SecretLeeds - History, culture and architecture in Leeds

In this mornings YEPhttp://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/news/Ang ... 8926.jpThe closure of seven all-day car parks will end cheap city parking and bring "misery" to thousands of workers.Around 2,500 long-stay car parking spaces that serve Holbeck Urban Village by Bridgewater Place, south of the city centre, will cease operating in the New Year.Typically the sites, which are located off Globe Road, Sweet Street, Trent Street, Ingram Street, Ingram Row and Water Lane, charge £3.50 for the day.Commuters will have to park further away – for up to four times the cost – or switch to public transport.Owners of the car parking sites lost at appeal at the council's city centre plans panel on Friday after it was decided that long-stay parking went against policies to reduce congestion. Commuter Martin Burrow, who uses the Sweet Street car park, said: "The closure of this car park is going to cause misery to thousands of workers who work south of the River Aire."Myself and my partner drop our daughter at school in the morning, and then car share (to work]."(We] leave promptly in an evening to collect our daughter from school. "The proposed closure will make it practically impossible for us to continue with this routine, and quite honestly we don't know what alternative we have available to us."Office administrator Susan Wood (have picture], who travels from Pudsey to work in Holbeck five days a week, told the YEP she will not stop driving to work as public transport is inconvenient and unreliable.She said: "It would take two buses and about an hour to get to work, when driving takes 20 minutes." Nearby carparks include the NCP on Boar Lane, which charges £14.90 for stays up to 12 hours and has 630 spaces; Q Park off Sovereign Street which charges £12 for up to 10 hours and has 499 spaces; and Town Centre Securities on Whitehall Road which charges £7.50 for the day and has 62 spaces.The City Council decided that a reduction in the number of long stay commuter car parking spaces in the city centre would:* encourage people out of cars* reduce morning peak time congestion* promote more sustainable travel choices such as bus and train travel, and park and ride solutions* reduce the contribution to climate change* make park and ride facilities, bus corridors and the anticipated Leeds City Train station's southern entrance more viable.Coun Elizabeth Nash (Lab, City and Hunslet) told the council's city centre plans panel that the city lacked a tram or trolleybus system and two suburban ralway stations proposed for the Aire Valley were on hold.Coun Graham Latty (Con Rawdon and Guiseley) said: "I don't welcome the disappearance of car parking in Leeds. We must start planning for more park and ride or there will be trouble in store."All seven long stay car parks were set up on vacant plots of land up from five to nine years ago.Four of the unauthorised car parks will be allowed to continue as a short stay service, subject to conditions such as charging drivers £25 for stays of more than five hours. The remaining three sites will close.Holbeck Urban Village was developed in a bid to create new opportunities for employment, living and leisure. The area employs thousands of people, and is popular with shoppers and visitors to its restaurants, pubs and sandwich bars.Proof, if it were needed, has finally arrived that Leeds City Council have totally lost the plot with the news that they are to forcibly close the well used and essential car parks in the Holbeck area.I wonder how the council expects the people who currently use the car parks will now get to work? Are they expecting them to be forced onto First's monopoly of bus services, with their robber baron attitude to fares (it costs more to make a return bus journey into Leeds during the peak periods than it currently does to park all day in Holbeck), or perhaps they are all going to pay the excessive rates charged by the likes of NCP?Maybe some will, but in these financially challenging times, something else will have to give - something the coffee shop and sandwich bar owners of the city centre will be able to speculate on at leisure as their customers find themselves priced out of buying lunch.The rest will simply park further out of the city centre, where it is certain that new car parks will spring up to take advantage of the councils actions. Some will undoubtedly park in residential streets to the consternation of residents. All of which could be easily avoided by allowing the car parks where there is demand. It's not as if anyone else is currently falling over themselves with alternative uses for the land.The council cites the need to cut congestion as the main reason for forcing the car parks to close - yet this is the same council that creates congestion everywhere it's dead hand touches the highways of our city. The recent reduction of Bishopgate Street from 3 to 2 lanes has created chaos out as far as the motorways and along the southern side of the already maligned Loop Road, while the misguided busway on Kirkstall Road looks set to repeat the failings of the similar scheme on York Road that has brought avoidable congestion to the lives of thousands every day, whilst ensuring that First maintain their monopoly on services. It wouldn't be so bad if the council had the sense to give motorists any form of sensible alternative, yet the muddle this council makes of any sort of integrated transport policy would shame a small parish council, let alone one of the biggest cities in the country. At a time when other councils around West Yorkshire are reducing parking costs to attract motorists to the shops and leisure facilities, only Leeds City Council could be ensuring that costs are set to rise.Perhaps it's about time for someone to investigate Leeds City Council and establish if they are fit for purpose - they certainly don't seem to be interested in the opinions of their electorate.

Well put Ravey davey i just dont know what they are thinking about how on earth can they make up for all the lost spaces.Is it because they get no income from them that they are doing this?

tilly wrote: Well put Ravey davey i just dont know what they are thinking about how on earth can they make up for all the lost spaces.Is it because they get no income from them that they are doing this? I strongly suspect that is at least part of it.We've stopped going into Leeds on a weekend as it's simply too expensive to park, or use the bus (well over a fiver for the two of us for there and back on a First Day ticket), and I can see the city centre dying like those in the surrounding smaller towns (Bradford, Halifax) have done due to the insistence on excessive parking charges and this anti-car war that the council seem to be on. How the poor folk who work in the city centre are expected to cope with this I don't know.

I complained a couple of years back about every short-stay on-street bay in one area having been madw long-stay (demonstrably disadvantaging those NEEDing a short stay - bays now being full of folk wanting to stay all day). Response: 'The short stay bays were underutilised and changed to maximise their worth'.Nearest you'll get to a damming admission.

raveydavey wrote: We've stopped going into Leeds on a weekend as it's simply too expensive to park, or use the bus (well over a fiver for the two of us for there and back on a First Day ticket), £3.80 for five hours on Quarry Hill. Still ot too bad. As for the closure of the car parks, vindictive and mad when there's no alternative and other options are at capacity, expensive and less flexible.

To play devil's advocate for a moment, the bus services are so terrible mostly because they can't get through the vast amounts of traffic trying to get into, out of, and through Leeds in the rush hours. This makes the time for buses to complete their journey two or even three times as long as it should. It follows that they are only able to complete half the number of journeys for which they are timetabled, hence only provide half ( or less ) the service. Increasing the number of buses only increases the congestion, and seriously increases the cost to provide the service resulting in fare increases......Traffic will continue to expand if added road provision is provided until it reaches the same level of chaos and so on in the famed ever decreasing circles. Eventually it becomes neccessary to discourage personal transport in the city centre, in order to prevent the entire system collapsing, and to provide effective reasonably priced public transport.Leeds does really need serious investment in public transport, and to go with it measures to effectively reduce the number of vehicles that carry only one or two people. Not what people want to hear, but inescapable.    

I'd agree with that if they had said key routes would have an extra bus an hour at peak times.

Cardiarms wrote: raveydavey wrote: We've stopped going into Leeds on a weekend as it's simply too expensive to park, or use the bus (well over a fiver for the two of us for there and back on a First Day ticket), £3.80 for five hours on Quarry Hill. Still ot too bad. As for the closure of the car parks, vindictive and mad when there's no alternative and other options are at capacity, expensive and less flexible. Here the story that First plan to add running boards and grab handles to the sides of their fleet to increas standing capacity?(many a true word....)

........and then there is the triple-decker bus concept. Reduces the passenger complement by a third at the first low bridge........

The question is: Are the buses fully loaded anyway? I can't speak for Leeds, but they're certainly not in Bradford.