Want to share your views? Today it seems very fashionable to share your views via twitter (my preferred social network) or facebook, which should be deleted. So why would you bother joining East Lothian’s new Citizens’ Panel? Some background first.
East Lothian Partnership is setting up a Citizens’ Panel to help it gather the views of a cross section of the East Lothian population on a regular basis. Panel members will be asked for their views on issues such as quality of life, safety, health and wellbeing, as well as on their satisfaction with public services. The information gathered will help public sector organisations such as the Council, NHS, Fire & Rescue Service and the Police to plan and make improvements to the services they provide locally.
Not a lot, perhaps. Today it would be the old A1, but both towns are, thankfully in many respects, bypassed. In the eighteenth century, it was the main road from Edinburgh to Berwick upon Tweed, which in George Taylor and Andrew Skinner’s 1775 map shows the towns incongruously side by side and has to be one of the more fascinating road maps of its time. Being a strip map it aims to portray the roads of Scotland in the late 1700s as efficiently as possible. Their map shows the towns of Tranent and Dunbar in an unusual vertical projection, which would make taking a bearing somewhat of a challenge, or so you would think. On the contrary, the maps are remarkably clear and very easy to interpret and one supposes easy to navigate. The modern day equivalent are the not quite legendary Coast to Coast strip maps produced by the Ordnance Survey, which show a strip of 1:25,000 detail for the whole route. For just over a tenner you can buy an A2 Taylor and Skinner print from NLS. Brilliant.
Consultation is increasingly a bit of a sham. Yet democracy relies on it. The deeply held notion in some areas of public policy that consultation is in itself a problem is obviously a barrier, but there’s plenty been written on participation myths and I ain’t gonna expunge any here. But here’s a thought. To my mind too few, politicians and the public, appreciate the difference between gauging public opinion and gathering information that helps improve public policy decision-making.
Without any real notice, exactly one working day to be precise, I received notification from Peter Forsyth, Senior Area Officer (Transport), of a plan to alter the configuration of the post office parking bay, so that it may accommodate a new bus stop. On Monday 17th March 2014 three weeks of road works will commence, so that East Lothian Council may (or may not, if residents have their say) go ahead with a plan to create a new bus stop right on the junction of Abbeylands.
Despite calling the officer in charge within minutes of receiving the hand delivered notification, and expressing my extreme distaste for the principle of the proposal, (outlined elsewhere in this blog and directly with politicians and in correspondence with the Transport Division), I did not receive a return call from either Peter, his boss Ray Montgomery or from Angela Leitch CEO, to offer an explanation for the lack of consultation with residents. A sharply pointed email thus followed.
Yet, just a matter of months before, the mood music at a well attended High Street public meeting heralded a new era of “greater consultation” with residents, whose voice has been suppressed by serial muddled thinking and obfuscation dominated by the views of small minded High Street traders and well meaning, but mostly out of touch Community Councillors.
Parking notices are always IGNORED in Dunbar
Our officials (they work for us!) and elected representatives (they work for us too!) run rough shod over the views of residents, and don’t even pay lip service to the notion of consultation. They cannot even fallback on the world changing planned Traffic Regulation Order for Dunbar, which is almost 10 years in the making. Even cursory scrutiny of this document shows it lacks a satisfactory, let alone detailed, explanations of the proposals so it is nigh impossible to see exactly what is being proposed and what the environmental and social impact on residents might be. I can say I met with an official, but he failed to provide any feedback or follow-up after a short on site meeting where we discussed a range of traffic issues.
Let’s remind ourselves of the background of this proposal. A bus stop a little further down the road, located next to the Lothian Hotel is almost derelict because the Council has failed to look after since it was first built. Cigarette burns, holes and other graffiti decorate the now opaque perspex. A cheap spec and a policy of no repair is a recipe for dereliction, and this is the main bus stop, but no one cares about bus users do they? Everyone recalls what Thatcher had to say about them! Punters at the pub, which has been closed now for 2 years, would hang around outside chatting and smoking, which is fair enough. An unintended consequence of the smoking ban is to transfer a private pleasure, fags and booze, into the public realm. Some tenants of the Hotel were less than savoury, or so I am told. The atmosphere at the bus stop was objectively unsavoury, and rightly users of public transport were aggrieved. But why not deal with the problem directly and resolve the matter with the owners/licencee?
Since the pub closed the state of the bus stop has not changed much, with plenty cigarette litter and other detritus accumulating, including Dunbar’s hallmark liquid stains and remains (discharging your drink on the pavement is a strange but popular pass time in our town, which doesn’t seem to occur even in Edinburgh or Glasgow). It’s impossible to pin down who is responsible for the littering and anti social liquid behaviour (I warned that investments in CCTV would never pay off), but my guess is that most of this is adolescents and a small number of people heading home after a good day in the pub.
I am pretty sure it is not the bus pass users, who probably have to hold their noses, and who wonder whether this thing called “free” is actually worth the candle. Over at relbus.org.uk, a project I admire and actively support, we get regular complaints about the quality of bus services, but there is a silent majority who never complain. These people have simply concluded that unsavoury bus stops are deterrent enough to using public transport, and they don’t or won’t. Who can blame them?
But why is the bus stop moving now the pub is closed? Why not simply remove the shelter, or replace it? Well it seems that for a few minutes every day, when there is a popular bus service (can you can guess which one this isn’t?), the pavement can get a bit congested – and that is about it. No other reason.
The Council, and certain local politicians, possibly aided and abetted by the Community Council, which has scarcely ever bothered gathering the views of that many people in its short history, quietly agree it must move. I call this the “tyranny of lazy decisions”, betraying the snooty attitude: “I don’t get the bus do you?” entirely similar to one that I get which is “you don’t live on the High Street, do you?”
But instead of engaging with residents and users with a view to relocating the stop to a more central and accessible location, ELC decides it must move it even further away from the High Street’s centre of gravity. The effect of which is to marginalise it even further and to make yet more room for more cars. Go to any sleepy Italian town and the bus infrastructure is bang in the middle of the square, not at the opposite end. There are numerous alternative locations which I have previously discussed with council officials, and others too, which they have failed to provide any rational arguments against.
So why is the new location such a bad choice? Here are the arguments:
It is opposite another bus stop – what happens when both bus stops are blocked by inconsiderate/illegal car parking, which is legion in Dunbar?
It is adjacent to the old Post Office – so will be regularly blocked as it is a well known drop off point for the Steamy Dreamy cafe, as well as parcel collection, and convenient if you want to pickup a paper or a pie
Illegal parking is rife – that is a problem
It is on a junction – so all the additional traffic that wishes to exit that junction (cf. the related daft proposal to create more unnecessary parking at Abbeylands) will have their exit line obscured when there are buses in the bay
It will block Abbeylands at regular intervals – when the stop is blocked by parked cars or badly parked buses, which I guarantee will be often, the traffic will backup
The proposal will cut off a pedestrian “desireline” – from the Steamy Dreamy cafe to the Newsagents
Abbeylands junction is used to illegally park – many people already use it as supplementary drop off parking, pickup a pie and parcel collection, and it is regularly used by Eve’s coach drivers to pickup coach parties
The Abbeylands junction is used as a mini roundabout – mainly by people heading to the main Post Office and the Co-op (see accompanying snap of free parking clearly available and the bus stop being abused – a new car park ain’t going to stop lazy drivers in our town)
The Abbeylands junction is used as layby – see the image above, the bored driver of the Co-op vehicle needs little further explanation!
The junction is used by larger delivery vehicles to deliver parcels and even stock the Co-op
Moving the bus stop does not alter the anti social behaviour, only now the local residents will have double the nuisance. In fact, as this is the main stop out of Dunbar, the nuisance factor is probably several times higher.
Abbeylands Circus – this is not an artist’s impression!
All of which stacks up to an increased safety hazard, and added environmental impact – clapped out Firstbuses and noisy diesels are polluting the atmosphere for your kids mine have long left and displacement of social problems – litter and the consequences of laissez faire regulation of the night time economy are contributing to reduce home asset values.
And, here is my final objection. The bus stop proposals I have seen foresee a huge and brash modern steel structure, with integrated information systems and the rest. This idea might work in a city location or perhaps even a central location in Dunbar (there was an interesting station hub proposal, which I would support), but there has been no public debate, let alone a discussion of alternative options as to how such a proposal would on its own change behaviour towards public transport, let alone fit into the historic streetscape.
The fact that the stop will be outside my house is a relevant consideration, for I don’t want anti social infrastructure outside my house, but neither does anyone else, so we can discount that argument.
Residents in and around Abbeylands already have enough antisocial infrastructure and bad neighbour businesses which should be located out of town. Let’s distribute the impact more evenly while taking active measures to reduce the impact of business, especially the night time economy, convenience shoppers and inconsiderate motorists, and reclaim streets for residents. Who knows, nicer “living streets” may help the economy grow.
