Following the news from the government of the release of £325m from a PFI, the Isle of Wight Council has decided to take a novel approach to the problem of it’s ropey roads. During a long, late night session last night a majority of Tory councillors voted in the measures.
“We’ve decided to think outside the box on this one,” enthused Joe Duckworth, “it seemed too obvious to spend the money on getting the roads fixed, so one of my think-tanks came up with some brilliant ideas.” He continued, “It’s a multi pronged approach – We’ll issue a 4×4 to every Islander, restructure the car parks and end up with tons of cash that we can use to replenishing the Councils financial reserves that have been running a little low of late.”
Ms Carz Furall presented the detail, “We’ve now adopted the issue of 4×4 as standard practice. We’ve tried it at the upper echelons of the council and it’s been very successful. Next stage of the roll out is to the people of the Island.”
Ms Furall explained how it would work with Island visitors, “The holiday makers aren’t here for long enough for it to have a notable damaging effect on their cars from the ever deteriorating roads, but year around use like the Islanders would have, would destroy normal cars – hence the 4×4 idea.”
Larger car parks
“To encourage more compact parking, we’re going to close quite a number of car parks around the Island – roughly half of them. Some of the current car parks will be rebuilt into large facilities,” Steve Buynone, in charge of the scheme at the council.
He continued, “It’s too inefficient having small local car parks, we’ve decided to close those and have a number of larger car parks scattered around the Island. OK there may be a bit of adjusting as people learn to get use to parking miles from their homes … or indeed places of work, but the buses that’s we’re laying on should sort that out.”
When questioned if this was the right thing for the Island, Buynone explained, “We’ve carried out an extensive public consultation, and got the answers that we wanted are evaluating the results – they’re looking favorable.”
Although precise plans of how this will be implemented weren’t disclosed to the councillors who voted for it — “We felt it best not to burden the poor things with the details,” came the official response — it’s emerged that many of these car parks are so large, that they won’t be able to fit on a single level.
Many of these will be multi story car parks, but the council official insisted that this wasn’t important, “It’s about improving the standard of parking, not the number of tiers in the car park,” insisted Peter Blenkensthop, the councils new parking Tsar.
Fight for it
Those who feel that it’s important that they be allowed to park outside their houses, Buynone suggested that they work on presenting a case as to why they should have a parking place instead of their neighbour.
“It’s good to bring in a more competitive approach to parking. There’s no right to having a parking space near you, you know. If the case they make is good enough, they might be lucky enough to get one.”
The master plan
Leader of the Council, David Pugh, detailed the next stage of the plan, “We’ve also decided to get with the kids. We listened to the words of Jack Tupac Pennington and decided to invest long term in horses … phasing out the 4×4 – that’s an important part of our Eco-Island vision.”
Not every one is convinced that this is the right approach. Arnold Pro-Test told us, “It’s ridiculous that the council are buying 4×4’s, just so they can phase them out in favour of the horses – all in order to carry out an objective of Eco-island.”
The right thing?
This threw us into a dilemma dear readers – is this approach right or wrong?
We put our concerns and questions to officials at the council, who explained to us very slowly, in words of one syllable, that they were right, and that we shouldn’t go around bothering our pretty little heads about it.
PS. As much as some people might like to think this article is true, you’ll see it was published before noon on 1st April 2008 by author, April F. Ool. Hence it is NOT true.
