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| Mid June, 2020, South St, Perth never did get Space for People. Shoppers were hemmed in by four lanes allocated to parking, buses and traffic. Typical of Perth: drivers before pedestrians. |
This post could be subtitled "how traffic calming failed in Perth and what it revealed about those involved."
During 2020 I set up and co-convened (with Roger Humphry) Perth Area Living Streets (PALS), a local branch of the national charity for everyday walking. We campaign for a low traffic, greener, cleaner, safer pedestrian environment. We are also supportive of safe cycling infrastructure and sustainable travel generally. This post and those immediately following are intended as a record of some of the issues over the things I was engaged in that year. The view is from a personal perspective.
When Perth won £1.1m from Sustrans’ “Spaces for People” fund, it felt like a huge breakthrough. Here was PKC’s traffic and network team under new manager, Brian Cargill bidding for money, making proposals and getting agreement from councillors. It wasn’t a Groningen-style revolution, but then the council wasn’t left wing with a firebrand leader of roads and this wasn’t the seventies. Still, at PALS we could hardly believe it. Perth is a mecca for drive-through traffic: drive across both bridges, drive-through restaurants, drive-in retail parks. The driver is king here. Nothing is done to inconvenience drivers. Last Christmas PKC offered free parking. The ordinarily fanatically pro-car businesses were too apathetic to respond to the relevant survey yet PKC put the money into the scheme anway. Perth is awash with parking and yet I recall an official saying that any parking space removed has to be justified and given back somewhere else.
Not all the council's "Spaces for People" ideas were great. This was not surprising. It was a new venture and there wasn't time to consult with communities ahead of time. Making the bridges and vennels one way for pedestrians actually reduced space for people and wasn't a measure that survived many months. People ignored signs in the vennels. Arguments broke out on the narrow bridges especially at the beginning when it wasn't clear which side you were supposed to walk on, or when you got trapped by traffic on the "wrong" side. Matters weren't helped by the bollards Cllr Barrett had campaigned for that made the pavements even narrower. Pedestrians, buggies and the many cyclists who chose to push their bikes across the bridge rather than chance their lives in the traffic were all cramped for space. This was an issue not taken into account even before the pandemic. But then if there is no-one in the council or among city councillors who cycles a lot locally and who makes infrastructure decisions, this is not suprising.
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| Smeaton's bridge, Perth |
The unequal distribution of space between a person in a car and a person on the bridge was shocking. This is not just tolerated but seen as normal here.
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| Theobalds Road, London. Widely shared photo illustrating space taken up by drivers versus cyclists |
On St Leonard's Bank, Perth, making people cross the bridge on a bend in order to adhere to the one-way system was more dangerous than it had been before. Your choice was to catch covid from someone on the narrow bridge (so we thought in early 2020) or risk being crashed into by a car as you crossed on the bend. I told my kids not to cross the road but they didn't have the nerve to disobey the pavement stickers. It was so unsafe I ended up driving them the mile to tennis camp at Darnhall that ordinarily they would have walked.
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| St Leonard's bank: note the stickers on the pavement telling pedestrians to cross on the bend |
The cones just expand the pedestrian space but it wasn't really needed here and further down (out of shot) the cones disappear, right where you actually need them more.
But many of the ideas were good, pedestrianising the central section of the High Street and traffic calming the residential area around Balhousie St. The latter would have tied in with North Inch and Muirton community council's (NIMCC) plans for a "Space for People" placemaking project, funded by Sustrans. However, the victory of the Sustrans bid was short-lived. A young man from the north end of the NIMCC area got up a petition against the plans, gathering some 800 signatures, not all of them obviously local. Ironically, having opposed the earlier scheme, by 2021 people in that area were talking on Facebook about getting traffic calming for their area. Anyway, back in 2020 some people clearly wanted to keep Balhousie St as a rat run between the Dunkeld Rd and Atholl St. PALS defended the council's decision but councillors sided with the protestors. Nobody investigated to see how many were actually in favour of the plans nor how representative the protestors' petition had been
The tory councillor for the city ward, Chris Ahern had at least nailed his colours to the mast. An F1 car used to be his Facebook banner photo and he had always been against traffic calming. Putting bollards in the road would "split the community" he claimed. I simply didn't understand this at first until I realised the logical extension of this claim was that the thing that united a community was a road. I asked my kids whether, if someone was to put bollards down our road (bring it on!) it would "split" them from their friends on the other side. They looked at me as if I was mad. "Er, no. We'd just walk to see them as usual." And it would be safer, quieter, less polluted. Maybe they could even bike! But Mr Ahern and his colleagues didn't see or didn't care that the alternative to drive-through residential streets was a child-friendly neighbourhood.
Two of us had been told by two of the councillors themselves that they intended to vote for the traffic calming but in the event both (from the same party) did the opposite. PALS wanted to respond to the decision and, as it had been taken behind closed doors without involvement from NIMCC, we wanted to know who had voted which way. So, we put out a press statement which resulted in the paper asking all the councillors for a statement. As such, it was a very useful piece of journalism. We found out who had voted which way without having to resort to an FOI. Of the four city councillors, only Peter Barrett stuck by the council.
Recently, a councillor from Pontevedra in Spain gave a talk to Living Streets about their decision ten years ago to make their city people-friendly. "We wanted a city that was good for children," they said. "Because a city that is good for children is good for everyone." Cllrs Ahern, Drysdale, Forbes, and Parrot had an opportunity to take a step in that direction but they chose not to. In Pontevedra pedestrian fatalities have fallen to zero. Their city is clean, quiet, people walk everywhere, the population has increased and they are proud of their city. Their councillors are in demand for talks all over the world. "We could never have paid for an advertising campaign like this," they said.
Councillors had initially supported the council's Spaces for People proposals but all but Cllr Barrett then betrayed them at the first sign of trouble - the petition.
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| Quote from the Perthshire Advertiser's article on the episode |
The paper had asked the councillors to respond to our press release so there was no doubt Cllr Forbes was referring to PALS. This was interesting. Cllr Forbes is not a city councillor but the tory convenor of Perth and Kinross council's Environment and Infrastructure committee. The councillor had earlier asked someone in the organisation how our membership stood. This trusting person had shared that we were as yet small - obviously, being only a few months old. Mr Forbes was this person's own councillor and that councillor betrayed the confidence of that person and used it against the individual and the organisation for sheer political expediency.
Apart from which it was a mean-spirited and vicious thing to say about a new group fighting the good fight for vulnerable pedestrians. PALS is an organisation representing pedestrians in Perth and the immediate vicinity. Where it's membership lives is irrelevant. Luckily, none of this did us any harm. Not so for the councillor, judging by the reactions of people we spoke to about it. "Weird," they said. "Doesn't even add up". "Mean". He was to drop a further clanger.
Erm, the councillor's own constituency is the Carse of Gowrie, nowhere near Perth city centre. So, why was he canvassing opinion outwith his own ward while criticising us for representing the pedestrian voice? Not smart at all. People made that point too.
Still it's useful to see who and what you are up against, who your friends are and who definitely isn't. And, perhaps it got the councillor thinking because only two weeks later there he was in the paper on his bike, talking about 20mph roads in the Carse and seemingly in favour. Politicians, eh.
Undeterred, by this defeat the beleaguered council pressed on. They met Roger and I (PALS co-convenors) to discuss the measures. We went for a useful walk and talk with the head of traffic and network. We discovered they were human, nice and really, really busy. Spaces for People was a big project on top of their regular work. They had a constant stream of requests and complaints from the public and from councillors. On top of this, a river of cars was making its way across the region to enjoy the countryside under lockdown, resulting in even more complaints about overflowing carparks and blocked roads. Their team seemed pretty small. How were they coping? Well, they had also been called in to do other duties like help with the food bank. How were consultations going on pedestrianising the High Street? This was something PALS had pushed since before Spaces for People. Roger had been down in recent months to find out what businesses thought and they had thought he was from the council. Little Bird and the Cally bar had been for it and Pizza Express had sounded encouraging before they closed permanently. The old fashioned tea room had thought people begging across the road would put their clients off and were not in favour. It didn't seem to be the roads team that was doing the consultations. They were doing the implementation. The consultation process was all a bit unclear.
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| The partially pedestrianised High St. With all the parking the High Street never did look that pedestrianised, but it was a bit better than before:  |
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| The legacy of Spaces for People on the High St today. Ironically, I think this may be the phone shop that complained about pedestrianised. |
Back at the office Brian and Blair even took time to show us the bike lanes they wanted to put in. No, Atholl St, the one we were pressing for wasn't looking likely. There was too much traffic and bike lanes might slow that down. But they were going to link the inches (parks) with a bike lane and put in another so that people from the south side of the city could get into town on some form of segregated bike lane, probably through removing some of the parking on the Edinburgh Road. Since so little was getting in under the temporary measures they hoped to make the lanes permanent rather than spend all the money putting in temporary lanes for a short period and then removing then. We left asking what we could do to help. Try and get people onside and try to get them to get the councillors onside, they said.
Whoever had been tasked with consultation of the businesses on the High Street had not done too well. The tea room complained, the mobile phone shop complained, another business complained. They scoffed at the planters, calling them tattie boxes. They never had a chance. Councillors backtracked again. An exclusion zone for a school in St Madoes drew protests and the council beat a tactical withdrawal.
The removal of planters all over the city made the few places where they remained look odd. At Brewdog & at Casella & Polgato on George St people ate pizza or drink coffee behind a planter barricade with cars parked on all sides and traffic surging by. A single restaurant on South Street put up a raffia matting screen aginst two lanes of traffic, a bus lane and a lane for parking so people could eat their meals admittedly outside but amid the roar of traffic, the thunder of buses and the choking fumes.
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| Planters, George St |
Perhaps most bizarre of all was the saga of the touch-free crossings.
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