Shopping Therapy
The Grim Reaper
No. 21 in a never-ending series. Spring 1998
Hurrah for New Labour. We've had a new deal for single mothers, students and Iraqis and now motorists are to be given the same treatment in the mother of all battles. New Labour have given their blessing to the Traffic Reduction Bill and local authorities will soon be legally bound to implement startegies that will result in less traffic. It is only a matter of time until we can picnic on the grassed over M32 whilst listening to skylarks, and Ashton Court quarry closes through a lack of demand for its products. That's the good news. The bad news, dear readers, is that it may be a long time, or even a very very long time.
Whilst the impoverished local councils struggle with how to implement another piece of legislation with no money, South Gloucestershire, that stretch of roads and warehouses that lies between Bristol and open countryside, has embraced the Traffic Reduction Bill with enthusiasm. Only last week I was assured by one of their senior planners that It is central to county policy to reduce car dependency.
A rather large spanner will be thrown into their works on 31 March at10.00 a.m. when the Mall at Cribbs Causeway opens and depressed people from all over the South West will converge on it in droves in search of some shopping therapy. Here are some facts to alarm you. This millenial pleasure dome and leisure complex built of the finest Italian marble and Ashton Court hardcore offers everything a man could want, including 7000 free car parking spaces, 6 new fast food outlets including two drive throughs, a twelve screen multiplex cinema, a health and fitness centre, and a virtual reality games arcade. And for the women, there's a bit of shopping. The developers (Higgs and Hill) say it has a catchment area of a one hour drive and includes four million people. In a fit of public spiritedness they have spent £10m to improve Junction 17 of the M5 and have agreed not to open until 10am each morning as they know the roads wont cope with the traffic. John Hutson of the RAC whose offices overlook the M4/M5 interchange told the Grim Reaper, The motorway is already log-jammed for much of the day. At Xmas and on Saturdays, especially in the summer, it's solid. Cribbs Causeway is expected to generate about 350,000 journies per week. The exact outcome is uncertain but I'm sure that all roads leading to Cribbs Causeway will be severely congested.
And a bloody good thing too. Frankly, the more congested the better in the Grim Reaper's eminent opinion. If a family from Taunton, Trowbridge, Tewkesbury, or Tredegar want to make a special journey to eat a hamburger in the armpit of a motorway interchange on a greenfield site 50 miles from home, then they should be made to suffer as much as possible. But sadly the miserable people who travel half way accross the country to have a burger will not be the only ones to suffer. If the 350,000 depressed shoppers travel an average 50 miles return to reach the Mall, that's an extra 17,500,000 miles that will be driven each week on motorays, local roads and in North Bristol with all the accompanying accidents, noise and air pollution.
Sadly South Glos has chosen to accommodate the monster in its midst by improving road bus and cycle links. Their cycling officer assures me that dedicated cycle routes will be converging on the Mall from all directions, including Patchway and Henbury, and for those CTC sorts who fancy a spot of shopping on their Sunday morning run, Sustrans Route 4 (Wales/Bristol/London) will thoughtfully lead them directly to the haberdashery counter of John Lewis.
Had the Grim Reaper been elected to South Glos council, he would have dug a moat and erected a barbed wire fence around the site and refused to link it to the local road network, thus forcing depressed shoppers to swim and clamber over fences and across muddy fields to access their drug of choice.
Happy shopping!
The Grim Reaper
