End of parking problems

One only has to go to Melbourne to see vast avenues where parking is not only alongside each pavement but also in two rows in the centre of each thoroughfare to realise that roads in Bristol were constructed at an earlier date with no cars in mind.  One’s car is hardly ever used for more than hour or so each day except on holiday and remains for most of its life parked somewhere, and such parking causes a good deal of obstruction to traffic flow.  So my idea is to provide a massive incentive to get rid of one’s car altogether unless one is a tradesman who needs a van or a doctor or nurse who needs to make emergency visits.  The present system of buses are obviously a No, No – today one sees fleets of Bristol buses with only one or two passengers in each. 

If the weather is bad, you have children, shopping, valuable documents/computers and one wants to get from A to B in a reasonably short amount of time, one wants to be driven down your chosen route by car.  So what better than encourage taxi drivers to fill the gap and carry out this very important function?  Having lots of taxi drivers would mean unemployment would fall.  Not only would the congestion be greatly eased, we would now have good drivers and not have to face the expense of buying and maintaining a car ourselves.  To proceed on longer trips on holiday etc, hire car arrangements could meet this requirement. In effect we would become a Hong Kong another city with narrow streets: a city where one can get from A to B by modestly priced taxis and in fact on certain routes by some excellent buses again at very little cost but for car owners a parking permit for one space is £300 per month, hence hardly anyone possesses a car there and are far better off financially as a result of not having to own one.    

This idea goes some way to solve the ever increasing congestion problem we have in Bristol.  Much of this congestion is due to the very narrow streets we have that are constantly clogged up by parked cars.  The inordinate cost of buying a car and maintaining it but not actually using it for more than an hour or so per day could be avoided if we simply did not own the car in the first place and relied instead on excellently driven taxis as people do in Hong Kong.  Such a move would get us from A to B more safely and swifter than is possible today and would reduce unemployment as we would require a veritable army of  taxi drivers.