Chesil Street Car Park and Badgers Farm Superstore - Trust Annual Report 1984
Without a clear insight into current thinking on the Plan it is difficult to assess the significance of certain decisions taken during the last year. The appearance, however, is one of the strategically important actions being taken haphazardly. The Trust has argued that those actions may eventually be seen to be right, but feels that they are premature unless clearly placed in the context of an overall strategy.
The Chesil Street scheme is a move in the direction of siting car parking out of the centre, though without a proper study of a park-and-ride strategy one cannot tell whether it is the right sort of site. There has also been no clear statement that this scheme is to replace the central car park provision. Unless such a connection is made, and soon, the new car park will come to be seen as just an addition to the general parking stock. The Chesil scheme represents a considerable environmental (and financial) cost for which we ought to expect a considerable environmental reward. It is interesting to note that car parking places are now working out at about £7000 each. It is also an interesting commentary on City Council priorities that they begrudge the cost of 15 parking places for a good quality study of Winchester's most important planning matters.
The superstore decision might also have been better left until it could be put in a proper Plan context. The Trust has not resisted the idea of an edge-of-town superstore since it sees the advantage of peripheral 'daily needs' shopping in taking the pressure off the centre of the traffic normally associated with such shopping. Without a positive policy to restrain car traffic in the centre, however, any traffic gains there will be fairly rapidly lost to the trend towards inefficient access and mobility. Traffic abhors a vacuum!
It is also disappointing that no attempt has been made to link a superstore scheme to a public transport system. A superstore which can be one of the park sites of a park-and-ride system, umbilically linked to the City Centre by a fast, frequent bus service, would make the store facilities available to the car-less and, more importantly, the City Centre would share in the attractiveness of the store to car drivers without the concomitant traffic problems.