Make empty space part of hospital
The proposal to set up a shuttle bus between the under-utiliised Lichfield St parking building and our city hospital is intriguing but does not go far enough.
Why not set up a pre-ED triage unit right in the parking building. With the time available between shuttle bus departures, a preseparation of patients into, say, infections, surgical, drug etc should diminish waiting times in the main ED unit. Just pinning a coloured marker on each patient might suffice.
An alternative usage of the parking space would be to turn the top floor into a brothel. That would cut down the problems with women hanging around Manchester St. The worlds’ first drive-in, drive-out brothel would attract patrons to the parking building outside shop hours. There might be, of course, interesting and challenging difficulties, both technical and legal.
Jay D Mann Sydenham
Poor public planning
First, we’re sold the advantages of new bike lanes in and around the city. Now, concerns have been raised over the fact that the Lichfield St parking building is not being filled to capacity, and is losing huge amounts of precious money each month. There isn’t necessarily a connection there. (My guess is there isn’t, judging by the poorly used new lanes.) But the PR relating to matters of transport in our city is starting to look confused.
Council transport operations manager Steffan Thomas has tried to explain away the loss by saying the building ‘‘was built for the future’’. I’d say fair enough, except I’m not aware if such a degree of loss was expected or not, ie whether it was factored in initially. (This is something The Press might have questioned.) Either way, it’s a regrettable example of poor public planning, and is especially woeful in light of recent stories on inadequate hospital parking facilities.
Also, although the Lichfield St building offers discounted rates, even one hour’s free parking, I wonder whether the cost is still too high for many motorists. This is another factor which might have been examined, but wasn’t.
Finally, even if I did accept the ‘‘built for the future’’ argument, I’d want to say: What kind of future is it, exactly, that we are building? Frankly, choosing to describe this ghastly eyesore as ‘‘flash’’ will not halt my increasingly pessimistic outlook on the already dismallooking, dollar-driven fate of the central city.
Jason Collins Strowan