20/12/2007

Woking

Letters from December 20 2007

Parking plan not thought through

EDITOR — Your recent articles on the subject of parking, particularly the withdrawal of free parking for the disabled, serve to highlight a fundamental problem in the council where cars and roads are concerned.

The only reason the policy on free parking has changed is that, when designing these new car park barriers, nobody actually thought through the problem of how disabled drivers would manage.

I had a number of conversations with various officials and the explanation of plans for disabled drivers was becoming even more bizarre as I pointed out that their ideas would not work.

At one stage it was suggested  that disabled drivers return to their cars (maybe on the fourth floor) take their blue badge from the car to the parking office on the ground floor (presumably leaving their cars in disabled spaces without badges), get a special pass-out ticket, return to their cars and use the ticket to operate the barrier.

When I pointed out the idiocy of having disabled drivers walk twice as far as everyone else I was told that the alternative was for disabled drivers to approach the barriers and push the help button to be let through.

The problem of fraud or the delay if the office was unmanned at that moment and the patience of the 10 drivers in the queue behind wasn’t apparently in the equation.

Whoever it was trying to think up answers on the spot wasn’t very good at it! Now of course, the need is to dress up these mistakes as a serious plan to allay financial disaster. There is a very rude word which comes to mind.

Now that the Brewery Road car park is completed, can anyone explain who qualifies for the ‘authorised parking only’ spaces outside the barrier? I assume that it will be the council employees or councillors themselves while the disabled have to drive through the barriers and pay on exit.

Would it have been beyond rational thought to give wage earners passes to park inside and put the disabled parking outside the barrier?

What particular mind-set dictates that the elderly and disabled must pay for a couple of hours parking but may travel free on a bus from here to Carlisle?

May I suggest that, as a protest, disabled drivers use their cards to park on the yellow lines in Brewery Road itself? M E Head
St Johns Road
Woking

Land working group is needed

EDITOR — I am writing regarding manorial waste in Chobham parish.

Broadly the work which is being done by Richard Roads on behalf of the parish council is to be welcomed but would be very much more welcome if it was being done properly.

I summarise a number of anxieties below.

The general purpose is to acquire land to protect the village scene, although this is nowhere stated and has not been agreed by the parish council.

Professional advice is that where a parcel of lands of this sort is dealt in the recipient should be endowed — not have to pay.

It is pretty monstrous that an attempt has been made at the recent days of ‘consultation’ to get a straw vote in the absence of any estimates of cost/or endowment on acquisition; any agreed estimates of annual cost; any indemnity as to how the asbestos which I understand is on one of the parcels of land should be cleared away, nor for whose account.

There are also doubts about title to lands and their status. Well less than 2% of the parishioners attended. Not much of a ‘ballot’.

The fact that, as of November 15, no attempt had been made to discuss the situation with Surrey Heath Borough Council which owns and manages Chobham Place Woods with which some parcels of the land are contiguous is inexperienced.

There are possible legal problems with the creation of a charitable trust which have not been looked into.

As I have already said to Robert Bell, the general idea is to be supported — prudently. It is to be hoped that a properly equipped working group will be formed to ‘flesh out’ the proposals.
A R K Hardcastle
Chertsey Road
Chobham

First printed in: Woking News and Mail