I NOTE that there is still on-going concern amongst local residents over parking provision at the new Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (“Residents’ anger over legal hitch on cheap parking near hospital”, The Herald, June 13). It is perhaps worth noting that the planners stated that “the development will result in no additional severance of local communities as a result of traffic increase”. They stipulate that a car park management plan should be submitted for approval and that this should detail the system of allocating spaces to staff, charging regimes, and the system for controlling and managing on-site parking.
They further state that “to curb the adverse impact of staff/patients/visitors/ attempting to circumvent on-site parking controls on neighbouring off-site roads, on-road car parking controls will be required on the roads surrounding the site”. If the traffic regulation order needed to implement this does not work, then a refundable bond of £750,000 which would be valid for five years is to be provided “for the implementation of appropriate on-road parking controls should the future need arise”. So the money should already be there for the residents’ benefit.
What the consent does not cover though is the scope of further developments on the site, such as the new Imaging Centre of Excellence (ICE) on Langlands Drive. This is directly opposite neighbouring housing.
At the ground-breaking ceremony for this building in October, 2015 Professor Anna Dominiciak of Glasgow University announced that the centre would employ 260 staff, with the vast majority of these being new hires. In other words, that would be at least 200 new people working here whose parking needs are not accommodated on the site.
However the planning application submitted to Glasgow City Council by the university states that “no additional parking is required over and above that for the whole Masterplan, where the 68 no. new staff for Project ICE are collaborative partners.....” It further states that “the shared functionality that the ICE represents with the Masterplan will remove the need for additional parking...” From this it would seem that 132 of the new staff have mysteriously disappeared.
Nowhere in the council’s planning assessment does it state that the university was to be given an allocation from the 2,400 NHS staff parking spaces on site. As all the new car parks were full to overflowing before the ICE building was conceived, where do these 200 new ICE staff intend to park?
Notwithstanding that, to fit the ICE building on the site the eight existing disabled parking bays on Langlands Drive were reduced to three. Despite being NHS spaces, these three remaining disabled spaces have now been claimed by the university for the ICE building. That means the NHS parking allocation has actually been reduced, thereby putting further pressure on the surrounding streets.
Robert Menzies,
2 Burnbrae Gardens, Falkirk.
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