On 31st October there was another eventful Regeneration and Highways Select Committee meeting.
We had an update about Liverpool’s air quality plan. Tom Crone criticized it for not being as ambitious as Bristol, who have declared that they will ban all diesel cars from the city centre, or Leeds who are creating car-free areas of their city centre. We hope Liverpool can become more bold and ambitious.
We had a presentation about the Paddington Village development in the Knowledge Quarter. This is a positive development, bringing high quality jobs and research to the city. However yet again Liverpool council didn’t feel able to finish a development without attaching a multi-storey car park to it, allowing yet another 1250 people to drive into the city centre and park their cars. The development will also be heated by gas. In this day and age we need to stop using fossil fuels to warm our buildings; we need to do it in a way that could be renewable.
But these were just a warm-up for the two really big items: Tom Crone’s motions on scrapping of the 82c and 82d buses, and the plan to expand river Riverside Drive. Unfortunately both of these motions were amended to be more or less useless. The Labour Party tried to deny that they were planning to scrap the 82c and 82d, even though it was an explicit part of the bus rerouting strategy launched a while ago. They also denied that there was a plan to make Riverside Drive a dual carriageway – even though the report that they commissioned detailed exactly how they would do that, and the City and the combined authority has allocated £264,000 to Liverpool council to finish creating the plan. All in all it was another meeting showing that despite the council starting to talk the talk on the climate emergency and reaching zero carbon they are still completely unable to make their actions match their words.