Engagement at the Henderson Hall. One time TI Member, Alex, listens carefully

Here we see ‘Barry from Brecon’ enjoying the bike cleaning experience

Talybont on Usk is a popular honeypot village between Crickhowell and Brecon. It is a centre for walking and mountain biking, it has three pubs, a thriving community shop, a narrow through road and a big parking problem.

In 2011 Transport Initiatives were commissioned to investigate ways of relieving the parking problems. Essentially people would drive to the village, park, go mountain biking, return, put the bike back on the car and leave, having blocked the road or locals’ parking spots during the day and not contributed anything to the local economy.

The work involved

• Surveying visitors
• An open consultation meeting with residents
• Conversations with businesses, the emergency services including mountain rescue, and the bus company
• Searching for additional parking places, checking ownership and feasibility

The issue with looking for new parking areas and forcing visitors to park there by means of a

residents’ parking scheme or similar is that it “solves” the parking problem but doesn’t help the shop or the pubs. Indeed, it could prevent legitimate visitors parking outside them.

Our basic recommendation was that the village should exploit their village hall and car park which was often unused during the day and try to provide something the visitors would appreciate as well as providing parking.

From our work the village developed the hall into a bike hub. The hall now has a new, direct and more obvious pedestrian entrance, showers and an eco-friendly bike wash using rainwater and enzymes rather than detergent.

It can sometimes take years for our work to be developed into a finished project particularly if the purpose of our report is to attract funding. So on revisiting the village six years later we were pleased to see a quality solution to what was originally seen as an impossible problem.

And theres’s more…

Another project about parking in the Brecon Beacons dealt with the Watersfalls Area, and another village project looked at Longwick in Buckinghamshire