Cardiff: how has regeneration and transport fared almost 30 years after devolution unleashed a wave of energy? First, the good news, and there is plenty. The city centre is looking good, helped by a sensitive pedestrianisation scheme. It has superb historical assets in the castle with its Animal Wall, the market, the glorious arcades full of cafes and little shops and the civic area with excellent museum. At half term the city centre is buzzing. There is plenty of public art, including a snow dog trail providing fun for kids.
There are some good new buildings too. Cardiff Library (BDP 2009) has good proportions and a bright interior. It has a prominent site directly on The Hayes and seemed well-used and liked. The sensitively restored old library houses a lovely if confusingly named ‘Story Museum’ (the story of Cardiff rather than a museum of stories). I’m in two minds about the city-centre Millenium Stadium. It occupies a large block and it is not obvious why Cardiff City needs a separate 33,000 capacity stadium just a mile away. But it adds character to the city, it’s great for fans to have direct public transport and all the city centre facilities. It attracts a lot of people to its tours. And it is just out of the way enough to avoid sterilising too much of the city.
But the cracks are obvious even in the centre. Duke Street is a moat of traffic isolating the castle and as it races along the oddly named ‘Boulevard de Nantes’, and walking to the even more isolated museum involves instant traffic death or a grotty subway. The architecture and contents are worth it. The subway, not the death from traffic.
Cardiff Bay was the big regeneration hope. The Senate and millennium centre are great buildings. The Norwegian Church adds character but the rest of the bay is a disappointment. Mermaids Quay is lowest common denominator commercial development. Nice for a stroll, great if you like chain eatieries, but with very little character. Behind you are the grand old surviving commercial buildings. But many are vacant, some derelict and the surroundings are poor, enveloped in a swirl of traffic and fumes. This is the big opportunity area in Cardiff. Great buildings, crying out for new uses, for decent architects, for urban planning, for a decent environment to walk or cycle, for a bit of the regeneration cash that has been spent elsewhere on roads and faceless apartment blocks.
A walk around the bay reveals huge areas of derelict land waiting for development and the views are dispiriting. St David's Hotel looks awful and none of the other development seems to relate to the water or give it a decent skyline. There are a lot of apartments but little soul.
We walk round to Penarth, a pleasant but run-down seaside area and then need to get back to the city centre. The 89B took a mind and bum numbing 40 minutes to cover the four miles but we did get a lovely look at a lot of housing estates and out of town supermarkets. The bus company is the delightfully named NAT ‘New Adventure Travel’. They sure do make bus journeys adventurous. Which brings us to transport. Outside the pedestrianised city centre, traffic is supreme, the city is a mess of roads, flyovers and car parking that are hard to navigate on bike or foot. It is made clear that pedestrians and cyclists are very much second-class citizens and only tolerated because you are too poor to be in a vehicle.
A note to highway engineers – if you put up a ‘cyclist dismount’ sign, then you have designed something that is not fit for purpose. You wouldn’t expect to see a ‘motorist get out of your car and push’ sign, would you? Second note: Everywhere, everywhere are miles of pedestrian barriers. In doing so they make crossings feel longer, introducing psychological barriers, with most impact on the least mobile, and encouraging some others to make dangerous crossings to get around them. These barriers don’t just make it harder to cross the road, they sever communities and decrease opportunities for healthy transport.
Residential areas are dominated by roads and parking too. Despite the amount of tarmac, car dependency means all-day congestion which makes journeys on the limited, tortuous and confusing bus network slow and unpredictable. Multiple operators and fares makes things worse. Cardiff bus charges odd fares (£1.80?) but doesn’t give change.
The one-mile journey from Bay to City is typical. It should be easy. There is a train, but the station is marooned inland next to a traffic island, and trains go to Queen St, not the more convenient Central. There appear to be four bus routes by three (?) operators, but there are no bus maps, timetables are incoherent and fares appear random. Walking is unpleasant and cycling suicidal.
What should be done? Cardiff should be easy. Distances within the city are relatively small and much of the urban area is compact. Cardiff Bus is one of the few municipal bus operators left. It has an extensive but run-down suburban train network which should be converted to trams tomorrow.
First a change in mindset. It is the movement of people, goods and ideas that is important, not the free flow of traffic. Public transport, walking and cycling are very good at shorter distance movement, and they free up a lot of urban land for development. They create better conditions for living, working and investment. A really high-quality walking and cycling route from the Bay through the middle of the city centre and up to the University would be a good start. We need to redesign a few roads for people rather than traffic, and get the scrap metal merchants in for the railings.
Then there is the curious train shuttle, underused and of limited transport value. The obvious solution is to convert to a tram and extend it to the waterfront in the south and through the town centre (probably along St Marys Street) and out to the north. I know trams are expensive and hard to build in Britain, but this is a capital city we are talking about, not Stockport.
And then there is planning. It seems so unfashionable in Britain to link land-use and transport planning, but it can be done. Take a trip to Germany. Higher density near tram and train stations, but we know all that. Why can’t Cardiff do it?
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