A Super Big New Car Park!

This sends out the totally wrong message about Aberdeen.

As part of our duties as promoters of the "Save the Denburn Dual Carriagway!"  pressure group (like us on FaceBook, follow us on Twitter), we were passed this document (great big nasty PDF) which put our mind to rest a little bit about the redeveloment of Union Terrace Gardens and the prospects for saving the Denburn Dual Carriageway.

Deep within the document, we found this sight to gladden our eyes - this is what will replace that underused park in the city centre:

Ah, that's better!
That's the bottom deck.

Where the useless grass is at the moment.

As you can see from the pictures, plans for the development in Union Terrace Gardens include a lovely big new car park where we can put our nice cars when we go shopping.

That's the middle deck.
Where today the useless canopies of the trees wave stupidly in the breeze
contributing nothing to economic growth, soon we will see
lots of lovely cars.

We are very happy with this, as a great big carpark instead of the useless park will attract lots of traffic onto the Denburn Dual Carriageway, and make Aberdeen look all busy with lots of people in lovely cars going about their business on the bustling road. This will send out all the right messages.

However, when we looked at the "Schedule of Accommodation" for the proposed "City Square", we noted that 15,515 square metres of space out of a total of 56,505 are allocated for car-parking. That's 27.5%.

Yes. 27.5% of this new civic space is to be given over exclusively to car parking. We found this absolutely horrifying. It's not even nearly enough!

Edit:

Aha! Thanks for your comment, Julie. That's a step in the right direction, isn't it? What does Aberdeen "City and Shire" want with Artist-lovers when there's an urgent need for parking spaces?!

So, when all the space for the now abandoned Contemporary Arts Centre is rightly allocated to carparking space, then that gives us about 612 spaces; 19,380 square metres. That's 34% of the total.

Given the fact that other 'civic squares' in Aberdeen (like Golden Square) have allocated as much as 70% of their space to cars, this paltry 34% from the City Square Project still is simply not enough. They urgently need to re-think these plans if they are to save the Denburn Dual Carriageway.

They should listen to us. We are motorists. We have clout.