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The real shame about the County Council’s loss of parking revenue is that OUR county will not reap the potential benefit.

It is a perfectly reasonable debate as to whether free parking increases companies’ business in affected areas – history shows that it does. But this does not feed through into an increase in rates receipts by the local authorities taking the reduction on parking meter income. Rather it goes straight to Whitehall for redistribution around the country, holding down council taxes elswhere!

Environmental concerns are also overstated. Most evenings many metered parking spaces are empty – the primary exception being St Giles itself. Check out Mansfield Road, Museum Road, Merton Street, Wellington Square, Great Clarendon Street and others. But I also know that to avoid meters people drive further, for example in Jericho’s residential streets, checking the few free non-residents’ spaces first.

Now that services like the Barton to Kidlington bus are gone, even getting from parts of east Oxford to Jericho, let alone from out of town, is a sufficiently awkward journey by bus as to be offputting, especially if you’re going to be late returning in the evening.

...so says Shirley Williams on Question Time. Nice phrase. Were I a truly principled Prime Minister I would thank the likes of Iris Robinson for her regards and tell her to go screw herself and take her vote with her. And if her husband stands by everything his wife says, he should go diddle himself with his voting lobby too. A real "progressive alliance" Gordo - well done!

Yesterday in my piece about the Policy Exchange think tank's suggestion that Oxford and Cambridge ought to be allowed to expand to as many as a million homes I mentioned the work "Car Free Cities" by J H Crawford which I came across a decade ago when looking into Oxford's last Local Plan. In it he postulates a city of a million people with a topology and transport system that means that any two addresses anywhere in the city would be no more than 35 minutes apart by foot and rapid transit system.

The city is made up of many districts of about 12,000 population like strings of beads along one of three overlapping rapid transport loops. Every home is less than five minutes walk from open countryside. And whilst the densities within the districts are amongst the highest on earth (similar to Seoul, for example, although nothing is more than three stories in the reference designs) only 20% of the total 100 sq mile (10 by 10) area is developed at all, leaving all the areas between the beads and strings as open countryside or managed parkland or whatever. Overall then the density is not a lot greater than Oxford's current density and less than the average of Greater London as a whole.

So, for a bit of fun, I superimposed Crawford's one million population city topology onto the ten by ten mile square centered on the current centre of Oxford. Now sure, a million population is only probably about a third of the million households the Policy Exchange report was ultimately suggesting, but if anyone says to you that it would simply be impossible to imagine a million people in the area between Wheatley and Eynsham, Littlemore and Kidlington, you can say you have seen how, and with no traffic and only 20% of the land developed to boot! It would currently take me over an hour to get from the end of one of these loops to about a third of the way out the adjacent one, incidentally.

Now nobody is suggesting that we do this, least of all me. I'm just demonstrating that it would be possible, indeed whilst making more of the green belt actually because all the space would be accessible in minutes rather than in half an hour in the car, it would reach right into everyone's neighbourhood - with open country no more than 400m from every front door. Fitting such principles into existing cities is of course much more difficult than an academic sitting at a drawing board with a blank sheet of paper. They need not be loops for example but twelve strings with termini at the end of each. It would increase average journey times but not the overall maximum of 35 minutes door to door and could be fitted in along existing radial roads as a series of villages.

Incidentally, the picture on the right here shows some of the housing in the ward with the highest density in England, at least that I can find - a "middle level super output area" either side of the Cromwell Rd in Kensington & Chelsea.  I notice from Net House Prices that there have been 267 £1m plus residential property transactions in the last eight years in this post code area.  This is getting pretty close to the densities that would be required in a city such as that in Crawford's book.  It's hardly slum clearance stuff is it!

Not a lot of people know this, such is the popular perception of the city of Kingston upon Hull that I rarely even admit it to myself, but Haltemprice and Howden is my place of birth. To be more precise, Woodgates Nursing Home, North Ferriby. At the time my folks lived in Woodlands Drive, Anlaby and my dad worked for Northern Foods.

We returned to the area when I was eight and lived in West End, South Cave for a year or so. I went to Hymers, dad worked as Finance Director at Moore's of Hull (then an Opel and Colt main dealer), with a chap who would become a life-long friend, Ben Moore. I remember the school bus from Elloughton into town, getting a taste of silage when on a school trip to Bishop Burton Agricultural College, the (much tastier) Stroganoff at the Cave Castle Restaurant, the horses in the field behind the house (I see it's been developed now for housing from Google Earth), standing in a crowd around Hull Parish Church to see the queen on her Silver Jubilee tour of Britain (and the beacon on the hill up behind South Cave come to think of it that was lit on Jubilee day tiself) and discovering snails of all things down the lane leading to the A63 (we were allowed to play near the dual carriageway in them days without being taken into care!).

Ah! The A63. Blessed road, for it leads you away from Hull! The landmarks along the way - Howden Abbey, the high bridge over the Humber before Goole, Drax power station are all signs that you are approaching civilisation!

And then, inexorably it seems, it draws you back too, and so, with me just a year or so into a boarding school career, my folks moved back to Hull, and I find the street we lived in there, Maplewood Avenue - one of the worst hit in last years flooding I believe - is more or less the very easterly most road in the Haltemprice and Howden constituency. I remember big rows between my mother and father during school holidays. I remember finally uncovering the fact I had suspected for some time - that Santa Claus was actually my mother with a bag of Boots cotton wool stuck to her chin. But dad was back at Moore's meeting the new wife, so I remember divorce. And depression. I remember getting caught smoking by my mum the first time. I remember trying to make lager from a Boots kit. And her wondering why she had found a condom in my coat pocket when she washed it!

My sister did most of her secondary schooling at Willerby, and they went to church at St Luke's in Willerby. I learned to swim at the Haltemprice Leisure Centre. I discovered a friend at school 200 miles away (and not a mile too many!) who at the time lived in Malton so we shared most of our train journeys to and from school as far as York. When I got back in touch with him after school, my father was living in Driffield and his in Cottingham, so I've spent a good few nights out in Cottingham on Sam Smiths and Hull Brewery Co beers.

So actually, a pretty significant place for so much of my formative life. But the days when a boy from Hull had to deny his city and support Leeds if he wanted to support a top flight football team are over. I still managed to feel a little glow of pride on hearing that Hull City FC had made it into the premiership!