Cllr Stewart Dobson, Marlborough "drivers need parking near the shops as they are unfit; cyclists can walk"

Marlborough, over in Wiltshire, is on the easternmost fringe of the S Gloucs commute ring; people do drive all the way from there to the offices on the A4174. They are the ones who have to get to work by 8am, who stay until after 7, who whine about congestion on the M4 near bath.

They are also, perhaps, the people too unfit to walk a short distance to the shops.

This has to be the conclusion to an ill-fated proposal to add bike racks outside some shops in Marlborough -at the expense of a parking space.

The plan was voted down, due to the fact it would take away two free parking spots.

The most ridiculous rationalisation for this has to come from Cllr Stuart Dobson, Marlborough East.

"It is so important, especially in these present financial times, that we do all we can for residents,"

subtext: nobody who voted for me rides a bicycle. People who do cycle are non residents -yet bring no revenue to the shops.

"There are an awful lot of people who are not disabled enough to qualify for a parking badge and therefore a disabled space, but nevertheless they are not terrible mobile.

subtext: we need to feel sorry for the people -the residents- who have to park right in front of the shops, because it is for their health. Even if they don't have disabled badges, they can't walk.

"Cyclists by and large are very active people," he added.  "So I can’t see a problem with them walking from one end of the High Street to the other whereas we would be penalising people who are far from active."

subtext: it is acceptable to penalise those people who cycle. They are not residents/voters after all.

This is possibly the most retrograde piece of thinking there is. Unless he has been misquoted, think about what it means

1. We should reward the people who drive into the town by providing parking directly outside their destination.
2. We should penalise those people who cycle in to town by making them park elsewhere and then walk to their destination -so increasing their journey time and inconvenience.

Yes, it is couched in terms of "my residents aren't healthy enough to walk far" and "those cyclists, they are all fit and healthy and can walk a few minutes to get to the shops", but that makes clear the fundamental problem that the NHS has to tackle

By encouraging people to drive everywhere, we have created a nation of obese, unfit and unhealthy people.

Rather than care about the health of his residents, Cllr Dobson is implying that health problems are not lifestyle-related, that they are some random acts of chance. Those people who drive, they only do so because they are unfit. If they were fit and healthy, they'd be cycling instead. Except of course in this time of austerity we need to provide the parking spaces because those fit and healthy people don't bring any money into the city.

This is completely missing the point about Britain's growing obesity crisis: it is driven by a lifestyle that involves no physical activity at all.


Rather than reward these people by providing a parking space directly outside the chemist, they should be ever so subtly trying to get them to do a hint of activity, even it if it is walking five to ten metres from the car to the chemists. That's all. There's lots of car parking nearby -it's only cycle parking that is absent.

According to the government, 61% of adults are obese, 30% of children. This is why the government wants to encourage everyone "to eat and drink more healthily" and "be more active". The policy in Marlborough is going completely against the NHS recommendations, where even adults aged 65+ are encouraged to take part in moderate physical activity for at least two hours a week.

The other thing worth picking apart is the entire economic argument. Two parking bays, 30 minutes free parking. If every visitor used their full 30 minutes, you'd only have 16 visitors per bay in an 8 hour working day. Let's be generous and assume that there's a minimum dwell of ten minutes, but after the ten minutes the visitor can leave at any time in the remaining twenty minutes -with a uniform distribution. That would give an average parking time of 20 minutes. You could say then that there'd be a whole 24 visitors/bay/day, but that assumes that there is no period when the bays are ever empty, which is unrealistic. let's assume 0-10 minutes with again, a uniform arrival time, leaving another average of 5 minutes (a poission distribution of random events would be more appropriate, but it's not that different). The outcome is ~19 visitors/bay/day, or ~40 a day. You could argue about the numbers, but the big one: how long people stay, could be optimistic -as we are assuming that nobody stays above 30 minutes, the nominal legal limit. If someone with a disabled badge were to park there -as they can- they could say for two hours, cutting the daily capacity of that by down by about four vehicles -four customers for the high street.

Now imagine each bay has four sheffield stands. A parking capacity of eight. Being pessimistic and assuming a continuous occupancy of only 50%, you would still get 4x the customers per bay from parked bicycles than you would from parked cars. Even if each cyclist bought half as much as someone driving in -a completely spurious figure- the shops revenue from converting a car bay to a cycle parking bay could double.

the whole economic argument is bogus.

There we have it then. Someone who says "in these present financial times" we should actually reduce the potential customer parking capacity of the high street, and that we should penalise those people who have adopted a lifestyle that make them healthier than those who haven't.

This is worse than being stuck in the 1970s. It is coming up with the most irrational form of thinking you can -which essentially comes down to "we don't want people on bicycles shopping in our town".