Are bus gates good or bad for town centre?

Sidney Poitier, actor, Jimmy Greaves, TV football pundit, Mike Leigh, film director, Ivana Trump, socialite, Gordon Brown, former prime minister Imogen Stubbs, actress,

Ian Brown, rock singer, Cindy Crawford, model/actress ALTHOUGH we know Kirklees Council have to pick and choose what to spend its finite local taxes on in terms of the local community, having to choose between those who are deserving and those that are not with most probably a political bias it was interesting to read the recent letter by A Taylor, of Springwood, concerning the logic of the town centres bus gates.

Indeed, these bus gates and the logic behind them is highly debatable for the good that they do and so the decision will always be controversial, especially from the business community within central Huddersfield who totally depend on people coming into the town centre to buy from them.

In this respect are bus gates good or bad in an economic sense and where do the socalled 2015 installed inner transport system make things better or worse for the people of Huddersfield?

Indeed, are the reasons that are given a smoke screen in reality just to collect penalties from unsuspecting vehicle users or not?

For on the other side of the coin without enough economic activity in a town centre it ultimately and progressively fails, becoming to a certain extent a ghost town to what it once was.

For then all we have left in the final analysis are possibly buses and taxis running in and out of the centre of the town - for a while that is if the effect is not so severe on the economic trading.

For in a recent FOI request released by the council it stated that in the following fiscal periods the number of PCNs (Penalty Charge Notices) issued to the public for these bus gates alone was:

Year 2014 to 2015, 0 (not then introduced), Year 2015 to 2016 1,055 (only 2 months of use due to the bus gates only starting) and Year 2016 to 2017 - 26,641 which is a growth rate pro-rata of 420% year-on-year.

I dread to think what the 2017 to 2018 figures will be.

Considering the above and looking at these figures we can see if we have a brain in our head that the bus gates have been overriding good for the council at a PCN issue charge of £60, equating in 2016 to around £1.6 million, but bad in many respects possibly for the town centre’s long-term trading conditions.

In this respect, I have read in the Examiner also that readers have stated that they will now go elsewhere to towns and areas to shop in the future after being caught out by the bus gates. DOES this council want blood on its hands?

The removal of free bus passes to children in the Meltham area who attend Holmfirth High or Honley High will put at risk the lives of children from families that are less well off, as they will have to walk to school on roads that have no footpaths or lighting a distance of roughly three miles.

This will put two hours on the children’s day.

Do these people making these stupid decisions have any idea of the topography of this area, and on wet, windy and snow days due to the exposed routes they would have to walk?

No right thinking parent would put their children at risk.

I suggest the councillors who are suggesting this walk it for themselves. They would then see the error of their ways POST Polio Syndrome affects 120,000 people in the UK; more than Parkinson’s but this neurological condition - for which there is no cure - receives a fraction of the attention.