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Town praised as most motor-friendly
Friday 26th June 2009, 3:30PM BST.
Telford is the UK’s most car-friendly town while big cities such as London and Cardiff are likely to drive motorists to despair, it was claimed today.
Telford got top marks for such things as petrol prices, parking costs and speed cameras in a survey by Virgin Money. Second to Telford was St Helens in Merseyside.
It was followed by Southend, Sunderland and Belfast. London was considered to be the least car-friendly city, followed by Cardiff, Birmingham, Glasgow and Edinburgh.
The best towns and cities for cheap parking were Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, Luton in Bedfordshire, West Bromwich and Dudley in the West Midlands and Sunderland, while the most expensive included London, Bristol, Manchester, Edinburgh and Oxford.
Based on the number of car parks per 1,000 people, Aberdeen was the top town, followed by Blackpool, Poole, Gloucester and Telford.
The places people were likely to struggle to find car parking were London, Birmingham, Cardiff, Leeds and Glasgow.
The best towns and cities for petrol prices included Ipswich, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dundee and Norwich while the most expensive petrol was in Cambridge, Northampton, Gloucester, Exeter and Crawley in West Sussex.
Eastbourne, Poole, Colchester and Brighton and Hove were the least likely places where motorists could become victims of car crime, while drivers were most at risk in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Slough in Berkshire.
Grant Bather of Virgin Money said: “The UK’s 24 million motorists are often driven to distraction by the frustrations of driving with parking problems, petrol prices and speeding tickets among the biggest issues.
“But not all towns and cities are the same and many local authorities do their best to ensure drivers aren’t treated like second-class citizens,” he added.
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is it good to be pro car ?
i mean the environment is dying man come on!
all those towns are new towns, modern towns with concrete and roads every where, personally i think they are all montorous and prefer pedestrianised medieval towns like Ludlow which might not be car friendly but IS PEOPLE friendly which is why its nicer than telford
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Shame about the roads……
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some really top towns there then
wow what an accolade!!
meanwhile loverly shrewsbury is Cycle town – a much more impressive accolade
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mrsP@1 > Don’t fret, Telford and Wrekin are doing their best to lose the acclaim.
Pot holes, pointless road markings, pot holes, traffic hold-ups, pot holes, illogically-phased traffic lights, pot holes, minimizing line of sight at junctions, pot holes, effectively turning dual carriageways into single lane roads, pot holes, maintenance money to be spent instead on average speed cameras to slow down the main through route and pot holes – these are all the type of thing that brings pride to any council official tasked with making life difficult for the motorist.
Don’t you worry, they’ll have us all driving ox and cart or horses before long. That should clean the environment up and stimulate industrial growth to pull us out of the recession.
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Shame about many of the drivers.
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Like Rob said – shame the roads have pot holes in. Not forgetting the pointless reductions in speed limits everywhere
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far from an achievement
the car has made telford a congested dirty concrete ugly place
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Telford was car friendly once upon a time. You used to be able to drive at the national speed limit for dual carriageways on the Eastern Primary, which used to be a dual carriageway until it was deemed that it’s “safer” for a queue of frustrated motorists to build up behind a 40mph lorry, with nowhere to overtake, on the new single lane sections.
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ms P,
Even Rushbury, Much Wenlock, All Stretton, Great Bolas etc have roads and concrete. Presumably you would champion all towns and villages to have tracks strewn with horse excreta, and homes built of wattle & daub.
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ms P,
Clearly another comment from someone who has only ever visited Telford Shopping Centre and thinks they’ve seen the whole of Telford…
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telford is car friendly because you need a car to get anywhere with it bein laid out so far apart
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Telford, St Helens, Southend, Sunderland, Belfast, Milton Keynes, Luton, West Bromwich, Dudley and Sunderland are the motor-friendliest places.
Would residents of these towns say that car-friendliness is the most important factor in their quality of life?
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They did’nt try going from Hadley to Trench rd via pooly’s island then!!
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Blimey! I come from the gridlocked city of Bristol, which has been voted Britain’s Cycling City by some strange mistake. Just how petrol soaked must you be to be top car city? You should hang your heads in shame.
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all modern towns are ugly
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Huw,
No. It’s not the most important factor in my, or my wife’s, quality of life living in Telford.
Being a short distance from countryside walks that offer tranquility and a variety of flora and fauna is. A billy-bonus is the availability of free country-wine making ingredients no more than 5 minutes walk from chez winja, such as elder, damson, sloe, and cherry harvests.
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all those cities have one thing in common
you wouldnt want to live there
so is car friendly a good thing ?
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.. is this award equating to..
‘most easy to drive straight past and avoid’?
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Telford still has only limited traffic congestion (despite the best efforts of our local council to manufacture it) The housing here is good, if not excellent, in many parts, and there is much greenery and countryside both within the town and around it within easy reach – I’ve never seen a town with so many trees for example.
I think it’s fascinating that people from elsewhere in the county and beyond, who’ve clearly never been anywhere but the town Centre (and not even apparently strayed into the adjacent Town Park) are so willing to put Telford down, based upon the nonsense and prejudice often printed about it by this newspaper.
Don’t believe what you read – take a proper look for yourself and make up your own minds!
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Well, well – the lunatics in the asylum of Telford & Wrekin council have once again failed!!
They have set out to ruin Telford as a car friendly town and despite their best efforts and millions of pounds of public money they have failed.
Give it up boys – you just can’t do it – accept it and remove all your silly traffic lights and pointless congestion creating systems and take us back to what to Telford was designed for – THE CAR
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As a proud Telfordian I will always defend Telford when someone levels an unfair critcism however I find myself completly unable to defend the “town centre”. It is surely the best example of how not to plan a town around. The sheer amount of space given over to the car at the expense of people is its key failing. Vast surface car parks, wide roads, un-useable highway verges and big roundabouts should be replaced by proper streets with buildings lining them like in real towns. I would happily sacrifice the car love for a decent town centre. Should that happen then the “ugly concrete mess” argument against Telford would have a counter argument.
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As an experienced driver you’ll know all about the roads won’t you rob telford
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every time i visit shrewsbury i go in a car because its not safe to walk the streets in that dump.
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Actually, as a Telford resident, even I agree that the Town Centre is a cheerless abomination. And the roads – for the most part – are a paragon of the clueless planner’s art. We’re lucky, as Shropshire dwellers, that our county has some fantastic (and little known) roads that reward “enthusiastic” driving!
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