Balancing priorities

I visited St Andrews in Scotland last weekend, and saw this. It made me think about how immature or broken our national thinking about private car use is. We’re never going to have enough space for everyone to park, in some of the places we all want to go to. So how do we decide where the limits are? Who decides what to protect from parking, and what can be suffocated beneath it? Should someone decide on some kind of limit? Or do we just keep trying to find more space, even if that damages the very place/experience people are trying to get to? The problem The picture shows a band setting up to play in a traditional Victorian bandstand, on a sunny day, by the seaside. We’d probably expect to see an audience clustered all around the bandstand. Surely that’s a basic design principle of a bandstand. A bandstand is an open multi-sided structure that we’d expect to find in the middle of parks. We want the music to travel in all directions. The experience is as much about the people and the…