Jarman’s Jottings

OVER the Christmas break Network Rail took the opportunity to do work which they described as “Building tomorrow’s railways today”.

A friend of mine wittily responded by saying: “Maybe building today’s railways yesterday would have been a better start.”

Hopefully the jam tomorrow that we are always promised will, in the not too distant future, materialise and Cynon Valley will be better served by an improved integrated public transport system.

In the meanwhile, the hot topic in December was free town centre car parking.

It proved very popular and the car parks were as full as I have ever seen them.

This week the council’s Labour Cabinet will consider the outcome of the recent consultation on the proposal to reduce the charges and that is good news.

I sent in a proposal on behalf of the Plaid Cymru Group that they should also consider having a daily free parking slot of up to two hours.

It doesn’t look as if that will be agreed. Plaid Cymru negotiated an arrangement in the recent Assembly budget that secured funding for free town centre carparking. I can see no reason why free car parking cannot form part of RCT’s new scheme because they will have an allocation of funding for that purpose.

I have been asked how many people visited Mountain Ash town centre on New Year’s Eve.

The only recorded information I have is the weekly footfall figures collected by Experian on behalf of the council.

The monitor that counts the footfall in the town is well located near the card shop and I have no reason to doubt its accuracy.

What this reveals is that between midnight of December 30 and midnight December 31, 4,460 people are recorded.

During the successful Nos Galan Races the figures peaked between 5pm and 9pm, reaching a total of 2,810. The biggest crowd of 956 people was recorded between 6pm and 7pm.

The overall figure was just 85 down on the previous (2015) year’s figure of 4,545.