Tag Archives: Arcadis

A LOAD OF MALLSHIT

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Park Street: pedestrianisation boom or bust?

Council plans to close Park Street are backed by a private sector report by the council’s ‘private sector capital partner’, Arcadis – Queens Road, Triangle and Park Street – Economic Benefits Review.

The report claims that the proposal will generate a large 28.5 per cent increase in economic activity for the retail and food sector and a 19.64 per cent increase for the office sector.

Fantastic news until you learn from campaigners that the research Arcadis used to ‘prove’ these economic benefits is derived from US research from the 1960s about pedestrianising shopping malls.

The data is therefore 60 years old and, in three cases, malls were reopened to traffic to stop the economic decline caused by, er, pedestrianisation!

More dodgy bullshit from the Greens.

ARENA ISLAND TROUGHING UPDATE

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Arena Island Bridge
A nice little corporate earner: the bridge to nowhere at Arena Island

Plans by Bristol City Council, cloaked in secrecy, to hand over the prime Arena Island site to pension fund L&G for free without an open market sale or procurement process continue.

The deal, cooked up by the council’s former £260k a year interim regeneration boss Colin “Headboy” Molton, who was officially characterised by the council’s own legal team last year as “incompetent”, finds the council guaranteeing rents for 40 years on a speculative office slab L&G intend to build on the site.

And there’s lots more public money to go around for privileged corporate sector players in on this public money giveaway. For instance, new council regeneration boss Stephen “Preening” Peacock has just signed off £420k to a corporate ‘strategic partner’ (Arcadis working with Arup and Mott MacDonald) “to provide project management, cost management and design services to maintain progress”.

Progress on what? Er, a further £32 million worth of “enabling works” on the site that the public are paying for before handing the site over to L&G.free of charge.

Nice work if you can get it!