IMS_Blog

I think this is linked into my thoughts on the car park, and the council’s ooh so clever we must make Gateshead an attractive place to visit policies. They’re not very good at it.

You see this weekend happens to be that of the Great North Run, and associated smaller events (which has nothing to do with why I’m here incidentally). That means a fairly large influx of people from outside the immediate region. The run route passes across the iconic Tyne Bridge into Gateshead. So you might expect quite a few to maybe wander into the centre. We’ll ignore for the moment the fact that they’ll be confronted with the boarded off car park but that may make them more eager to take up the action they’ve probably got that far from, which is transport to the large MetroCentre for a spot of early Christmas retail. I presume the same sort of thing happens from Newcastle.

From both the centre of Newcastle and the centre of Gateshead there are regular, non-stop shuttle buses to and from the MetroCentre. The Gateshead ones are actually better because they run from the lovely enclosed transport interchange and are big bendy things (incidentally—as an outsider I’m a bit baffled by Londoner’s seeming hatred for bendy buses), and every few minutes. Except currently they don’t.

There’s road resurfacing work going on at the travel interchange: The X66 CentreLink non-stop bus to MetroCentre will pick up and drop off passengers on the A184 Prince Consort Road, next to the interchange, where a special stop and shelter is being erected.. I used the CentreLink bus on Saturday. That special stop and shelter consists of a few pieces of scaffolding with the coverings normally associated with such. The covers are held together with tape. It was raining, the roof inevitably leaked. The “shelter” is way too small to accommodate the sort of numbers which can fit on one of those bendy buses. I found it incomprehensible that anyone in charge could have signed off that shelter as being good enough. It’s a little baffling they couldn’t find a better solution to start with, but to say that is good enough tells you everything tells you a lot about what is actually wrong with the place.

And such a nice thing for all our so important visitors to find, if they were lucky to work out where the stop is to start with (I wonder how many from out of time had parked at the multistory?)