The first time I visited California I realised that the Americans were smarter than us Brits in one very particular way. They truly value convenience. Nothing must stand in its way.
Supermarkets must stay open 24 hours a day. Parking must be free, even in limited space car parks where it was necessary to get a shop – any shop – to stamp your card. If there was deal by a company whose goods were stocked at a supermarket, rather than by the supermarket itself, you were told about it automatically at the till.
I recall buying two bottles of potentially “emergency water” for a short trip to the Anza-Borrego Desert with its 600,000 acres of diverse desert terrain, a desert so hot in late August that it was like standing in front of a hairdryer on full blast, whilst the roads were covered with basking snakes.
As I got to the cashier with my two bottles of a particular brand, she said: “I think there’s a two for one offer on those”. She pulled out a page of a newspaper with hundreds of offers, cut out the right one and let me pay for just one bottle.
Can you imagine Tesco, Asda or Sainsbury’s doing that? No, me neither.
This lack of any sense of the necessity of convenience often strikes me here in Milton Keynes. Milton Keynes City Council has recently found new ways to strip out further convenience from our lives.
Suddenly expecting more than one green bin to be collected without incurring an additional fee is no longer an option, despite rises in everybody’s council tax and regardless of the size of your garden.
This move by the council follows other recent slaps in our faces such as having to make an appointment to drive to the tip and to never be allowed to use a trailer or van should you have one.
Not only does the council fail to understand and respect the needs of its citizens; it appears to go out of its way to hurt them both financially and emotionally.
You would think, wouldn’t you, that MKCC’s mission would be to improve the lives of its citizens. It would, you’d imagine, revere and respect the original principles for this city that made it different from and much more user-friendly than virtually everywhere else.
These principles were so clever that the original plans for Milton Keynes have been copied all over the world from Africa to Canada and beyond.
You would hope that MKCC would literally do everything in its power to preserve such elements as 1km grid squares with their own workplaces and shops to avoid a morning and evening ‘rush hour’ to the centre, that they would champion new redways, new grid roads, new grade-separated crossings, reasonable-cost parking where it is absolutely necessary to charge anything.
But no. MKCC is proving itself to be, quite literally, the enemy of its citizenry.
I wonder whether the council has already damaged trade at centre:mk with parking charges and strict ticketing routines. I am willing to bet that the centre would be busier and more successful if parking was still free as it is at other major shopping centres countrywide such as at eight of the biggest shopping centres in the UK:
- Bluewater, in Kent, has 13,000 free parking spaces.
- Meadowhall, Sheffield has 12,000 spaces.
- The Metrocentre in Gateshead is one of the UK’s biggest with 10,000 free spaces.
- Lakeside Shopping Centre at Thurrock offers 11,857 free spaces.
- Trafford Centre in Manchester – in my experience, one of the UK’s best – provides 11,500 free spaces.
- In Glasgow, the Braehead centre has more than 4,600 free spaces. And Silverburn includes more than 3,400.
- Arena Park in Coventry, has 1,600 spaces.
Meanwhile, Milton Keynes City Council has announced plans to remove the last vestige of free parking in central Milton Keynes.
Shortly before you will read this column, a deadline of April 24, 2025, will have passed by which time MKCC will have sought public input via a statutory consultation – input that I can absolutely be certain will be ignored.
It was seeking our views on separate Traffic Regulation Orders to remove all existing car share parking places and free and limited waiting parking places in Central Milton Keynes, replacing each with standard and premium tariff parking places.
“The proposal is based on the results of the Council’s Strategic Review of Parking, a citywide initiative designed to assess parking pressures and to identify areas where parking controls would help to alleviate those pressures,” the council said in its Official Statement of Reasons.
“The proposal aims to manage parking availability and usage to the benefit of residents, businesses and their visitors. This will be achieved by the alteration of a combination of parking restrictions and parking places.”
So it is all for my benefit. Silly me, how could I not see that? How funny, that increased revenue from fees and fines does not get even a mention.
For those of us still able to park for free near the market, for instance, it will be the end of an era. The anti-convenience brigade at MKCC will have one more notch in their belts of pain, one more slap in the face for its citizens, one more way to fine and penalise us all.
And to think that MKCC has its own carpark, right in the heart of CMK and entirely free for councillors. What a happy coincidence.
Cheerio.