Sheffield centre and has plenty of parking. Pity they blew up those old chimneys though.
I live somewhere which happens to be in Zone 5 (opposite direction to Croydon) and we have two young kids and take it from me, I struggled along manfully for 8 months without a car until even I had to accept that a car was indispensable.
So AFAIAC it is "countryside". I can even see fields and trees from my front gate. I did not say "Zone 5 = countryside".
omg BBC Reed trots out his "why higher prices are good" thesis again....
In my experience dual carriageways do blight the landscape, Erith and Thamesmead are good examples. The environment around both town centres is dead, whereas nearby Welling or Bexleyheath the shops follow the main arteries out of the town centres and there is much more life and integration.
By walk I meant from the station, both are terrible. I personally have no problem with these retail parks, they serve a different purpose from the town centres which from my observation are hardly dying and if they are surely it is the high rents which is the cause?
Also given that Bluewater has many more parking spaces than both Westfields combined surely they don't really serve the same purpose. And considering the way the dual carriageways provide access to the Westfields I'd assume you are arguing that we should drive a dual carriageway from say the A2 directly into Bexlyeheath or from Purley way into Croydon, rather than having multi lane dual carriageways enter the centres from all sides??
It seems you might live somewhere around the Loughton area (apologies if I am wrong) which isn't Greater London and is only in the TfL fare zones because it is on the tube. Therefore given this and that fact that the outer NE area doesn't seem to have a hub town centre I don't think your area is indicative of how it is in the zone 5/6 London suburbs and therefore I don't know if huge car parks and dual carriageways are necessary.
Chr: "the town centres which from my observation are hardly dying and if they are surely it is the high rents which is the cause?"
"High rents" are not some immoveable unstoppable force. It's as simple as landlords preferring to leave premises vacant than renting them out. LVT will sort that out.
"I'd assume you are arguing that we should drive a dual carriageway from say the A2 directly into Bexlyeheath or from Purley way into Croydon,"
Why do you keep making these wild (and wildly incorrect) assumptions? I wrote a post about car parks generally and how they could be good for town centres.
Quite clearly, if a town centre is doing well because it has good public transport access and without car parking (i.e. Oxford Street) it would be silly to build car parks and "drive a dual carriageway into central London".
Now go back and read what A K Haart said. There are other places beside London.
The best shopping centre I think I have ever visited was bang smack in the middle of Toronto. Toronto manages to be a modern North American city with big streets and also very walkable.
BE
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