Tuesday 16 November 2010, author: admin

Last Friday, a meeting took place which had been called for by the Chamber of Commerce to discuss, once again, pressing issues of parking in Totnes. In attendance were Cllr Paula Black, Cllr Tony Whitty, Cllr Anne Ward, John Halliday and Chris Watkins from DCC Highways Dept and Andy Garner and myself from the Chamber of Commerce.

The Chamber’s concerns were threefold: 1 – Precisely what amendments, temporary or otherwise, were being proposed by DCC to ease the parking situation in the lead up to Christmas. 2 – How quickly could any improvements be put in place, and 3 – What long-term improvements were envisaged and with what timescale?

1. The Highways Dept is looking at specific sites in and near the Residents’ Parking Schemes on Mon-Wed this week to identify up to 80 spaces that could be made available for daytime visitor parking alongside or within the RPS.

2. Once identified, their contractor will be put on standby to implement immediately the necessary notices and road markings after approval from HATOC (Highways and Traffic Orders Committee) on Dec 3^rd.

3. Little progress on the long-term view despite a modicum of useful discussion. The problem here is, I believe, twofold. Firstly, the Highways Dept shows every sign of being unable or unwilling to acknowledge that it has made a colossal blunder in ignoring and even going against its own expensively commissioned report (the Parsons Brinkerhoff Report). In this report, most if not all of the problems which have occurred because of RPS were meticulously predicted. Consequently the officers of the Highways Dept seem somewhat reluctant to seriously consider a fundamental review and overview of the RPS. Our question is simple:

‘In what ways would we improve the RPS given the information we have now, the research results we are continuing to receive and any still relevant lessons from the PB Report?’

The second problem seems to be that some local politicians appear unwilling to accept criticism of the RPS for fear of losing some residents’ votes. Naturally, many residents, having been given premium rights to park in the streets around their house will resist and resent even the slightest reduction of that privilege. County officers and Cllrs alike should have avoided this messy situation.

However, it now looks as if the group who are complaining the loudest both vocally and in writing is not only the largest group but also the one with NO VOTE here, the visitors. Specific and heartfelt complaints have been pouring into the town recently summed up by one unhappy scribe “Stuff Totnes”

If each visitor who vows never to return to Totnes, or even just to drastically reduce their visit frequency, then goes on to tell one friend, then there is a serious risk of losing visitor numbers to the town to a detrimental degree.

This Thurs evening the questionnaires that have been completed in the town over the past two weeks are going to be evaluated. The excellent and hard work carried out by Ross Newton Alan Gorman and others recently has resulted in over 600 responses to their parking questionnaire.

These are going to be sorted out at the Civic Hall and I would strongly urge anyone who can find an hour or so to spare to go and help out. This project has enormous potential to help the business community with some of the town’s parking problems, including but not only, the RPS issues. So please turn up on Thurs if you possibly can.

Thank you,

Paul Wesley, Chair