The final decision on the multi-story car park will be made on Thursday the 8th September at 7pm at the Council Chamber, Civic Center in the Marlowes. This is your last chance to come along and make a noise.
These (29.08.16) pictures below show the currently allotted Dacorum BC paid car parking space at Lower Kings Road.
The proposal is to build a four storey carpark on this open air site. The decision is imminent, and the remote Dacorum BC is in favour.
(see the Sept Rex mag R&P pages – repeated here below).
The Berkhamsted Town Council has a chance to save or postpone development in favour of greater and more thorough research. Please come along on Thursday the 8th, all are welcome and it’s the final chance to have your say.
Environmentally and even for future town planning purposes, this will be an irresponsible, expensive, nasty and unforgivable mistake.
Multi story car parks are the biggest blight on any small town. Stop to look at St Albans. It is a horror for drivers approaching it through narrow residential streets, with a labyrinth of loathsome, badly designed and ill thought out one-way systems to reach it and exit. And much worse for people who live there in those once easy to get home to, now one-way streets.
In addition multi storey carparks are dark, dangerous places where NOBODY ever wants to park at night. Hence they are empty for 12 hours a night for seven dark months of the year. It’s only August now, and it’s dark by 9pm.
The current open air car park, with its trees and open air (Don’t dare dismiss this as namby pamby ‘air and trees’). Open air is what we need to live and breathe.
It is not a privilege, it is imperative and essential.
The simple arithmetic:
136 open air parking spaces with trees and open sky right now, and for many years, only occasionally full-ish at weekends.
312 spaces will be provided by this multi storey concrete brick. And here lumped on our horizon ‘forever’ – 365 days and nights a year – mostly half empty.
A solid reminder of the worst ugly, unnecessary hurry of things forced upon us by people who know too little about too little.
Therefore 176 new spaces is all it will provide…!! Hardly a space invasion. But a huge invasion of the unnecessary foisted on a whim by the elected, ill-informed, hapless few on to the many – for generations.
The cost to park is bound to go up per hour, just to maintain and man it? Then there’s those machines you need the right change for, before you can get out of those nasty, empty soulless blocks of cold stench, with a queue impatient behind you.
Let alone who will pay for its millions to build, and its monstrous disruption during those inevitable delays it takes to complete.
Councils MUST comprise clever women and men, who care and can think clearly, not petty politically motivated careless lightweights.
That aside, COME to the council meeting, 8th September 7pm at the council chamber, civic center in the Marlowes
And yes bring your own takeaways if you must, but it’s only an hour. You wont waste away.
You may well be angry and depressed by the end, but you wont starve.
Please come and have your say – whatever it is. Remember, we are still, for the moment, a democracy.
James Hannaway