Another day, another tax.

[cromwell]

More and more people are coming to the same conclusion Aggers. Replace the shops with flats.

[medsec222]

May be centred around an open space with trees and benches etc., coffee bars, restaurants, tables outside, perhaps a few specialist shops. It would make more sense than derelict boarded up shops. It would be nice if our inner city shopping centres could be revitalised.

[Suff]

The only problem being that you would have many more people in the centre of town, which is very hostile to vehicles and no parking, whilst all the shops would be out of town.

You can't have way more accommodation in the towns and cities without the corresponding parking. As town planners do not want the parking, they won't get the people. Not hard to understand.

[Workingman]

A correct observation by Suff.

City living is a popular concept the world over, and it could possibly be made to work in some of our larger villages and county towns. Unfortunately our city centres, the High Street(s), which is where a lot of the "unused" space appears to be, have evolved to be particularly unfriendly as living spaces.

[Suff]

Of course if your car was self driving you could tell it to go and park in the park and ride until you wanted it to pick you up.... Or was that science fiction? Or is that only a decade away? I was wittering on about this at work a couple of months ago. The sheer cost of parking at the train station is high in southern England. They have to leave so early there are no busses and unless you have a partner to drop you off, you just have to eat the cost. However a self driving car could take you to the train station and go home. If it were Electric it could even charge itself up, if needed.

Technology might, just, change the way we view the world again.

But, for now, there is no joined up thinking.

Moving these unused buildings back to accommodation would also have the benefit of driving new, smaller, shops in the local area. For the things people don't want to go to the out of town supermarket for. Somewhere you can walk and get what you want.

When you look at London, where just having a car inside the congestion charge zone creates a "tax", to Edinburgh who are completely opposed to personal vehicles and make it harder and harder to park there; it is hard to imagine a situation where we could revitalise our city centres with people living there.