Lendal Bridge Week
We’re halfway through the six-month ban on private vehicles using Lendal Bridge between 10.30am to 5pm. This week YorkMix is running a series of articles from people with very different responses to the trial. What do you think? Comment below, Tweet us @theyorkmix or go to our Facebook page
York author and consultant Alan Gillott explains why he fears the city is becoming a no-go area for those who can’t walk far
The closure of Lendal Bridge is impacting the lives of citizens. Taxi drivers and tradesmen are noting increased traffic, some roads are now experiencing greater levels of pollution and the disabled and semi-ambulant are finding it harder to negotiate their daily lives.
Taxi drivers say they’re not happy with the increased journey times and general chaos. And tradesmen are equally unhappy as their journey time from client to client has increased considerably, leading to missed appointments and loss of income.
Lowther Street has seen a considerable increase in traffic, forcing people to close their windows to keep out the resulting pollution. Planning documents predict this particular road will run out of capacity by 2015 – the changes mean it’s already well on its way.
Extending the no-go area
The closure has moved a pollution blackspot from the retail area of Gillygate to residential Lowther Street, which is also home to a primary school. To be fair, however, traffic is now flowing faster along Bootham and Gillygate.
For semi-ambulant residents (those whose lives are shaped by the number of the steps they feel able to take on a given day), Coppergate and Tower Street are already virtually no go areas because of their traffic restrictions.
Yes, you can get there by taxi or, for the intrepid, by bus, but accessibility doesn’t always equate to comfort and convenience for someone who is disabled or semi-ambulant.
Closing Lendal Bridge has now extended the no-go area to Rougier Street, Micklegate, the shiny new council offices, where the disabled have to go for their bus and parking passes, and the railway station.
Making life a painful struggle
The council has also blocked access to the footstreets from Blake Street and Museum Street, creating an enormous no go area for anyone with disabilities and for the semi-ambulant, who will avoid any area they feel they might have trouble negotiating on a bad day.
York’s footstreets were previously set up so that nowhere was more than 100 to 150 steps away from an accessible road. There have been times when I’ve had to drive into town to rescue my wife, who is semi-ambulant, when she’s literally run out of steps.
Now she will have to struggle painfully to the bus stop in Museum Street or Stonebow to wait for the number six bus – the only one that serves both ends of the footstreets.
My wife, an events organiser, no longer feels able to arrange business meetings in key areas of the city – Guildhall, City Screen, the over-60s’ centre – or simply pop in to Boots, WH Smith, Browns, the market or her bank. She can’t, in effect, do her job.
Public transport not the answer
Understanding the hurdles faced by someone who has a physical impairment is genuinely difficult for those who are fully functional. Taking a taxi, for example, seems obvious, but it’s an expensive option, particularly for people whose income is limited by their disability.
Buses are wonderful when they run but, for some in our community, the jerking stop-start motion can be extremely painful, the queuing nigh on impossible and, occasionally, the drivers extraordinarily unhelpful.
Just consider the feat of scheduling it takes for a disabled person to make it to the railway station at a particular time. The bridge closure and footstreet blockages mean the journey inevitably takes longer than before.
Opt for a taxi and you’re assuming it will arrive on time without the driver getting stuck in traffic elsewhere. A bus is also possible as long as you make sure you’re at the stop at least 30 minutes before the scheduled service in case it doesn’t run.
And, to cap it all, if you have a disabled seat on the train, East Coast insists you turn up at least 30 minutes before the scheduled time of departure.
The supposedly simple act of catching a train can, therefore, take many hours out of your day. And there’s still no guarantee you’ll make it through the traffic on time, so you have to factor in the additional stress and monetary cost of missing it altogether.
For those on an already limited budget, the government’s “we haven’t figured out how to run a railway yet” tax for missing a train is the last straw. City of York’s “cripple tax” to cross the bridge is, sadly, the cheaper option.
- Read all our Lendal Bridge stories here
My disabled father from hovingham has a solicitors meeting in blake street can he park there!
As Jim McGurn states:
“This does not mean that access for people with disabilities is easy: more needs to be done.”
The Council response offers limited parking on double yellow lines. I am not aware of adequate (unlike that outside Castle car park) official roadside blue badge parking. The spaces that were at the Library are now two and are for Library users.
If someone has a Motability or similar vehicle they don’t want to use the various alternatives mentioned, they are already paying for transport.
As to the few streets/squares listed there’s not enough space for the numbers who wish to use them.
I don’t want to appear heartless, but I have to point out that the only part of the city that’s closed by this measure is Lendal Bridge itself (and even that not all the time). Everywhere else is accessible though it may require a longer drive. Nothing’s changed at Blake Street.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but the Lendal Bridge trial almost seems a bit of a red herring here; the issue really seems to be whether the Council’s support for the mobility impaired is sufficient, which is of course an important one.
Thank you everyone for your thoughts and comments. Trying to be all encompassing unfortunately leads to very long articles and between the excellent sub editing from YorkMix and my self- censorship, one or two issues were not fully addressed. The original article was focussed very much on the needs of the semi-ambulant, the hidden disabled, who appear at first sight to be normal but in reality face discouragement and discrimination at every turn. The trip into York’s footstreets was somewhat of a subplot mainly attempting to illustrate the wide scope of the new restrictions and make people aware that the council appears to be actively discriminating against the disadvantaged. A bit sad for a Labour administration.
The Lendal Bridge closure creates a severe problem for those needing to reach the railway station and my original article spelled out in ‘too much information’ detail exactly what the hurdles were for many who were sick and have difficulty getting about. It explained why the bridge closure really makes the life of residents who need to cross the bridge extremely difficult.
The York footstreets initiative makes life difficult for different reasons, especially as it is particularly broad in scope: a typical footstreets program closes one street and is usually paralleled by an open street which includes a bus route or two. As I implied, someone who is semi-ambulant counts their day in ‘steps’. How many steps do I have in me today? 100? 1000? 200? 500? That answer predicates what is done on that day. If you get it wrong you are stranded somewhere. There are many points in York’s footstreets layout, where getting from where you are stranded to where you can get a bus is huge: for that reason alone York has become a no go area for many. I have suggested on several occasions to the council that some form of hop-on, hop-off charabanc service running through the footstreets effectively servicing the two nests of bus stops at each end is desperately needed. Actually, a nice little narrow gauge trolly service would also be a tourist attraction and complement York’s railway heritage.
I suspect that the Council will eventually be forced to route busses through Parliament Street to alleviate this situation.
Now we come to shopmobility. This is a marvellous service but for us totally useless. It was omitted from the original article as it wasn’t relevant to Lendal Bridge, was located right in the middle of one of our no go areas, and I did not want to be too coruscating. Before discussing shopmobility, it is important that ‘normal’ people understand just how dangerous a wheelchair is for someone who is semi-ambulant and how quickly it can disable someone who is partly enabled. A friend of ours used a wheel chair for a few days when they needed to get from place to place very quickly. After three days they abandoned the chair because they got a point where they were losing the ability to walk and keeping with the chair would have committed them to a programme of serious physiotherapy to overcome it.
Now for why we don’t try to use Shopmobility: firstly, it is difficult, for us to get to, (explained elsewhere), secondly it is near the top of Coppergate car park, forcing disabled drivers to negotiate awkward blind turns, park in a location with restriced space making them reverse out of a parking space (actually a general criticism of a lot of disabled parking places), it costs money (which disabled folks tend not to have), and it steals time going through the process of rental and return (one transaction took over one and a half hours – time those with difficulties do not have), and, of course, you have to get the device back down to ground level in a busy car park requiring further neck twisting (something that disabled folk sometimes can’t do very well). In mitigation, the people who work there are loving and helpful to the limits that the circumstances allow.
I don’t have a blue badge, I’m not disabled or elderly and I don’t wish to have to use a special bus service. I do have arthritis which affects how far I can walk and I don’t drive but my husband does. If I’m in town in pain I’d now be forced to pay for a taxi rather than my husband being able to pick me up. It now takes way too long for him to drop me or collect me from the Minster side of town which sometimes rules out me using the library & the shops on gillygate.
The reply to this article does seem to presume that the people the article talks about all have blue badges or need to use the mobility scheme, but there are many people like myself whose lives are difficult & where every step does count. I’m just not sure our needs do.
We’d like to thank Mr Gillott for helping to raise awareness of the six-month Lendal Bridge trial, however there are a number of factual inaccuracies in his article which are important to correct.
The only city centre street which is restricted for blue badge holders to park on is Davygate, which is part of an ongoing footstreets review to reduce misuse of the former green permit scheme and the number of people illegally cutting through the city centre. Blue badge holders can still use the parking on Blake Street or Lendal, or they can park on Goodramgate, King’s Square or St Sampson’s Square.
The council also supports the shopmobility facility which was set up specifically to address the issue of access around the city for people with reduced mobility. Whilst we are continuing to improve the signing around the site (the top floor of the Piccadilly multi-storey car park) so that it is easier to find for people arriving on foot, there are signs from the Outer Ring Road directing drivers to this facility. For full details about this facility please visit: http://www.shopmobilityyork.org.uk/
The council also provides a door-to-door Dial & Ride service for elderly and disabled residents. Key to the service is that the driver will escort residents on and off the vehicle, taking people to their front door. The city centre Dial & Ride journeys serve the footstreet areas, travelling down Blake Street and stopping anywhere up to, and including, St Sampson’s Centre for the over 60s. For more details on this please visit: http://www.york.gov.uk/downloads/file/2056/dial_and_ride_timetable.
In addition to this service, the council also offers a York Wheels’ voluntary car scheme. For more details please visit http://www.freetocharities.org.uk/ywl/activities.html which specifically provide journeys for the elderly and disabled.
We encourage all feedback on the Lendal Bridge scheme to be submitted via a survey on http://www.york.gov.uk/citycentreimprovements. Paper copies are also available in libraries and the council’s West Offices.
City of York Council.
Alan Gillott claims that various groups of vehicle users, including taxis drivers, are against the Lendal Bridge restrictions (it’s not a closure). I would very much like to know how he has researched this. What figures can he give? How many taxi drivers has he surveyed? Has he got a position statements from the taxi companies and their representative bodies? He may be right in what he say, but I”m a bit suspicious, especially since every taxi driver I have talked to (admittedly not many) has been pro the new arrangements.
I thought the response from City of York Council regarding disabled access to the city centre was very good, and yes, Mr Gillott seemed not to be aware of Shopmobility. This does not mean that access for people with disabilities is easy: more needs to be done.