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that will not heal in the Morpeth motorist's tortured psyche: the primal unresolved betrayal, mother's breast cruelly withdrawn, the traumatic well-spring of all subsequent dysfunctional tantrums in opposition to beastly traffic lights, nasty traffic wardens, horrid road traffic law....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.