Sir,
during financial year 2012 - 2013, pay and display ticket machines for Morpeth's 1097 car parking spaces generated £713,315.43. This is another formula we might use to determine how generous a personal transport subsidy, to single-occupant car commuters, 'free' parking is: £650 a year. Worth having.
No justification has been ventured by Morpeth's car user lobby for this workers' subsidy being exclusive to those choosing to commute by car. A curious oversight, because those who commute to work in Morpeth other than by car need to feed and clothe themselves no less than car commuters; they're no less likely than car commuters to do their shopping in Morpeth and would, I'm sure, happily receive their subsidy in the form of vouchers redeemable only in Morpeth shops, if that would help swing it with Toad of Town Hall.
We've heard rather more than we needed to hear from Clarence the Car-Dependent Lion and co-religionists in recent years. Perhaps we could hear something from Pete the Pedestrian Potto, Buster the Bus-Riding Bonobo, Trish the Train-Travelling Tamarin and Bart the Bicycling Bandicoot. Can they pick up their £650, in whatever form, from the same distribution points as the 'Free' Parking discs? No? Where then?
Sincerely
NTMH
during financial year 2012 - 2013, pay and display ticket machines for Morpeth's 1097 car parking spaces generated £713,315.43. This is another formula we might use to determine how generous a personal transport subsidy, to single-occupant car commuters, 'free' parking is: £650 a year. Worth having.
No justification has been ventured by Morpeth's car user lobby for this workers' subsidy being exclusive to those choosing to commute by car. A curious oversight, because those who commute to work in Morpeth other than by car need to feed and clothe themselves no less than car commuters; they're no less likely than car commuters to do their shopping in Morpeth and would, I'm sure, happily receive their subsidy in the form of vouchers redeemable only in Morpeth shops, if that would help swing it with Toad of Town Hall.
We've heard rather more than we needed to hear from Clarence the Car-Dependent Lion and co-religionists in recent years. Perhaps we could hear something from Pete the Pedestrian Potto, Buster the Bus-Riding Bonobo, Trish the Train-Travelling Tamarin and Bart the Bicycling Bandicoot. Can they pick up their £650, in whatever form, from the same distribution points as the 'Free' Parking discs? No? Where then?
Sincerely
NTMH
I work in one of the distribution points for the new 'free' parking discs. 'Free' money is proving predictably popular with the recipients. Less predictable is the boundless compassion on display. We saw it first with the Lights Out! campaign: people wanted rid not because they personally were mildly inconvenienced by an initiative to reduce the odious, hazardous hegemony motorised traffic enjoys in central Morpeth, but on behalf of other people and interests - pedestrian safety, street scene aesthetics, congestion in a general sense were their prime concerns.
I'd dismissed it as evidence that it only takes a few determined liars to Shanghai a town, but again I'm being confronted by the warm hearted humanity of many drivers. They want multiple discs. Not for themselves, you understand, emphatically not because stockpiling them while free before they start costing a quid apiece from April, but for family and friends and neighbours, and their friends and extended families and neighbours. And one for the little boy who lives down the lane. And I'd better take a dozen for the poor ginger orphans. It's the Big Society made flesh and it brings a tear to the eye.
