The quest for commuting bliss

It's hard to keep up with the volume of car-user friendly puff generated by the Morpeth Herald. I'm getting behind. 

There was a letter from Cllr Towns - a response I think to the suggestion that the 'Lights Out!' agitators were perhaps being a tad silly – in which he treated us to anecdote about a couple of prangs at the lights. Anecdotes which might be persuasive were they balanced against data for the incidence of prangs, scrapes, near misses, altercations, shootings of the pedestrian crossing on red by northbound traffic barrelling round at speed, for a similar period prior to the installation of the 'new' lights. Without this comparison data his anecdotes are worthless.

This week we've a real peach of a front page 'report' which stands as shabby exemplar, an essential distillation (which I promise will be the last aromatherapy pun) of the car-besotted bilge the Morpeth Herald specialises in. You can read it here .

What the Herald studiously doesn't report is that the complaining, car-dependent aromatherapist lives - a trawl through the electoral rolls suggests - in Morpeth, near County Hall, at a distance of circa 1.3 miles from her place of work. 

Josie says that the days when she's able to find an all-day space for her car in the town centre “are bliss”, she “can relax”. Let's quickly run through Josie's personal transport options for a commute journey of 1.3 miles, alternatives to grinding her four wheeled fossil fuel diffuser (I lied about the puns) into town every day, that she might always and forever enjoy the relaxed bliss of not having to fret about her motor car's whereabouts. 

We've the few dozen 'Lights Out!' protest marchers themselves to thank for demonstrating recently that a 1.7 mile walk up to County Hall from the town centre is readily do-able for anyone averagely able-bodied, even those toting kids to window dress some protest banners. The walk from Josie's home to the town is shorter. Does an overall 20 to 25 minutes each way sound reasonable? How this compares with the time it takes to drive in through peak time central Morpeth, drive around a while to find a parking space, walk from parking space to clinic, pop back several times during the day to move car if unable to find a blissful, relaxing all day space, walk back to car and grind home through peak time central Morpeth at end of day, is unclear. I doubt there's much in it, and were you to add the time it takes Josie to earn the money to pay for her car commuting - fuel, parking, parking fines and a chunk of her fixed car-ownership costs (initial purchase, MOT, VED, depreciation) proportionate to her commuting mileage - walking will be the quicker option. See Ivan Illich on the subject.

Or Josie could cycle. Downhill of a morning she'd barely need to turn a pedal, could roll into work in a comfortable 5 minutes with negligible exertion. Getting back up the gradient would require more effort, would maybe reduce her speed - until she's found her cycling legs - to an average 6-7mph and extend her journey time to something over 10, but short of 15, minutes. I will concede that the return leg stretch up Castle Bank can be unpleasant for an un-confident, novice cyclist: getting over into the right hand lane approaching the mini roundabout, to take position to go up towards County Hall, can be unnerving because of the volume and speed of people like Josie using cars to get home. To begin with it may be best to hop off shy of the roundabout, walk across, and re-mount the other side. Under 20 minute round trip doesn't sound bad for a commute though, does it? 

In addition to the bliss of not having to worry about parking, walking or cycling would save Josie money, improve her fitness and health, likely see her lose weight, free up a parking space for someone who might have genuine need of it and - if anyone cares – de-carbonise her commuting.

It used to be six but might now 'only' be five peak time buses an hour that pass the end of Josie's street down the A197 into the town of a morning. Josie's place of work is right by the bus station and the bus station closer to her clinic than any legal parking space. Little to add, really, except that a folding bike would enable Josie to mix and match her commute patterns according to her energy levels. She could coast into town on her bike of a morning, giving a cheery wave to all the single-occupant car users seething about 'traffic' in long tailbacks of broiling-tin idiocy, then decide to get herself and bike back up the hill of an evening on the bus, if feeling a bit sluggish after a day spent stacking 100gallon drums of essential oils in the stockroom.

“Morpeth is so lovely, but the council is making it a misery with the parking problems,” Josie is quoted as saying in the offending front page splash. Not even close; ill-considered personal transport choices cause the car-shafted misery of Morpeth Town. Josie is ideally placed to choose to be neither perpetrator nor victim of the traffic congestion and parking over-subscription that bedevil Morpeth. 

I'm not sure what your going rate for an aromatherapy session is Josie, but this Personal Transport consultation is my gift to you.

Car Parking #1

Car parking then. Bert's an acquaintance: congenial affable chap. Fixed my best-beloved kitchen utensil – a rice cooker – for me and would take nothing for his time and trouble. Whenever I have rice, warm thoughts of Bert mingle with the scent of fluffy beads of perfectly cooked long-grain. More than an acquaintance perhaps, but not quite a mate: we've yet to compare warts after a skinful. (Scars, surely? Ed.)

Bert's with Morpeth's 'Lights Out!' movement, something of a spokesman, photographed and quoted in the Morpeth Herald. I think Bert's misguided, if well-intentioned, and that there may be causes more deserving of his energy and abilities. We discuss transport issues sometimes. Bert says that the economic decline of Morpeth was caused by – didn't merely coincide with – the introduction of parking charges circa 12 years ago. I suspect we're at the nub of it here, and that this is the wound that will not heal in the Morpeth motorist's tortured psyche: the primal unresolved betrayal, mother's breast cruelly withdrawn, the traumatic well-spring of all subsequent dysfunctional tantrums in opposition to beastly traffic lights, nasty traffic wardens, horrid road traffic law....

Is it true that Morpeth's been in economic decline for the last 12 years? I've seen no data to support this assertion. The cars congesting the streets and pavements seem always to be getting bigger and more bling, the mobile phones with which some drivers distract themselves from the tiresome chore of controlling lethal heavy machinery in shared public space are morphing into sleek flat smart tablets. Yes, small independent retailers are struggling, but might that have more to do with a global recession, the rise of internet shopping and Tescofication, the pressures identified by Mary Portas that are squeezing traditional town centres nationwide, not just Morpeth?

Anyway Bert, says I, the Morpeth motorist has it easy. A year's municipal parking permit, access to all the Council's car parks county wide, can be had for £110 (£82.50 concessionary). £2.12 per week to rent circa 16 square meters of engineered town centre hard-standing for private machinery storage, less than the cost of provision and an annual subsidy of, roughly - depending how you measure it, and we'll have a stab at some measuring shortly - between £290 and £7390. Morpeth motorists should be toasting their good fortune, humbly grateful for this largesse from the public purse.

No, says Bert, the permit is not a subsidy because Morpeth's car parks are always full and you can't be sure of finding a space.

Now..... were you listening to this on the radio rather than reading a blog you would've heard, just there, the unmistakable scraunch of a stylus being clumsily lifted from a vinyl record. Woah, back a bit! Let's re-cap: there are more cars than ever before choking the streets of Morpeth (certainly since the A1 bypass 42 years ago): there are more car parking spaces now than at any time in Morpeth's history (Google satellite view can't keep pace with the voracious tumour of tarmac gnawing away at the town's innards). The more cars than ever before are filling the more car parking spaces than ever before, Bert assures us, beyond capacity. Yet car parking charges are crippling the town!? A startling whiff of motorist illogic: something has to give here. To make stick the claim that parking charges are scuttling the town you'd need, as a minimum, to be able to point to some under-used - because over-priced - car parking. If you can't, you need a new theory.