Miscellany: Cross town traffic
16 February 2009
16 February 2009
I've been looking a recently reissued guidebook on Yorkshire, originally published about 50 years ago. The section on York highlights all the things you'd expect, the Minster and the like. The thing that struck me most - and highlighted a major change of the last fifty years - was the car parking information.
The guidebook suggests use of the car parks at Duncombe Place and Minster Yard. This dates it more than anything else. The idea that tourist parking could be accommodated in a small bit of car park right next to the Minster seems hilarious now.
Fifty years ago there were so few cars on the road that we could have small car parks right next to major tourist attractions. Now there's so much traffic that it needs careful management, and we have pedestrianised streets and park and ride, and attempt to keep as many cars as possible out of the city's historic core.
Not far from the former tourists' car park at Minster Yard is Union Terrace car park, just beyond the city walls. Passing recently, in the tourist season, it looked like the coach parking facilities there were at full capacity, and enormous groups of tourists disembarked and headed up Gillygate. Built recently on part of the car park area is the new ArcLight centre for the homeless, which of course had a long struggle to find a location for the new premises it needed.
These car parking areas reflect our changing needs. Before the 1970s, Union Terrace was a street of houses. A section of it still remains, at one end. The area was cleared at the time we were planning a new inner ring road for the city, and then ended up as a car park, to cater for the needs of the late 20th century. Then again, at the start of the 21st century, we've had to build again on the same bit of land, again to provide housing, albeit of a more temporary hostel-based kind.
Marygate car park was another of the 20th century's 'clearance areas'. That area was filled with several streets of small terraced houses. Demolished - presumably because they were seen as sub-standard? - and with the land again kept as a site for the proposed ring road, though again ending up as car park. Then, more recently, proposals to build housing on it once more. So many needs competing in these precious areas of land close to the city centre.
There are times when some of the roads in York look like car parks, with so much traffic just standing, as on Gillygate at busy times. I remember it being much worse, before the outer ring road took most of the lorries away. I remember standing at the corner of Gillygate and watching massive lorries turning the tight corner.
In the 1970s, with traffic choking up the city centre, desperate times seemed to call for desperate measures, and we nearly got a 'tarmac necklace'.
Continued - p2 - Tarmac necklace >