{"id":1787,"date":"2014-03-26T12:28:06","date_gmt":"2014-03-26T12:28:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/abbeylandsresidents.org.uk\/?p=1787"},"modified":"2014-07-14T13:23:14","modified_gmt":"2014-07-14T12:23:14","slug":"concrete-gardens-is-a-car-parking-coming-to-a-green-space-near-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ourlocality.org\/abbeylands\/concrete-gardens-is-a-car-parking-coming-to-a-green-space-near-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Concrete gardens – is a car park coming to a green space near you?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"coosgreen\"Our friends over at Coosgreen, have tipped us off that the long awaited consultation on car parking in North Berwick has begun. At least they are getting a fairly detailed consultation and some options not long after the publication of the research. Moreover residents are being asked too whether the proposals for residents parking should be extended. Nice, we approve, but one is tempted to see this as a bribe. By contrast, residents over in Dunbar have to rely on research and decisions from as far back in 2005\/6, while recent requests for their views and parking needs to be taken into account dismissed pretty much out of hand.<\/p>\n

Sure, Dunbar did get a pretty map last year, but how many householders actually saw it? Pretty colours, but pretty cumbersome, detailed and awkward to unpack (you can see nice copies on this website though<\/a>). Was the Traffic Regulation Order being published for consultation or was this a pre-consultation? We’re still confused. If you were designing a process to confuse the public, this one would get a good score. The exact proposals were at best opaque, but by this stage almost a decade after the original research, most people had forgotten what the fuss was all about.<\/p>\n

There were no options – so what was the consultation for? Six months after the event there’s still no official response, but in the meantime at least 1 new car park has sprung up out of nowhere and another unplanned one is in the making<\/a>. So much for evidence-led policy making. As tarmac spreads over every last vestige of green space in our rural towns, the quality of our local environment inexorably declines.<\/p>\n

The population of many of our towns has doubled, but by my reckoning greenspace has not increased. I suspect that North Berwick’s enviable greenspace quality and quantity score will be severely dented if all the sites for car parking get the greenlight. Dunbar’s greenspace scores aren’t that great, so every time a plot in the centre gets built on or paved over, that’s a collective loss, especially in a town where pretty much the only greenspace left is in people’s private gardens. Dog shit strips probably count as greenspace.<\/p>\n

New parks and gardens (areas of land normally enclosed, designed, constructed, managed and\u00a0maintained as a public park or garden) are not being created, so, as our towns and villages grow, we are getting progressively less and we’re all the poorer for it. To be fair some green areas have been added under s75 agreements including woodlands (nice if you have can have one) and maybe some children’s play areas and football pitches, but these are not a substitute for formal parks and gardens. Formal parks and gardens should be at the heart of the greenspace quality criteria and be weighted accordingly. So is the planning system failing us by creating ever cheaper and perhaps poorer greenspace substitutes, and not least transferring the responsibility for management to communities in order to save money?<\/p>\n

Feeling completely depressed and disempowered? Well here’s what you have to do. Offer a bit of solidarity to our neighbours over in North Berwick. Before the 5 May 2014 send feedback directly to East Lothian Council on the proposals. https:\/\/eastlothianconsultations.co.uk\/infrastructure\/north-berwick-parking-strategy\/consult_view You may wish to refer to the coosgreen.org website too to pick up on the background and the sorts of costs involved. Obviously there’s many who just don’t want Coos Green developed, but I suggest that this is not about voting for one site or another, but rather arguing that a different approach needs to be developed, which in fact many objectors have to their credit proposed. The proposals for NB may even seem quite modest in relation to the rather expensive ones that the consultant’s were proposing, but this could be just part of the death of greenspace by a thousand cuts. Click through to their survey and check your answers with care, as the survey responses are saved as you go, so even a partial response is being recorded. If you only answer a few questions I guess it is better than nothing at all, but the point is not to vote, so much as to provide logical arguments for alternatives to daft predict and provide paradigm<\/a>. I suggest that there’s a need for:<\/p>\n