Essential Services - Initial.co.uk - Reg. HX09HBU

The human tides which inhabit the HMO's of Aberdeen's Broomhill Road are a constant source of trouble to their entrepreneurial landlords. Often, the problems are of a nature which we would prefer to draw a tasteful veil around!

Initial "Washroom Services"

Suffice it to say that we've seen "Inital Washroom Services" reg HX09HBU around a few times, clearly dealing with an urgent toilet emergency of some kind, as the driver of this Aberdeen Van has been present-minded enough to use the pedestrian build-out "demand-responsive" emergency parking area outside the HMO in question as he goes about his "business". It's also a nice piece of PaveParkVertising which directs us towards the Initial website at www.initial.co.uk - nice one!

"Inital Care is Everywhere!" (as they used to say)
and, they should add, "At Any Time"

The very model of "Corporate Social Responsibility":

Everyone at Initial, from onsite personnel to senior management in the boardroom, demonstrates a firm commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility by putting our good practice guidelines into action on a daily basis.

PaveParker of the Week! SV08LCO

Yay! This weeks PaveParker of the Week is the driver of Aberdeen Car SV08LCO.


Yes, congratulations to the driver of Aberdeen Car Vauxhaull Astra Sport (oooh!) 1.6i Design (ooooh!) who shows excellent technique on Aberdeen's Rubislaw Park Road.

The double yellow straddle, the 'flipped' wing mirror, leaving just enough room for the pestestrian to squeeze past without having to resort to "carraigewalking". It's all good stuff. We particularly liked the choice of PaveParking location - close to that rogue cone. This will cause the hapless (and carless!) pestestrian to have to execute a sort of slalom maneuver. This will humiliate them by moving them off of their desire line and reminding them of their proper place on the streets of Aberdeen - subordinate even to the cones! Quite right.

We have only one gripe with this weeks PaveParker: why is he not flashing his "exempts"? By this omission he runs the risk of being spoken to by a hated Community Warden. Flashing the hazards exempts is the sure secret way of demonstrating your importance and vitality to the local economy - thus causing the hated Community Wardens to leave well alone - they know what side their bread's buttered on!

However, perhaps it is that the driver of this Aberdeen Car is less certain of his status, driving a lowly Astra in Aberdeen's exclusive West End. You'll note he shares the road (and pavement!) with a Chevvy Jeep, a brand new Range Rover and one of those Porsche Cayennes - oooh we like them! Rubislaw Park Drive is quite steep, after all.

I Dig UTG.

I 'dig' UTG!

We're beginning to gain more of a professional footing now with our popular campaign to to "Save the Denburn Dual Carriageway!" ('like' us on FaceBook, 'follow' us on Twitter). We're gaining more followers every day!

Of course, as we've pointed out, saving our the Denburn Heritage Dual Carriageway (which is part of our city's Heritage Inner City Ring-road), necessitates the destruction of the city's Union Terrace Gardens. Hay, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs!

So, to celebrate the forthcoming desecration of the gardens to make way for the much needed car-park, we've had this brutally honest tee-shirt created:



The beauty of creating this teeshirt via fulfillment house "Zazzle", is that it's a doddle - anyone can do it, takes about 5 minutes. Not only that, it also demonstrates a provocative disregard for the nimby tree-hugging naysayers who think that grass and flowers are more important than parking spaces. This'll rile them!

Yay! Hud'at nimbys!

I think everyone will agree that this lends our campaign to realise Sir Ian Woods' 'vision' for Aberdeen City centre a professional and mature aspect which was hitherto missing. We have contacted him and his supporters at local enterprise forum ACSEF to ask what he and they think. We've also asked Aberdeen City Council whether they'd like to sell the tees at council tax collection points across the city. We're sure they'll all be delighted by our initiative!

You can't make an omelette...

Without breaking eggs...

The Silent Majority wants to Save Our Heritage.

It can be tough going at times, trying to motivate the silent majority: continually issuing rallying cries to our silent silent supporters in aid of our campaign to "Save the Denburn Dual Carriageway!" ('like' us on FaceBook, 'follow' us on Twitter).

A woefully underused urban asset.
Part of our heritage under threat.
What can YOU do to help?

We take our obligations on behalf our our huge but largely silent support very seriously; the job has a high profile and entails real responsibility. As part of what we do, sometimes - like over the last few weeks - it's been necessary to report on the threats to not only the Denburn Dual Carriageway but also our worries about the other road projects which we hold dear in Aberdeen "City and Shire". It's upsetting work - we have to look at things which nobody should have to look at and read proposals nobody should have to read - but somebody's got to do it. One of the dangers of this type of work is that it can skew your perspective - turn you paranoid - you begin to see cyclits and pestestrians literally everywhere, murmering their creed of "reallocation".

But, we've had a nice weekend - got the car parked directly outside the house so we could look at it whenever we wanted to (comforting) and so we settled down to count our blessings. We noticed that our local MP, Dame Anne Begg, tweeting furiously that the AWPR Aberdeen Bypass is still a party priority, despite all sorts of anti-bypass misinformation promoted by our Dundee-based local press. And we also comforted ourselves with these thoughts:

Don't worry - we'll fix this
medieval aberration on the A90.

Firstly, the work which will complete the A90 Trunk Road Anderson Drive "Ring Road".

• The forthcoming improvements to the historic Bridge of Dee (it's recent de-scheduling as a Scheduled Ancient Monument opens the way to its significant modification and widening as part of the A90 trunk road)
• The improvements to the Haudagain Roundabout at the A90 A96 junction - a flyover? An underpass? Exciting! One things for sure, some social housing full of unemployed people and students will be bulldozed to make way for it. Good.

Inner Ring Road

Secondly, the work which will complete the "Inner-City Ring Road".

• The Berryden Corridor
• The Link to Great Northern Road
• Some stuff to do with buses at Powis Terrace

Thirdly, and most excitingly, the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route - The Aberdeen Bypass itself. Still a priority for Dame Anne Begg MP, and MSP candidate Gregg Williams of the Labour Party. This will be a motorway. Sort of.

So, yes. Soon Aberdeen will be a city which has not one, not two, but three - yes three ring-roads. Two of these will be thrilling urban-dual-carriageways, and the third will be a motorway. Fabulous!

At last we can see the future - the future our forefathers envisaged in the 1952 Local Plan - a future full of cars busily speeding about on our three ring-roads creating economic growth for the whole country. By heaven it'll have taken a long time to get there - but it'll be worth it. The future IS what it used to be. These retro-modern transport plans are cutting edge. They say that if you wait long enough, fashions come round again. That means that Aberdeen is avant-garde.

Some say that these mid-20th century plans now reaching implementation are now out of place and unsustainable against the dark background of resource depletion and climate change. They say that the effort would be better expended getting Aberdeen "City and Shire" hooked up to next-generation fibre-optic high-speed broadband, but we don't really know what that means, so we ignore these calls. They say that the future can only be assured by the up-to-datedness of the fastest possible 21st century internet connectivity - but we think they don't know what connectivity means. The growth-generating drivers of Aberdeen Cars are only interested in the sort of connectivity which dual-carriageways and motorways can provide! High speed traffic flow! Now that's connectivity!

Soon enough, our city centre will be regenerated by efficient traffic flow delivering large numbers of high-speed drivers into the city-centre at a higher rate than ever before. More car-parks will be definitely be needed. And so our beloved Denburn heritage Dual Carriageway will saved for future generations. Hooray!

Kill KIIIILLLLL KIIIIILLLLLLLL!!!!

Kill them all if you love your car!

But what of the carbon emissions? Well, we all know that global warming is just a conspiracy theory to to make motorists feel guilty - yes, a myth put about by jealous hippy types who envy our lovely cars (and, as pointed out by our mentors at Bristol Traffic, what about all the carbon emissions caused by the manufacture of too many cycle helmets and high visibility jackets, eh?). But anyway - whatever! - we draw their sting with the Granite City Forest project. This project sort-of offsets the expected increase in carbon emissions by 'planting a tree for every citizen' and necessitates the slaughter of all the deer on Tullos hill.

Good. These spongeing animals do not contribute to economic growth. About these useless roe deer we care not a jot - they are in the way of our plans for dual carriageways and motorways. They deserve to die. Will we get to eat them?

So it's time for the silent majority to stand up and be counted, and hopefully encourage others to do the same. If you love your cars, if you love driving you MUST spread the word:

'Like' us on FaceBook, 'Follow' us on Twitter.

Budget - Yay! Budget - Boo!

Fantastic news for Aberdeen - Oil Capital of Europe, where everyone drives really nice big cars - doing as much mileage as we can - because it supports the local economy. As hard-pressed beleaguered family motorists, naturally we welcome the long-expected and much-needed 1p off the fuel duty on a litre of petrol. All our wishes and hopes for the future were contained within the Chancellor, George Osbourne MP's, announcement that he will help motorists in this way. Yay!

Oh but at such dreadful news for Aberdeen - Oil Capital of Europe. During Wednesday’s Budget speech, Mr Osborne said the offshore oil companies’ (who live in Aberdeen) greater-than-expected profits had led to his decision to use North Sea tax to recoup the £9.4billion the government would lose through the fuel duty cut. Boo!

We are conflicted. Does the chancellor not realise that Aberdeen "City and Shire" is the economic dynamo which was all set to pull the economy out of recession, all because of the high oil price! High oil prices are good for Aberdeen, leading to newspaper features and articles on the BBC's "One Show" saying that we are "the town the credit crunch forgot". And this is true; reaping the benefits of the high oil price, Aberdeen is the "city to watch". Some say that while the drivers of Aberdeen Cars revel in high oil prices, it's this self-same high oil price which is helping to prolong the economic gloom elsewhere, but we think that's just jealousy talking. We have the largest man-made hole in Europe and we contain the second-richest man in Scotland (We regularly gain comfort from reading the sayings atrributed to him on his wiki page). We have the second-largest granite building in Europe and we are the number two in the world for upstream oil and gas. Yes indeed, a real "number two".

So, today, we hit out in fury at the Chancellor and blast his disgraceful attempt to bite the hand that feeds him. The drivers of Aberdeen Cars are the one resource that he could have relied on to create some much needed economic growth and pull UK plc out of recession, like we did in the 1980's and then again in the 1990's. He has taken us for granted. He has brought the recession to Aberdeen - thanks for that, George! We agree with the local press: you are a "stupid, ignorant hypocrite". We think that's fair comment and are glad that our local newspaper of record is prepared to exercise such judicious weighting of its opinions. How dare the chancellor punish our achievement of having the oil resource nearby and that the price is very high right now is indeed our achievement - we in Aberdeen "City and Shire" should be rewarded - not punished!

It is said that this winfall tax on our oil industry might have an impact on the local housing market. But we doubt that. Everyone knows that houses only ever go up.

Mr Osborne’s Cabinet colleague, Aberdeen's Michael Gove, had been due to visit the north-east yesterday, but cancelled the trip at the last minute.

Bypass "may not be top priority" - Whaaaaaat?

The drivers of Aberdeen Cars today hit out in fury at threats to our cherished bypass hopes.

There were astonishing admissions from politicians earlier in the week when, as the hustings is prepared for the forthcoming Scottish Parliament Elections, a politician said that the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route project (the bypass) may not "be the top funding priority" for any incoming Scottish Government.

As everyone knows, the bypass is a vital infrastructure project which is needed to allow the economic powerhouse that is Aberdeen create some much needed economic growth and pull UK plc out of recession, like we did in the 1980's and then again in the 1990's.

Aberdeen, as we all know, is the "Key City To Power the UK Recovery". But do we here in Aberdeen "City and Shire" get any thanks for it? No we don't! The thought of the bypass being completed in 2012 is just about the only thing that gives some of the drivers of Aberdeen Cars hope - it's the only thing that keeps us going through our long-standing traffic misery. Meantime we see our grudgingly-paid Road Tax money being spent on cycle lanes, pedestrian crossings, footbridge overpasses and the like, but never ever anything for us: the real people, the people in nice cars, the only ones who are economically active and create real economic growth so that people can have nice cars.

So, for polititions to brand the bypass as: "not the top priority" is insensitive. They say they need the money for hospitals and schools. We say - "let the drivers of Aberdeen Cars create the much-needed economic growth first - then you can have as many hospitals as you want! Give us our bypass! NOW!"


Then there are those who say that the bypass won't work, it'll just create more traffic. They talk of strange sounding things like The Lewis-Mogridge Position, The Downs-Thompson Paradox, The Braess' Paradox and Induced Demand. Which is all very clever we're sure. They say that more roads means more cars will use the roads. Well, duh! That's the whole idea! And that means that we'll need even more roads, and so on until there's enough. Simples!

What these nimbys don't realise is that they should treat this as a mathematical problem. If you evenly distribute the population, everyone of age can drive and has a car, everyone drives at the same time and there is sufficient road available with an even distribution of journeys throughout the country then you have the situation where everyone is driving at the same time and no scope for an increase in roadspace leading to more journeys undertaken etc. there would be no one else to drive!

This will be the omega point. Only then will our work be done.

PaveParker of the Week! SW55 KWM

This weeks laurels go to the driver of Aberdeen Car Kia Picanto 1.0 GS reg. SW55KWM



We spotted this exemplary parking on the city's historic Hardgate the other day. What we particularly enjoy about this display of How-to-PavePark is the consideration show by the altruistic driver of this Aberdeen Car. Noting that the area is characterised by sheltered housing and nursing homes, our philanthropic PaveParker has made sure to leave just enough room for the elderly residents to squeeze between the car and the fence.

That is, of course, providing that the elderly people can be trusted to stick to the example set out in the instructive sign and walk one in front of the other in a line, as illustrated.

One in front of the other, please.

Our humanity-loving driver of this PaveParked Aberdeen Car has even allowed the elderly people a little bit more room by "flipping the wingmirror". Cool! We have to admit, though, perhaps there's just a hint of selfishness in this. It's possible that the driver was afraid that the sticks and walking frames of the passing elderly people might scratch this nice wee car; thus rendering it less nice. We congratulate the driver's foresight and planning.

Flipped.