We'll all take the pain!

FRANK SOBEY: We'll all take the pain of meters .Thursday, September 29, 2011 Herald Express
ON THE evening of Thursday, September 29, I plan to be at the Oldway public meeting when our councillors debate the placing of yet more parking meters around the town centres and shoreline.

I write this having just watched the hugely expensive Torbay Council-sponsored TV advert promoting late season holidays on the English Riviera, so let me start there.

Whether you like it or not we live on the coast and by its very nature is therefore a 'honey pot' for tourists.

What we have not had for the past four or five years is a sunny summer.

Most places can seem somewhat sad in the rain but a beach is particularly pathetic.

While the harbingers of doom bang on about how hopeless it all is, you must agree that we do live in a stunning beautiful area that springs into life when the sun beats down.

Sky Atlantic is still screening the television diary Fish Town, which tracks the lives of Brixham folk around the harbour.

Sad that it is only on the expensive pay-to-view Sky Atlantic because the filming is stunning and the narrator spins the yarn in elementary verse.

The sun seems always to shine and I do believe that even the seagulls are flying upside down!

It's this, I believe, that has prompted our mayor Gordon Oliver to stump up an additional £250,000 to promote tourism. Hence the little film.

The screening now, it seems, is to capture the late season business although I was a little curious about the waterslide shot because it is, of course, closed at this time of year.

Having said that, it is really good to see lovely film clips of the English Riviera on TV as a thirty-second advertisement.

The film is buoyant and that is how we must be if we want to retain our tourist business in these troubled times.

Part of that buoyancy is down to the local population and whether we make the visitors really welcome.

Having local folk walk around with faces like slapped kippers doesn't get the best reaction from people who have travelled many miles to holiday on the friendly English Riviera.

Now about that welcome.

The reason that I will pitch up at the parking meter meeting is because it seems to me that we are spending hundreds of thousands getting people to visit and then metaphorically take the foot shot as we make them angry by blatantly stinging them with painful parking meter charges.

But, of course, it isn't just the holidaymakers who take the parking meter pain since the local population get to share.

A local legal-eagle is looking at the relevant statute since our executive seem to be using parking meters as a means of revenue collection rather than traffic control.

That being the case, we have one part of the administration saying to people please come visit whilst another department is making them very unwelcome!

Of course, it isn't just about tourists when the parking meters start to spread like some alien life form.

It's hard enough these days to hold a community together around the centre of a town.

The evidence is the sad empty shops that look hopelessly like the mouth of a man in need of a dentist after years of oral neglect.

We've spent, again, hundreds of thousands on town centre managers and consultants.

We watched our Prime Minister ' launch' shopping guru Mary Portas on some sort of spiritual retail journey around the towns and cities in the hope of regenerating the flagging fortunes of the high street.

So what do we do on the English Riviera / Torbay/ Agatha's Riviera?

Parking Meters! Outstanding! You couldn't make it up.

One of the planned pitches is on the road around the west side of Paignton harbour.

The harbour economy is fragile and for the local businesses parking meters will be both catastrophic and pointless.

Catastrophic because for many a business it will be the final nail in a cheap coffin.

Pointless because people will simply not park there and so the machines will stand idle as a monument to the commercial corpse.

So, let us celebrate what is good, push forward socially cohesive and economically viable initiatives, but most of all have a council with its eye on the ball.