By Douglas Kruger
LAST week, an evening news feature asked what it might take to rejuvenate Jersey’s high streets. The proposals were troubling. They included “helping proprietors to find their place in the Island ecosystem”, and “appointing a PR group to tell people about the high street”.
There may be a disconnect between theory and reality.
Let’s start with the first one. Imagine you own a store. You must now go about “finding your place in the Island ecosystem”. Are you ready to do that? OK, go!
It’s meaningless. It’s not a thing anyone can DO.
Then there’s the idea of appointing a PR group to tell people about the high street.
“Hey, everyone! There’s a high street!”
“Yes, we know.”
“So… maybe go there more?”
“We can’t. There’s no parking.”
“OK, but what if you walked instead?”
“All the way there? With my shopping bags? In the rain? You do realise it’s not the 12th century any more, right? We’ve also eliminated diphtheria.”
And it’s not the case that people no longer shop in stores. Many of our Islanders take empty suitcases to London, fill them up with retail purchases, then bring them back to the Island.
So, what’s missing here? Could it be that it’s simpler and easier to fly to London and shop?
Perhaps a useful starting point would be to ask store owners directly what they need. Like this:
“How can we help you to earn more money?”
“There’s no parking. People can’t come here.”
“So you’re saying that if we provide parking, you could make more money, stock a wider range, pay more taxes, hire more people, rejuvenate our high streets, and improve the tourist experience?”
“Yes, to all.”
“Good. Then we’ve identified both the problem and the solution. We’ll get right on that.”
To that end, we might consider three orders of business:
1. Enable the process by identifying the politicians who are trying to reduce parking. Send them off to a lovely communist state where they can be happy. Say, Canada.
2. Speed up the process, by gathering the folks from Planning. Fly them to a fully paid team-build retreat somewhere on the far side of the world. They can return once the project’s done.
3. Commission the engineering team that built the Albert Cuyp Underwater Parking Garage in the Netherlands. Get them to duplicate their work here.
The Dutch faced a problem dynamically similar to our own. They hoped to ease traffic congestion and provide more parking for shoppers and employees, all while enhancing, not destroying, the beauty of a public domain. They looked about and discovered they had no space. So they went down instead.
Engineers conceived of projects like the Albert Cuyp Underwater Parking Garage, built directly beneath their iconic canals. Each such parking lot provides hundreds of bays, with exits for pedestrians on either side.
And naturally, it was initially picketed by angry Dutch people shaking signs that proclaimed, “This project will destroy the whole world and bring about the apocalypse!” But now it’s done, and it’s perfectly invisible. In fact, the area looks better than it did before, with more open space, and less congestion.
When you make parking abundant beneath city centres, you can reduce incidental parking above ground. This can free up acres of new space.
Imagine if every one of the cars stopped around St Helier on a typical day suddenly disappeared from sight, because they’d slipped beneath the surface to take advantage of ample parking instead? How much open space would that win back, and what might be done with it? You could either develop further, or simply bank the win, and have a more open, less congested city.
Do it a sufficient number of times, and you would solve morning traffic. I exit my apartment, and must crawl slowly around three one-way streets, before I’m even heading in the right direction. If instead I could exit from a large communal parking area beneath my “city block”, I would start off going the right way, and cut three streets from my route. Multiply that dynamic by several thousand people, and you would cull thousands of hours from our collective commute. That’s time won back for productivity. It’s also energy spend reduced, on a significant scale.
If I could have my wish, I would make it trend-defyingly cheap. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist, but our island is too small for parking to be a profit centre, and charging multiples of pounds for a single hour is not a solution. That’s merely a continuation of the current hostility towards parking. Charge enough initially to fund construction, by all means, then remove the booms. Make it free, along with all Island parking.
If that sounds too generous, weigh it up in this light: our island continues to slide down the per capita productivity rankings, year by year. We also occupy an unenviable position on the business freedom index. Both could be positively impacted simply by making it easy for people in Jersey to “go there”.
I’ve lived in different places in the world. It was typical of our family’s behavioural patterns to go to dinners, movies, bookstores and more. We’d go to malls just to walk around and browse. We loved going places, just for the sake of it.
We don’t do that as much here. And there’s only one reason for it. You can’t. It’s too difficult to go there. If you can’t park, then you stay home. And you do your shopping on Amazon. And no amount of PR campaigns, or telling proprietors to find their place, will change that.
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Douglas Kruger is a professional speaker and author. His books are all available via Amazon and Audible.
