All card, no advantage

The parking benefits of having an Advantage card were stripped away in April and this has left many locals wondering whether there is any point in going to the town centre now.

Paying premium rates for the privilege of walking through a ghost town of boarded up shops, nestled among the glorious sights of mobile phone, charity, coffee and pound shops is apparently a temptation many can resist.

If shops in Maidenhead are struggling to survive, why would you hammer, what may be for many local businesses, the last nail in their retail coffin?

The Royal Borough may say that there is a budget shortfall (thanks, Dudley) but even if that is the case, revenue from car parks is likely to actually fall as the higher prices scare people off.

This policy then defeats the object. Perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise, given the shambolic management of finance in recent years by the borough.

The borough has since done a small U turn, considering a couple of car parks (at Grove Road and Hines Meadow) to be reinstated with some Advantage card benefits next month, but for many this will be too little, too late.

You probably haven’t heard about this yet, as my guess is you have better things to do in your life. Or are you one of a tiny minority that waded through an intensely dull, excessively verbose, document of no less than 174 pages of the Borough’s Parking Strategy?

I can only assume it was made that long to ensure that nobody actually read the whole thing. The highlights could no doubt be made in 4-5 sides to create a pithier and more relevant document.

If the council wants both Joe Public and aspiring (young)? councillors to engage in local politics, then they need to rethink how they can connect better locally.

The Advertiser offers a speed read version of articles of even a few hundred words, so could the borough not embrace this brevity for something running to several hundred thousand words?

The existing town centre traders, still trying to scratch a living, against increasingly unhelpful odds, seem to be given little support. Maidenhead retail is being sacrificed, in the face of more impressive local retail competition in Bracknell and Reading, whose shops themselves are under pressure from the technological revolution.

Having essentially given up on shops in town, perhaps phase two is to clear the car parks so they can be repurposed. As soon as they can be shown not to be economically viable, they can be next.

With Maidenhead town centre about to be redeveloped in favour of thousands of flats, they will perhaps need some modern super car parks.

Where are all these cars going to go? It is difficult to see how the town centre won’t choke from the fumes of all this additional congestion given the existing road infrastructure.

Sadly, there is no money to improve this, as the developers were told by

RBWM that they didn’t need to worry about CIL and the usual contributions they pay towards helping local infrastructure and amenities were, rather ironically, ‘on the house’.

The Advertiser Facebook page was full of useful suggestions how the Advantage card could be used though.

Lester Picket explained how they were ideal for spreading Ronseal. Paul Ashby and others spoke of the virtue of the card as an ice scraper. Ellen Vanschaik helpfully suggested rebranding it as

‘card’.

All in all, it does seem to be another example of a lack of joined up thinking by the borough at best or a cynical attempt to promote an alternative agenda at worst.

Perhaps David Cannon, the council’s lead member for parking could tell us how well these higher parking charges for residents are going (COVID effects notwithstanding)?

I suspect that all this policy has done, will be to make the budgeting situation worse, but I very much hope to be corrected on that by Cllr Cannon.