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QUESTIONS
AND ANSWERS
This question
and answer session followed the Design Talk given by Jonathan Bevan
a Design Consultant from Cardiff Community Design Service, at the
Home Zones conference in Stirling, November 1999.
Click on a link
below to fast track to a question of interest, or scroll down for
all the questions.
Question
1 - How do you encourage communities to attend
your public exhibition and consultations?
Question 2
- Where did you source of funds come from?
Question 3
- How do you promote the suitability side of the street? How
do you control public drinking?
Question 4
- Comments on the use of buses and making provision for buses?
Question 5
- What experiences have you had with emergency services, especially
fire brigade for access in developed areas?
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QUESTION 1
How do you encourage communities to attend your public exhibition
and consultations?
ANSWER
Well the short answer is I've done all the work beforehand. I mean,
basically our work is - we just go into communities and make ourselves
available so that we're always walking along streets. There's always
people to talk to and we talk to everybody on the street and we
make ourselves available and then when the group that we're working
with - the residents or tenants' group or whatever - start to harden
up their ideas, then we may go and talk to - I don't know - the
best ones are usually small groups of women in communities getting
together in the playgroups, you know, that. So we'll try and have
a meeting with them and that sort of disseminates. There might be
a lot of meetings in the school or with some residents in a street
which is gonna be particularly affected and we'll try and set up
a little meeting with them. And we'll just build these up. Have
a bit of a meeting with somebody that owns the land, potential developers.
We'll do all that stuff and just build it up and build it up and
then we'll have the bigger meeting and usually the bigger meeting,
you can guarantee we'll probably get 30 or 40 there, not a bad turn-out
for those sort of events in many communities. I mean, I'm reluctant
to dive in and have big meetings, as I said earlier, because the
opening first half hour is just wasted, it's just wasted, fighting
off the - why aren't our streets clean ….. You've still got to deal
with that stuff but I'm a great believer in build-ups, slow build-ups.
Starting bringing all the different interests. When I go into the
big meeting, I suppose it's political because I want to know what
the result is before I go in, you know. I want to know where we're
gong with it before I go into the meeting.
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QUESTION
2
Where did your source of funds come from? Are you a charity?
ANSWER
We're
a charity. We used to be a free service. Those days went with Mrs
Thatcher, shall I say, and now we have to be self financing so we
get our fees out of - we do things like that I've said to you today,
just get some small grant Lottery money or try and at least cover
the cost of the front end so we try and get about 5 grand for the
community and that just about covers our costs for putting the scheme
together. Then in the bid, we build fees into the bid for doing
the job and hopefully the community will keep us on for the work
we've done in assembling it with them. So we get half decent fees
out of the actual implementation of the project which is pretty
standard professional fees out of that. And that's how we make enough
money to fund the stuff at the front again. It's something that
we do for nothing but we try and get the community to make a commitment
in the first stages so that we can - so that they know we're running
a business here, we're trying to do something serious so it's nice
to get them to just get a small bid in to cover our costs. There's
plenty money. There's always money out the Lottery sector and Europe
and so on. Europe's a bit more painful because of all the forms
you've got to fill in for a 4 and a half thousand pound job. We
have to get auditors in four times for payments, you know, each
time we asked for a payment, we had to get an audit certificate
so the chartered accountant got 250 quid every time we got part
of our 4 thousand or whatever it was. There's a downside to that.
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QUESTION
3
How do you promote the suitability side of the street and it's
all very well promoting adults gathering at night and being sociable
sometimes that can turn over a bottle of wine. In the street setting,
there's a ban on drinking in public places and a lot of areas within
Stirling Council, how do you get around that?
ANSWER
Well you have to pick it up in the design. I mean, I can't legislate
about that stuff. Certainly the one we are doing just now in Aberalmond,
we're not creating a drinking environment. I'm pretty sure there's
going to be some people without them drinking but the community
is very tight there and I think it will be able to control it. I'm
willing to run with it. I mean, I know in Stirling - I know the
example you're referring to. There's some difficult work to be done
there and we can't create environments where it's a good place to
go out and drink all day. We have to watch that. But a lot of that's
about creating them in good residential environments. You know,
lots of small ingredients in this package. It's the richness. I
mean, a lot of this comes out of mixed use town, urban design theory.
It's a lot of different - it's not just about residents and play.
All the ingredients that make up sustainable living and I mean,
we've got to deal with the bad bits as well as the good bits.
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QUESTION
4
I'm from Stirling Council, can you give me some comments on the
use of buses and making provision for buses? I'm thinking from 2
angles first of all and first of all have some knowledge of Edinburgh
and their new Greenways projects to get the buses flowing much quicker.
To me, they're very, very anti pedestrian, people on the streets.
I mean, I only really know it from walking between Murrayfield and
the centre of Edinburgh. In places you still have sub standard bits
of pavements, you have the main vehicles in the centre of the road
traffic calmed because of the amount of traffic, then you have these
wide bus lanes but the buses go zooming through at 30 miles per
hour and to be a pedestrian right adjacent to them is really quite
frightening. That's one thought but then I've seen it in Stirling
several times with new housing developments where you're trying
to get a reasonable sort of road layout, pedestrian links through,
cycle lanes, but then people come by car, probably Transport people
say, oh no you must have this big wide street down here because
you must get the bus to the centre of the new development otherwise
people won't use the buses, you know, people won't walk to the bus,
they've got to have the bus stops right at their front doors and
immediately you seem to start going against everything you're trying
to do just because you make a provision for buses. I mean, obviously
they have to play their part but it's just fitting them in, getting
them in scale which is a problem at the moment.
ANSWER
Well it's not easy this. There's no short term answers. The model
that we're talking about here is one that's trying to deal with
all those things and, you know, we can't do it. In the short term,
we can't do it. In essence, most of our design work I'll argue,
we shouldn't be causing any more damage to the urban environment
so although we can't solve everything, we shouldn't be building
lots more big roads because we know that they're causing damage
so we have to find ways of doing this.
Now in essence,
the public transport route should run right through the middle of
a community and so therefore it should be on a main road and I'm
just talking basics here. Just absolute basics. This is how the
public transport route should work. Now there's an argument and
we're involved in it about looking at how local public transport
systems can service that but it's not like local community transport
can solve the problems of public transport. All we're really interested
in was community transport schemes of which there are many which
cater for giving lifts to disabled people and elderly and so on
and doing lots of community based work. What we should be looking
for is for them to be servicing the main public transport route
but also we're looking at trying to cultivate public transport routes
that are meaningful and, you know, that's a big job that stuff.
There's no question about that. It's huge for local authorities
again. In my home town, we got rid of all the trams in the 60s and
now they're saying, well we can't afford to bring them back. But
actually we need to do that and they say, you can't bring them back
without a subsidy. Well no, you can't bring them back without subsidy.
You have to subsidise that stuff but by the way, you've been subsidising
roads much bigger than you'll ever do with trams for the last 50
years.
Massive public
investment has gone into car transport so the argument that they
should be investing in other forms is somehow unreal or something
or unreasonable is quite misplaced. They make huge investments in
roads and which we're still making it. The other thing that's interesting
here is that they're just part of the urban environment public transport
and Henef's just such a wonderful example of how these different
ingredients fit together. The other big arguments which come to
mind is about service vehicles and they've got loads of examples
of - if you're making this tight block urban structure, how do the
service vehicles get in round the back of whatever like that? Well
one of the places in Henef, the service vehicles stop in the middle
of the road, you've got this main road, single lane each way, the
service vehicle stops in the middle in a space allocated for them
in the middle and they service the shops from the middle of the
road. They're just part of the traffic calming environment and it
works beautifully. It works really, really well. The traffic still
goes up and down.
Of course there's
much less accidents in Henef now and it's a really fine urban environment.
So there's loads and loads of ways of dealing with that stuff. I'm
a great believer - I think we're gonna have to deal with the bus
in the short term because that's what's happened to our public transport
system. It's all become privatised bus companies by and large and
we're gonna have to find the answers and bus lanes are just the
beginning of that answer. I'm a great believer in light rail systems,
the tram and back to that and they should be in the middle of the
road. Some of these huge avenues that were built for cars. They
were actually designed for trams. Run them up the middle and we've
got wonderful tram routes. The worst ones are the bypasses because
I'm interested in trams that run through the middle of communities
because one of our thoughts about trams is - or public transport
systems - is we're interested in getting people from the outskirts,
from big estates, into town. It's that thinking that's feeding our
public transport.
But if you could
put public transport through the middle of communities, you're actually
strengthening the social and economic life of the suburbs as well
and so it's important that public transport is part of the mixed
use town concept that we're thinking about for our urban environments.
So we should be looking at our public transport routes, starting
to reclaim some of that central space in the middle of suburbs because
a lot of our suburbs do actually need strengthening at the centre,
you know, the shops live a precarious existence. A lot of Asian
families do their business, work all hours of the day and night
to make their businesses work. Part of that is because the market
has been dispersed so we're looking at ways of reconvening the market
place in the middle of those communities and public transport does
that job too. It's a very complex rich tapestry.
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QUESTION
5
Just to move on from that, talking about service vehicles, what
experiences have you had with emergency services, especially fire
brigade for access in developed areas? How have you found it?
ANSWER
Well the main thing I found about service vehicles is - emergency
vehicles - is they hate humps. But other than that, we can accommodate
them. It's not as if we're trying to create an environment where
you can't drive a service vehicle in there. Clearly, we have to
get them in. They're part of the designs. I mean, that one where
I said the pavement comes across the entrance to the street, you
can still drive service vehicles in there. It's just that as soon
as you go in, in a car, although it's wide enough for a service
vehicle, all the visual signals are different. That's the thing.
Instead of - a lot of our towns, when you drive into the town, you
come through a narrow little country road, there's lots of them
in Scotland, Wales is full of them. You drive into Caernarvon and
it's a narrow little road, you come into Caernarvon and the road
opens out in front of you as you come into the town, you know, there's
a big lane off here to take you into a housing estate, then there's
a leisure centre, all the road widens up so as a driver, your natural
reaction is just to keep your foot on the floor. What I'm interested
in is giving signals like the trees over the road and the narrow
environment, makes the driver at least take the foot off the accelerator
pedal and preferably put the foot on the brake just to slow down.
It's all like that. It's not about preventing service vehicles or
making it difficult. In fact, it's a better environment for service
vehicles to go through here. I can't say we've had any trouble at
all in our street designs. Most of the trouble comes from Highways
departments, you know, it's the old DB32 rules. You've got to have
big turning heads and, you know, I've got to allow the articulated
lorry round here with a pantechnicon with, you know, a house on
the back, you know, that sort of stuff. You've got to design for
them. I mean, I've had that stuff. I mean, how often do they go
through communities? But, yeah, that's the game. Have you had enough?
Do you want to go and get a cup of coffee?
Thanks very
much.
APPLAUSE
Transcript of
talk supplied by Colin Guthrie e-mail to
grey_triker@hotmail.com
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