Sheffield Council's anti-car crackdown driving businesses to distraction: Bird Lovegod

This is the same council that during Covid ‘temporarily’ removed, with zero consultation, all the free parking spaces outside a major row of shops in Broomhill in Sheffield. Why?

Same reason, plus a fig leaf that it made the pavement wider and therefore saved a number of lives from being snuffed out by Covid. That number is, of course, zero. And temporary of course equates to permanent.

The latest effort to destroy retail in Sheffield works like this. Make it impossible to park anywhere near any shops. Then people will get the bus into town.

The only problem is, there are hardly any buses, and making it harder for cars doesn’t add a single new one.

Adding friction doesn’t create a solution. It just sends people online to buy things, or to a different area of the city, or means they won’t pop out for that quick coffee or whatever it was.

The council seems to not understand that convenience is key to shopping, and when you deliberately make it less convenient, as they are trying to do, it doesn’t change how people travel to the shops, it stops them from doing it altogether.

Preventing thousands of people every day from shopping or going out for lunch by making it impossible to park is not what the council should be focusing on.

What is their actual motive? It’s hard to say, given that they also tried to destroy the trees lining Sheffield streets and only a fierce public backlash stopped them. It’s genuinely hard to get a grasp on the intellectual processes that go on when they come up with and then implement these frankly horrible, anti-community brutal ideas and schemes. It’s like everyone except them knows it’s wrong.

Often it seems they don’t listen to the people before they decide to act. They decide what action they want to take, then either do it without consultation or do it regardless of consultation. There’s a dictatorship mentality, a mentality of ownership rather than service.

Is that what’s underlying it I wonder? I emailed Olivia Blake, the MP for the area, and Sarah Hyde, from Sheffield City Council, and asked them, but they didn’t reply.

It seems ideological. Cars are bad, therefore discourage the use of them. From the council's perspective this is an easy thing to do, and it costs no money. In fact, it can actually make money, at least on paper, by fining people £100 for stopping their car for 10 seconds. What it doesn’t require is any creative thinking, or financial investment.

I’m aware of the desire to reduce carbon emission and pollution and so on, but this is not the answer. This is an anti-business, anti-community undemocratic approach to attempt to engineer an outcome that exists only on paper and in reality will profoundly change the character of entire communities. Who will benefit? It might knock a few minutes off the bus journeys, that’s all. A trivial achievement for a vast downside. The council will already have spent tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of taxpayers money, planning and consulting on this degenerate idea. Is this the best use of their time and our money? I seriously wonder what we pay them for.

Bird Lovegod is MD of EthicalMuch