Agenda item

The Committee had before it a report by the Director of Corporate Governance dealing with objections received after the statutory advertisement of an order to provide for controlled parking in and around the King’s College Campus, where the University of Aberdeen was building a new library to replace the existing Queen Mother Library.

The University was providing £600,000 to the Council to fund the implementation of this zone.  The estimated cost of the implementation plan now stood at £535,000.  In terms of the legal agreement, the Council would be obliged to return the £65,000 surplus to the University, although there were grounds for caution about whether that estimate would hold true.   It was based on current market forces, and on the tender return for the recent Zone X order.  

The tender for that order had been much lower than expected, but not too much reliance should be placed on that.   Another factor that would affect the final cost of the Old Aberdeen zone was the extent of the area affected.   In the event that the Committee were to excise any part or parts of it, the cost would alter.   Also, a scheme of this nature always had unknown factors that could only be identified once work commenced on site.  

The report went into all of this because of the known idea that the projected surplus might be made the subject of negotiations to use it to subsidise a “honeymoon period” to ease in permit charges more gently.   However, under present circumstances, there was simply no funding available to subsidise cheaper (or free) permits.

The University funding had never been contemplated as a means of subsidising or eliminating permit charges in any respect.  A somewhat extended honeymoon period for the Foresterhill area had ended a year ago, although a similar period continued at Garthdee.  The scale and impact of the Foresterhill and Garthdee developments had been much larger, with a completely new campus having been established at Garthdee.  The sense of completely new presences causing completely new impacts had been much more vivid in both cases.

Also, the Robert Gordon University had never directly subsidised the arrangements in Garthdee, in the sense of replacing the supposed revenue which permit charges would otherwise have generated.  RGU had subsidised the administration of the zone in a much broader way - not least by funding an extra post of parking attendant – and, because of this very satisfactory agreement, the will had presumably existed at the time to relinquish whatever revenue might have accrued as a result of imposing permit charges, charges which, had they been introduced after all, would have been much lower back in 2003, and would have generated much lower income.

In any case, although there was an immediate appeal in the idea of a honeymoon period to ease in charges more gently, such a course of action only postponed the fateful day when the standard charging levels had to be reverted to.  Also, people tended to resent the good fortune of others – in most controlled zones in the city, the option of a honeymoon period had never been available.

Furthermore, it could be argued with some conviction that a period during which permits were absolutely free would simply encourage some people to take up the option of non-car-specific permits to sell to non-residents. 

And, finally, although it was a well-established principle that traffic orders could be made without re-advertisement if they were to be altered in terms of a diminution in stringency, and although the temporary reduction or removal of permit charges would clearly reduce the stringency of this traffic order vis-à-vis its most trenchant critics, non-residents with an interest in parking in the area might well take the view that the order had actually been fairer in its original form.   Again, though, as things stood, the funding to subsidise cheaper (or free) permits was simply not there.

Moving on from this particular issue, the report then offered broad observations on the content of the usual informal meeting with statutory objectors.  The first and the second appendices presented nine specific recommended adjustments to ameliorate various situations in the light of those discussions.  The third appendix was in the authorship of the roads officials, and offered technical commentary on all distinctive themes to be found in the objections. 

Straight from the outset, the informal meetings had yielded one recurring opinion;  namely, if the zone could be larger than it was at the moment, have 24-hour application, and offer free residential permits, there would be little resistance to it. 

Of course this was a broad-brush remark.  Some criticism would remain about the limitation of two permits (only one of which could be non-car-specific) per household.  For the avoidance of doubt, the permit charges of £80 for the first permit and £120 for the second one were indeed charges for “firstness” and “secondness”;  that is to say,  the higher charge was not for the flexibility of a non-car-specific option but simply for the taking out of a second permit.  Someone who wanted to hold only a single permit could go straight for the flexible one at £80.

Unpacking the separate elements of this, and leaving the question of permit charges aside in the meantime, several objectors – most notably, Old Aberdeen Community Council – had emphasised that for some residents in this area the most intense parking difficulties occurred in the evenings - when the new zone would not apply.  For these residents, the criticism was that they felt they needed to buy parking permits to see them through the exigencies of daytime parking requirements, but that, for the considerable expenditure at stake, they would receive no help in respect of their most pressing difficulties.

However there were other residents who said they had no evening problem and thought they could cope with the daytime one, and so saw evening controls as the only factor that would force them into buying permits.

This conveyed the complexity of such schemes, and the difficulties encountered by elected members and officials in trying to judge what the best public policy might look like in a situation where local people might quite understandably want completely different things.

However, moving to 24 hour operation would entail the complete readvertisement of the zone and a re-examination of the costs attendant upon it.  Accordingly, the 24 hour suggestion was intellectually respectable but altogether messier than its proponents might appreciate.

Inevitably, a common riposte was that the difficulty of 24 hour application disappeared if the context were to be that of free permits.

The new library would be very attractive and the University of Aberdeen held out hope that it would be of considerable appeal to people other than students and teaching staff.  As had been discussed on a number of occasions during informal talks with objectors, the existing Queen Mother Library was by no means full of academic texts and journals – although few people outside the academic community were aware of this.

In fact, the building had a wide selection of literature that would be of interest to any bookish person or keen library-user.  The appeal of the new library was likely to extend well beyond academic circles – especially given that it would be an attractive new building with a coffee shop, etc. – and so some of the parking intrusion in the area might eventually be caused by “literary tourism” from other parts of the city.

The report then went on to discuss a range of other issues raised by objectors.  Some had speculated that the existing on-street pay and display charges (35p for 30 minutes, 75p for an hour, £1.50 for 2 hours and £2.30 for the maximum period of 3 hours) might actually be quite attractive to some students in some situations.  In particular, £1.50 for 2 hours covered a lecture and a cup of coffee.  The charge might not be a deterrent if the cup of coffee was likely to be more expensive.

The point was a serious one, but there are two reasons to imagine that this effect would not actually occur.  First of all, if students found the parking options acceptable (or even attractive) in themselves, they would still need to have some expectation that the spaces in question would actually be available, and that seemed unlikely.  Also, the Students Association had come in for one of the informal meetings, and, in the course of that, the representatives of the Association had expressed doubt that there would be many students who would see the new parking options as an opportunity rather than a deterrent.  Nevertheless, the Association representatives were of the view that certain areas of pay and display parking might be altered to provide for parking over a six-hour period rather than the advertised three.

On a different theme altogether, there had been talks with teachers from Sunnybank Primary School who had expressed concern that the significant recent expansion and development of the school had been such that the teachers merited special consideration.

The Council had heard of this kind of thing in the past, and had not previously believed that one of its own schools could adduce a trump card that would allow a special case to be made without begging questions about the virtues of many other cases.  However, the officials remained open-minded about special cases (reference was made to an example in the George Street controlled parking area) as long as the distinctiveness of the case was easy to adduce.

On the other hand, the suggestion that the high incidence of vulnerable people (Tillydrone was a deprivation area and there were many elderly people both there and in Seaton) should attract reduced prices (or none at all) would be a difficult value judgement to open up in this context, and was one which the Council had declined to explore when similar arguments were advanced at the time of introducing permit charges for the first time in the Foresterhill zone.

A limited number of special permits were already in circulation for the likes of midwives and district nurses.  Carers (by which term should be understood voluntary care) did not have access to parking permits, but exploration of this issue a few years ago had suggested that representative groups in Aberdeen recognised the difficulty of entering this territory, and were reticent about the inevitable extent to which they themselves would have to share the burden of regulating any new arrangements made.

A different theme altogether emerged – understandably – in respect of the conservation area status of this particularly attractive part of the city, and it was important to say that the roads officials had worked hard to keep street clutter to an absolute minimum.  Also, where yellow lines were necessary, they would be both thinner and paler than ordinarily seen (this was a statutory possibility) and pay and display machines would be situated at a minimum level, determined only by the need to be sure that penalty charge notices could not be resisted by complaints that there had been no machine immediately obvious at the location in question.

Moving on to something which had arisen at a number of the meetings, it was of course being said by many objectors that the University was causing this problem and that the planning condition associated with their development ought to have been the construction of a major new overground or underground car park.  However, it was necessary to bear in mind how extraordinarily expensive that solution would have been.  An underground construction would almost certainly have been judged disproportionate, both in terms of infrastructural difficulty and costs.  An overground construction would have raised enormous questions of visual intrusion – and, again, costs – but, quite separately, supporters of off-street car parks needed to remember that all the cars in them had to get to them and then get away from them.  That is to say, cars using such a facility would have to travel every day to Old Aberdeen and then later in the day leave Old Aberdeen, all of them using the existing road network.

Finally on this theme, there was the well-known notion that new roads and car parks filled up quickly by releasing latent desire to travel by car, desire that might have been dormant up to that point.  Whatever differing views there might be on this, a major off-street facility was not a green solution.

The commentary prepared by the roads officials touched on all these matters, and picked up on smaller-scale points of detail which objectors had raised.  Again, nine specific (minor) adjustments were shown on the plans comprising the second appendix, and were listed in the first.  Putting all of that together with the broader observations of the Director of Corporate Governance, the question arose:  was the case made for the implementation of this zone, or had the objectors demonstrated that it would be in the public interest to abandon, alter or defer the proposals?

The University had confirmed that it would not resist any proposal to delay the implementation of the controlled parking area until the new library came outstream, if this were to be a sympathetic response to the concern of local people.  Unfortunately, the idea was difficult to recommend.  There was a time bar vis-à-vis the traffic order which meant that it had to be operational within two years of its statutory advertisement, and the report suggested that the order would have to be made before the library was operational.

It was hardly good practice to implement an order more than a year after the public debate on it.  Clearly, completely new prospective objectors could appear onstage in the intervening period, and might be aggrieved that the consultation opportunity had come so long ago.  Although the opportunity for deferred implementation did exist, it was likely to be construed critically by some people even if welcomed by others.

In particular, as had already been emphasised, there were some streets in the zone where residents wanted parking controls as soon as possible.  School Drive, School Avenue, Regent Walk, Hermitage Avenue, Orchard Street, Wingate Road and Wingate Place would all be in that category.  There was also the possibility of increased costs emerging since contractors’ prices had a tendency to rise year-on-year. 

The report observed in passing at this point that mention of residential desire for parking controls in the above-named streets compelled a reference to the petition received from STAR – Seaton Taking Action for Regeneration – which had expressed opposition to the entire idea of a zone, and had featured a significant number of signatories from School Drive and School Avenue.  However, in the course of the informal meeting with STAR, it had been acknowledged that those signatories almost certainly continued to support the controlled parking area, and opposed only the permit charges.

Indeed, any recommendation that the order be made and implemented was bound to be tempered by awareness that there was real and understandable ill-feeling in the area about the need to pay for permits, the need to pay much higher prices for those permits than would have been the case just over a year ago, and the need to pay those prices because the University was growing in line with its aspirations but (so objectors might say) failing to take seriously the aspirations of its residential neighbours in surrounding streets.

In particular, some objectors had suggested that, when the planning process had been conducted, and the new zone made a condition of planning permission, the scale of local feeling about parking issues in particular had not been canvassed or rehearsed, and that the “solution” of a controlled parking zone had been allowed to pass without substantive public input.  That input was now forthcoming, but some objectors thought that resistance had been left marooned with the right arguments at the wrong time.

All of that was understandable, although some of it depended on the notion that planning permission should have been conditional upon an entirely different solution to parking and traffic problems.   This, however, did not have to be a telling hypothesis.  The planning process in this case had been conducted completely correctly and properly, and, as was entirely familiar, one of the conditions had been the promotion of a controlled parking area which now looked to represent good public policy in a situation where other solutions were thinkable but not realistic.  Accordingly, the Director of Corporate Governance was suggesting that the implementation of the zone (except for the adjustments outlined in the first and second appendices) was objectively accountable.

As agreed at the beginning of the meeting (see article 2 above) the Committee then went on to hear three deputations from objectors seeking to amplify their views.  The first to speak was Mr Martin Wilson, who was a trenchant critic of the way in which the traffic order process had been fairly transparent but had rested on a given; namely, that a controlled parking zone was the right solution to parking problems being caused by the University’s development of a new library.  By comparison, Mr Wilson believed that the planning process had not been transparent, and that other possibilities had been conceded in private transactions to which the public had had no input (this was the line of criticism referred to in the report where the Director of Corporate Governance had observed that some objectors believed that resistance had been left marooned with the right arguments at the wrong time).

Mr Wilson also expressed the view that, if the University was providing £600,000 to fund the implementation of the zone, the dictionary definition of the word “implementation” surely embraced its running costs as well as the initial stage of merely setting it up.  However, during subsequent questions to officials, Mr David Wemyss (Senior Committee Services Officer – Roads Legislation) offered the opinion that the most important way of judging the meaning of an agreement was to look for the shared understanding of those who were party to it, and that there was no doubt that, in relation to this particular agreement between the University and the Council, neither party had envisaged that it covered future running costs.

The Committee then heard from Ms Christine Burgess of Old Aberdeen Community  Council, who repeated the Community Council’s feeling that 24-hour application, or perhaps application from 8.00am to 10.00pm, would be desirable, as would delayed implementation, subsequent review, and residential involvement in that review.  Ms Burgess also suggested that the traffic order process had been transparent but that the planning one had not, although, again, during subsequent questions to the officials, it was emphasised that the planning process was closed and could not be reopened here.

At that juncture, the officials confirmed that the question of chicanes at College Bounds would be made the subject of a separate report in the future and that Ms. Burgess would receive an explanatory letter from the Head of Planning and Sustainable Development on the nature of the planning process.

The third and final deputation was in the name of Aberdeen University Students’ Association, who were represented by Mr Robin Parker and Mr Sandy McKinnon.  Mr Parker began by saying that the Association believed that the need for the zone had been overstated, and that public transport arrangements could deal with the problems if the will was there to pursue that solution.  Those students who did use cars to come to the campus generally came from some distance, often outwith the city, and were sometimes non-typical (mature students, etc).  He believed the University was more interested in easing parking arrangements for staff than for students, and wanted to see students treated more sensitively than being dismissed as mere “commuters”.  He also thought that delaying the implementation of the order would be desirable, and that consideration should be given to the possibility of student permits for the University areas.  Proposed adjustments at Tillydrone Avenue and Bedford Avenue (outlined in the second and third appendices) were however welcomed.  Finally, Mr Parker suggested that the Committee might wish to write to the University to remind it of its obligations to students as well as staff, bearing in mind the contribution of students to the vibrancy, culture and economic wellbeing of the city.

The Committee resolved:-

that the objections be overruled (where not cured by adjustment) and that the traffic order be made as originally envisaged, but that it be implemented not earlier than six months from the present time.   Furthermore it was noted that, if the University were of a mind to continue to discuss possibilities for ameliorating the initial impact of the permit charges, any positive outcome could be reported back within that period, and also that, arising from the concerns of Old Aberdeen Community Council and others, the Head of Planning and Sustainable Development would write to Ms. Christine Burgess, Chair of the Community Council, to explain the aspects of the planning process which had been criticised by the deputations.