Call for Manchester to be more welcoming for green spaces
From 11am today campaigners have taken over a car park in the centre of Manchester to draw attention to the city’s overwhelming focus on cars and the lack of green space.
The event has been organised by Clean Cities and Plant Manchester, who have turned part of the Chinatown car park into a green space for the day. Members of the public are invited to go along and enjoy the space and talk about what they would like to see more of in the city.
The event is timely, given the delays to Manchester Clean Air Plan which were announced last week.
Sarah Rowe from the Clean Cities Campaign explained why rethinking parking space is so crucial: ‘Manchester has ambitious climate targets that it is not currently on track to reach, and some of the most polluted air in the country. Both of these issues are linked to the prevalence of cars and yet we continue to allow them to dominate the city. The good news is that this means there is huge potential to change things – our pop up garden shows how we could be using space in a way that is good for our community, good for our health and good for the climate.’
A new report titled ‘Manchester Unpaved’ looks into Manchester’s unhealthy obsessions with the car.
It found that around 28% of Manchester’s city centre is taken up by roads and another 8% by car parks. Less than 5% of the city centre can be described as green space.
This is exacerbated by the fact that car numbers in Manchester have jumped by more than 30% in the last ten years.
Manchester has an ambition that by 2040, 90% of all trips to the city centre will be made by active travel or on public transport, yet the 30,000 car parking spaces outnumber places to park a bike by ten times.
The Green Space Index, produced by Fields in Trust, provides guidance to planners on how much open space there should be based on a population size. Revised in 2015, this guidance sets a minimum recommendation that for every 1,000 people there should be approximately 2.4ha of accessible green space.
A Green Space Index score indicates whether an area is meeting the minimum standard. On their interactive map, Manchester Central, we are told, does not meet a minimum standard of green space provision. What’s worse is that given the growth in population, this Index score is projected to fall by up to 10% in the near future, with neighbouring Salford’s score falling by over 15%
Fields in Trust have established a minimum standard of green space provision, that being of 24m² of green space per individual, a level which they believe would enable everyone to ‘participate in recreation, sport, play and reap the well-being benefits’. The average provision per person in Great Britain is 30m² but city centres regularly fall below this. In the centre of Manchester the level is just 8.04m²
In Manchester Unpaved, Clean Cities make five policy recommendations to improve the city centre:
- Produce a kerbside strategy looking at how kerbside space is currently used, set targets to reduce the dominance of vehicles on the kerbside and instead convert it to more sustainable uses, such as bus lanes, cycle lanes, greenery and space for people.
- Introduce a sustainable parking policy that ensures parking tariffs, capacity and enforcement contribute to climate targets and health outcomes.
- Set a target and action plan to increase the amount of greenspace in the city centre by reallocating parking to accessible greenspace.
- Set a target and action plan to reallocate 25% of kerbside parking across the borough to more sustainable uses, such as active travel or public transport infrastructure, EV charging points or community space.
- Increase the cost of parking, particularly for the most polluting vehicles. In Bath, for example, parking charges in all council-run car parks are based on emissions or engine size, with more polluting vehicles paying more. In Paris, charges are higher based on weight, with diesel, petrol and hybrid cars above 1.6 tonnes, and all electric cars above 2 tonnes paying the higher fee.
