tributed, and I have to say that a fine time was had by all (roughly translated as a lot of people got happily drunk). There were a few surprises at the British ParkingAssocia- tion’s awards ceremony: The UK’s biggest (and probably most expensive) new car park at Heathrow got nothing (all thatmoney and you can’t get the drainage right), and the best newcar park honorswent to a quirky building atBicesterVil- lage, an out-of-town retail center in Oxfordshire. The V-shaped result (see picture nearby) is integrated


into the landscaping, and although the car park is more than 800 spaces, one gets the feel of amuch smaller andmore inti- mate parking experience. The one failure is to impose any sense of order on the customers. BicesterVillage is a high- end retail experience – catwalk rather than high street – and the Oxfordshire Country set will not allow anything to stop them from abandoning theirMercs and Lexuses so they can get to theirManolo Blahniks. So cars are more or less aban- doned at the first available parking space, and if that blocks the lane, well, “I amin a hurry, darling.”


99% Right The other BPA award that I had a personal interest in


(i.e., I judged) was for best refurbishment. Unlike previous years where the award has sometimes gone to the least worst, this yearwe judges had some genuinely good projects to look at. I was going on to describe the refurbishment entries, but I just realized that I did that lastmonth.


Parking Kills (1) Have you ever walked under a car park barrier? So have


I. It’s a dumb thing to do, and luckily I saw it coming and dodged it.Anne Evans, 79,wasn’t so lucky. Shewalked round her husband’s car to activate the barrier at a Cheltenhamhos- pital car park; it hit her on the head, and 48 hours later she was dead.There are lots of signs saying don’t do this, it’s dan- gerous, but she learned the hard way.


Parking Kills (2) Gillian Birdsall had a longstanding dispute with her


neighbor about parking on their shared-access driveway in Bournemouth.Therefore,when she came home and found an ambulance parked on her “private part of the drive,” with her neighbor seriously ill in the back, she blocked it with her car and refused to move. Her response to the pleas of the crew was to ask “Is he dead yet?”When after 10minutes she even- tually let the ambulance out, the neighborwas taken to hospi- tal where he did die. Her defense that she didn’t know it was an ambulance didn’t impress the court (large white vehicle, the word ambulance written on the front, blue lights, para- medics) and she was fined $750 for obstruction since they couldn’t prove that the delay caused the neighbor’s death. Nice lady.


There is nothing like consistency – this is nothing like consistency My daughter is the manager of a high street store in the


next town up the road, and she has started to getme involved in her parking problems. It’s a traditional high street store with deliveries coming through the front door. They get one truck a week, and immediately outside the door is a loading bay. Here’s the first problem; local car drivers decide this is the perfect place to park, so when the truck turns up, the Continued on Page 54


See us at the IPI booth #719 MAY 2009 • PARKING TODAY • www.parkingtoday.com 53


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