all talk and no action

Bath & North East Somerset Council, the people who are overseeing the building of the Bath Spa, a project which has cost £36.2 million to date, is a massive £22.7 million over budget, and has missed its opening date by over three years, has turned its attentions to the city's car parks. Not content with pay-and-display machines, the council has fitted the car parks with a pay-as-you-leave system. Not a huge undertaking, you'd think, given that this scheme is already in place in loads of other car parks all over the country.

But this is Bath. In Charlotte Street car park, where many of the city's workers park each day, it's been chaos, with barriers positioned right after a blind bend, making it a struggle to get close enough to the machine to push the ticket button on the way in, and worse, refusing to open to let people out when they want to leave. On Tuesday, I sat in a queue for 30 minutes while cars in front of me were stuck at the barrier before I managed to clear enough space to turn my car around and head for another exit where I was able to use my ticket to get out. (It seems some tickets are blessed, a bit like the Willy Wonka golden ticket of car parks.)

Later that evening, people broke down a barrier while one frustrated person crashed their car through another. Executive member of transport and highways, Councillor Sir Elgar Jenkins', response? "Well, they shouldn't have done that." What else were they supposed to do?

The next day the council promised that everything would be fixed by the end of the week. In the meantime, you'd think they'd leave the barriers up so people could go home.

Unfortunately not. Today was the same, with people stuck at the barriers and queues of annoyed people behind them. At least this time there was a car park attendant at the barrier, though he seemed unable to help with the problem. When I complained about the inconvenience, he responded that it wasn't his fault. No doubt he's right and he's not personally responsible for the operation of the barriers, but the council should have ensured that either the machines were fixed, someone was there who could manually lift the barriers, or they should have just removed them until the card-reading machines worked properly.

Perhaps the thought of losing another day's takings was too much to bear. After all, they'll be making around £4 million pounds profit from the city's car parks this year, with Charlotte Street alone expected to bring in £1,615,708, according The Bath Chronicle. Surely a little bit of that could be spent on ensuring people can actually get out of the place when they want to go home?

Next up for Bath & NES Council is a massive redevelopment of the Southgate Shopping Centre. What could possibly go wrong?

If you're visiting Bath in the next couple of weeks, you might want to arrive by train.

There's cost-cutting going on over at Minneapolis daily newspaper The Star Tribune, according to David Carr, writing in the New York Times. Staff in the Tribune's newsroom have been told that instead of the free papers they've become accustomed to, they can now access a free digital version online, or buy a copy of the paper for 25 cents. Then last Monday, reporters received the following message from Steve Alexander, senior vice president for circulation:

"During the first week that the additional on-site racks were in service, 43 percent of the Star Tribunes removed from those racks were not paid for. For the second week the rate was 41 percent. This is called 'pilferage' in our business; but put more plainly, it is theft, pure and simple.

"Taking more than one newspaper from a rack when you have only inserted enough money for one paper is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. Employees who steal newspapers will put their jobs at risk. There is zero tolerance when it comes to stealing from our company, even if it is a 25-cent newspaper."

[via BuzzMachine]

The responses to the Carphone Warehouse free broadband offer are rolling in, and PlusNet has opted for option three (or option eight, depending how you want to look at it) of the previously posted free internet access (again) list.

I'm not singling out PlusNet for any reason other than that its press release just dropped into my in-box. Here's an extract:

Before you rush in to a 'free' or cheap broadband deal, consider the preferred choice of the Internet savvy. Do you want an entry level product with limitations? Or a reliable Internet experience with award-winning customer support?

Neil Armstrong, PlusNet Marketing Director said "There are some seemingly great deals around. But there are big differences between the broadband offers available. Customers need to look at the whole picture and read the small print before they enter into a long contract."

Armstrong continued, "Up to 8Mbit/s is now standard, but it’s not just about speed. Savvy customers look for reliability, good customer service and generous usage allowances."

PlusNet Broadband Plus, by the way, offers speeds of up to 8Mb for £14.99 per month with no fixed download limits.

So Carphone Warehouse is offering free broadband to customers of its TalkTalk service. Fantastic news and it'll no doubt shake the industry up. Here's what I predict will happen:

1. Carphone Warehouse announces free broadband. Loads of people sign up.

2. A bunch of other service providers shout "me too!" Loads of people sign up to them, too.

3. The remaining service providers keep their prices the same and claim that extras such as web space, unlimited email addresses and a fantastic home page which offers weather forecasts and cinema times more than compensate for the monthly fee. Customers leave in droves and eventually the service providers abandon their monthly fees.

4. Industry watchers question how the free broadband providers can make any money. Providers stroke their chins and mutter about premium content such as movie and music downloads.

5. Only a tiny percentage of people pay for premium content and everyone else continues to get it free elsewhere on the net.

6. Service providers introduce caps on data use with a per megabyte charge for extra usage.

7. Customers get totally confused by the new billing model and complain loudly at unexpected high bills.

8. An innovative service provider says "hey, we'll drop the per-megabyte fees and charge you a single flat rate per month and you can use the net as much as you like!"

9. People like the "new" flat rate pricing and flock to the service provider. Other providers follow suit.

10. Go back to step one.

Web designer Miles Burke has come up with 18 ways the automotive industry would differ if it went all Web 2.0 on us.

For example, makers would have names like Chryslr, Mercedoodle, Dodg3 or Toyo.ta, the cars would come in lime green, orange, hot pink and deep blue, and -- my favourite -- car accidents would be called mashups.

[via Supr.c.ilio.us]