PRESENTER:
It certainly does have a lot of benefits. I want to move on now and ask you about a related project in King Street.
ALICE:
Right. Well this was an experiment I was involved in where local residents decided to try and reduce the traffic along King Street, which is the busiest main road in our area, by persuading people not to use their cars for one day. We thought about making people pay more for parking – but we decided that would be really unpopular – so instead we just stopped people from parking on King Street but left the other car parks open.
It was surprising how much of a difference all this made. As we’d predicted, air quality was significantly better but what I hadn’t expected was how much quieter it would be – even with the buses still running. Of course everyone said they felt safer but we were actually amazed that sales in the shops went up considerably that day – we thought there’d be fewer people out shopping – not more.
PRESENTER:
That’s really interesting so the fact that …
2/2