With the start of the sales today and the rush of buyers before the VAT goes back up on 1st January, the traffic has been quite busy. The only reason I know this is because I did not make my way to the shops but went out for a walk with my grand-daughter down to the floating harbour to feed the swans!
Judging from the amount of traffic in the city I can only imagine that it must be far worse at the out of town shopping centre where usually at this time of year long queues build up on the motorway with people trying to get into Cribbs Causeway. Later in the day long queues form again with people trying to get home and this also happens in the run up to Christmas.
Because most large towns and cities now have homogonised shopping centres with fewer people actually living there, the town planners up and down the country decided it would be a real wheeze to build huge shopping temples with gigantic car parks out of town so that shoppers could go and worship there transported in a weird assortment of gas guzzling, fume emitting cars and vans. All this adds to the CO2 emissions unnecessarily.
Then they decided that they would sprinkle large retail parks with giant supermarkets around various parts of the cities and towns so that when the residents wanted to eat, they would again have to hop into their cars etc. to drive a couple of miles to get the necessary to fill their cupboards and their stomachs!
Now if planners and councils had used their heads and encouraged the small greengrocers, butchers, fishmongers, ironmongers and independent clothes retailers etc. to continue to trade in city and town centres there would be less need for people to use their cars and there would also be a much better sense of community. Hats off to the town in East Anglia that recently fought against having a huge Tesco built there, at least they've got the right idea.
If people could buy more of what they needed locally at a reasonable price there would be no need to use cars so often. There would also be a healthier population if people were able to walk to their place of work and to the shops as well as less pollution and CO2 emissons. Instead, the population works in one place, lives in another and shops in a third. Am I the only one that is so old I can remember walking to work from home and also walking to the shops? I was also a lot lighter then too!
Here, here! Since they re-developed the town near me to become another homogenous mix of coffee bars and fashion shops, I rarely go there now. A lot of the local independant shops, who sold useful goods that I actually needed, can no longer afford the rent and have closed. I couldn't even buy something as simple as a biscuit barrel earlier this year! I can't now buy a decent pair of jeans because it's just fashion retailers, I end up doing a lot of shopping online now.
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