BROAD Street is an attractive street anyway: it does not need prettying-up in “new-town” style.

A small fortune was recently spent on huge planters, reducing blue badge parking space though looking quite nice, which your picture suggests will now no longer be used. What will happen to them?

Money could be better spent: Broad Street does need safety for pedestrians from cyclists hurtling in both directions and practising wheelies and other stunts, as they currently do in supposedly pedestrian precincts.

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Your picture of the new vision for Broad Street suggests the layout would be ideal for these teenage antics that endanger themselves and others!

Alfresco food and drink is available in Church Street, St Peter’s Street, High Town, Eign Gate... maybe there is demand for still more. Outdoor seating would be welcome, as it is in High Town and Eign Gate but, if it is as fairly comfortable as there, it may encourage people to bring their own refreshments.

You have only to look at the filthy street surfaces in these two places to see the squalid mess that picnickers’ litter, pigeons and seagulls make.

Are coaches to be banned?

From the picture I do not see how they could negotiate their way through the seating/planting/cycle racks/activities/etc. I have in the past seen guests unloading luggage from their coach outside the Green Dragon, and people on a day trip getting out of a coach outside the cathedral. Do we not want to encourage visitors to Hereford?

My major concern is that the council’s stated aim is to have fewer cars in the city centre. I agree they should be used as sparingly as possible, but cars are an essential part of our life.

The city centre contains several places of worship, which serve not just the immediate vicinity but areas around the town as well. Would you be prepared to make a weekly round trip, in all weathers, from eg. Tillington or Fownhope to Hereford, on a bicycle?

Churches hold weddings and funerals too; few brides would consider cycling in their wedding finery, and funerals require hearses and mourners’ cars.

The resident priest at St Francis Xavier visits the sick and dying in their homes; cycling is not a practical option.

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Nor is it practical for the aged and/or disabled. We need our cars to be able to get to church at all, and sufficient parking for there to be a place near enough to make walking relatively painless.

“Giving motor vehicles reduced priority” sounds very green and good, but the reality is misery for many: worried businesses, possible shop closures, loss of livelihood for taxi-drivers, curtailed social activities, and certain physical pain for me if required to walk more than 25 yards.

Hardly Councillor John Harrington’s “best possible experience for people in Hereford”! In calling for compromise, Hereford business chief Mike Truelove talks much more sense.

CAROLA MORTON

Hereford

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