Planning common sense at last in Essex

Have you noticed how horrible ghettos have been springing up all over the place in the past few years. This is largely due to the government's bizarre policy to discourage the use of the car by imposing anti-car planning conditions on new developments - not enough car-parking spaces, roads too narrow to park on, drives too short to accommodate the length of a car and (most stupid of all) garages so small that if you can manage to get the car into one, you then cannot get out because you can't open the door! As anyone with an ounce of sense would have forecast, this failed miserably to achieve its objective and just made life intolerable for everyone.

At last Essex County Council is having the guts to stand up to the government and issue its own planning guidelines which reverse this foolhardy trend. They should be applauded for this ....... but in fact they are having to put up with criticism from other organisations such as the Campaign for Better Transport who claim that they are "undermining a decade of work to help people become less car dependent". This is, of course, utter rubbish. You are not helping people to become less car-dependent by designing out parking spaces. Some people actually need a car. The only way you will reduce this need is to provide cheap public transport, easily accessible to peoples homes, which goes where you want to go, when you want to go there. ........ and that is still a long way off.
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/driving/article5920679.ece