(04 Nov 2021, 1:26 pm)ne14ne1 wrote If the city has been told it needs to address it’s illegal levels of pollution as quickly as possible, and therefore encourage sustainable travel options, it would be ridiculous to meanwhile continue offer free parking which acts as a magnet drawing cars into the city centre.
Metro offering free parking at their Park & Ride sites is a good move to help regain patronage.
Many people can’t afford cars and Newcastle has a lower than average car ownership. It’s rather unfair free parking has been offered for so long but not free (or at least cheaper) public transport.
https://twitter.com/newcastlecc/status/1...00134?s=21
Personally I'd rather see a vibrant city centre with people coming in because of the free parking who would have went elsewhere. There's plenty free options around, people wanting to drive will go elsewhere instead some no doubt further away through Newcastle to get to the point.
The biggest problem up here is the fact the councils seem to have decided that everyone going to Newcastle are and MUST BE going to Newcastle when reality most are just travelling through to other places with no form of public transport at all. Newcastle has no route of travelling East / West without going through the centre and there's no route of travelling North / South either because of lack of bridges.
Sunderland get a lot of slack up here but the new Spire Bridge is fantastic and if the councils we're serious about reducing pollution then they should be looking at the Friar Goose Crossing and the bridge to West of Newcastle removing the need for most of the traffic to ever travel through the centre in the first place. It's expensive, but sometimes you need to spend to fix things.
