I can only assume our Mayor has been at the metal polish:

Parliament piazza plan scrapped

He said: “This scheme would have turned a green glade of heroes into a vast, blasted, chewing-gummed piazza.

Eh?  Parliament Square, as Boris might have noticed since he’s worked there for several years, is about the most policed place in England.  Anyone dropping gum there runs the risk of uniformed goons descending armed with Instant Penalty Fines and sundry bothersome New Labour petty authoritarian powers.  Since Boris has abandoned any pretence of libertarianism and apparently likes that stuff now (at least when talking to George ‘Bastard’ Pascoe-Watson at the Sun or banning booze on the tube) why not announce funding for DNA testing kits, Gum Enforcement Squads and Zero Tolerance. Alternatively, if its his considered opinion that increasing roadspace means less chewing gum is dropped on the pavements, why not abolish pavements completely?  Congestion problem solved!  Litter problem solved!  Viva Boris!

Unless, of course, and this may be a shock to you, he’s talking complete crap.

What’s noticeable here is a rare example of digging up bad news, rather than burying it.  This scheme (the second phase, actually, the first was the completed Trafalgar Square development) was always in the sick-wildebeeste-at-the-back-of-the-herd category since early last month when new boy Kulveer Ranger apparently asked TfL to review it.  Amazingly enough, whatever came out of this review appeared in the press on exactly the same day as the annual congestion charge report came out, which was heavily spun as ‘CC makes no difference to congestion’.  Result: Boris delivers for motorists headlines all over the place.

So, what’s been lost and what does it tell us about Boris Johnson the Mayor rather than Boris Johnson the Image?  Well, investment in making London a nicer place is apparently no go, turning an isolated traffic island into a human environment is less important than pleasing motorists and lastly spending money is really not on at all.  This latter is a serious worry for numerous other sensible transport plans.

Luckily, presumably because of the aforementioned desire to tie this into the headlines around the CC report, no one’s edited the website yet, so we can take a copy for future reference:

The GLA, together with Transport for London and Westminster City Council, is planning to make improvements to Parliament Square. The Mayor aims to create a high-quality urban space that is fit for the 21st century and sensitive to the surrounding architecture and the square’s international significance. The World Squares for All Steering Group members are key stakeholders for the project.

Evidently Boris doubts his own ability to create a ‘high-quality urban space fit for the 21st century’ if he thinks that even if he made an effort the ungrateful public would just drop gum all over it.  Defeatist.

More detail:

The scheme will consist of an enhanced and expanded public space, created by closing the south side of the square - the road which connects St Margaret’s Church and Westminster Abbey - with accompanying improvements to traffic management and pedestrian facilities around the rest of the square.

The project is in the early stages of design, with Hawkins Brown leading a team of urban designers, including lighting, conservation and landscape experts, and Colin Buchanan conducting traffic modelling, highway design and environmental assessment.

Colin Buchanan, eh?

[Transport geekery: that's the firm founded by the man who

a) first tried to reconcile cars and towns in the famous 'Traffic In Towns' report and

b) seceded from the Roskill London Third Airport report and recommended that favourite Boris/Malthouse pie-in-the-sky idea of building an airport in the Thames Estuary]

So the scheme’s motorist-bashing idea was to close the southern bit.  The PDF document outlining the vision for the square shows it to be, well, rather green (which we can assume Boris doesn’t like).  It also says of the current situation (which we can assume Boris likes, since he’s decided to keep it):

• First impressions are of traffic dominance
• Physical detachment from sites of interest
• Profusion of guard railing
• Impact of road signs on environment
• Car parks as settings for historic buildings
• Cyclists are squeezed between a single lane of traffic and steel barriers

Sorry, what was that last point?  Cyclists are squeezed?  B-b-b-but, Boris doesn’t like bendy buses because:

They wipe out cyclists, there are many cyclists killed every year by them.

So he doesn’t like being squashed by bendy buses, but does like being wedged between lines of traffic and metal barriers.  Weird.  He’ll spend £100m bringing in a new Routemaster but not £18m (or, to be accurate, £15 to £18m, Boris picked the highest figure) to make a major traffic interchange more cyclist-friendly?  Whose side is he on here?  Not the cyclist, apparently.

What else? [I'm picking and choosing here, read the report for the full list]

• Little connection to or awareness of the River Thames
• Lack of a clear identity to the area
• No sense of democracy or openness
• Important views and lines of sight to historic buildings are blocked

Eh?  Boris has, of course, already rejected one tall building but approved another in the Westminster area, of course.  Now he’s approved the continued blocking of lines of sight in Parliament Square (the key one being the historic northern approach to Westminster Abbey, which currently has a traffic artery across the middle).  It would be nice to know what he’s up to, really.

Now we move onto the meat - balancing pedestrians and motorists.  It turns out that

• pedestrians are generally there because they want to be there
• there are thousands of them
• cars tend to go through on the way somewhere else (5000 in evening peak)
• pedestrians are squashed by the deliberately car-friendly design onto narrow footpaths round the edges and onto islands in the traffic.
• few people go into the middle of the square, due to it being inaccessible
• facilities for pedestrians are poor
• the gyratory system increases bus travel times
• the square is ‘intimidating and not conducive to cycling’

Sorry, what was that?

• the square is ‘intimidating and not conducive to cycling’

Ah, I see.  Incoherence again.  Boris is favouring cars over cyclists while having a pro-cyclist transport policy that seeks to have no hierarchy of modes on the roads.  At least that’s the impression I get.  I need some of that metal polish, because I’m buggered if I understand it.  There’s more:

• volumes of traffic higher than TfL recommendations for cycling
• cyclists squeezed between recent security barriers and other traffic

The scheme proposed would have turned the central area from an island into a peninsula to give a ‘Cathedral Close’ setting for the church.  Hardly a ‘blasted chewing-gummed piazza’, then.  A lot of the design is based around trying to make the security features installed since 9/11 less obtrusive and more suited to the unfortunate permanence they’re going to have.  As it is, just with the congestion charge it’s going to be stuck, unloved, in a 2008 time warp while the world moves on.

Finally, at the start we heard Boris let us know his opinion of what the square looks like now:

…a green glade of heroes…

Those heroes are:

• Sir Robert Peel (Conservative Prime Minister)
• Benjamin Disraeli (Conservative Prime Minister)
• Edward Stanley, Earl of Derby (Conservative Prime Minister)
• Viscount Palmerston (Tory MP, Prime Minister, first Liberal leader)
• Field Marshal Smuts (Prime Minister of South Africa)
• Sir Winston Churchill (Conservative Prime Minister, ex-Liberal)

I see.  Smuts was a supporter of racial segregation, Churchill thought it was OK to gas ‘uncivilised’ tribes and Palmerston supported the slave states during the American Civil War, and the other three were Conservative Prime Ministers.  I can see why Boris refers to them as heroes (or is it Smuts’ contribution to the founding of the UN or Churchill’s co-founding the European Convention on Human Rights that he finds heroic?  I must read his Spectator editorials and find out).

Oh, I forgot one, put up by Livingstone:

• Nelson Mandela (President of South Africa)

I bet he doesn’t even have a ‘watermelon smile’.  You can’t get the sculptors, you know.

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