Latest Brighton & Hove News: In Brief
PARKING TICKETS RAKE IN £18M EARNING COUNCIL A £9M PROFIT
Seven thousand extra parking tickets were issued in the year to the end of March, taking the annual total to 116,000. The rise comes after the number of tickets issued fell for six years running. But 36,700 tickets were the subject of an appeal or challenge.
Madeira Drive was the street where the most tickets were issued – just over 4,000 – netting the council almost £100,000, the council said in its annual parking report. This was more than twice the number issued in the next most lucrative street, Wilbury Road in Hove. Overall income rose to just over £18 million from £16.75 million while costs fell £680,000 to £8.5 million from about £9.18 million. This left the council with a surplus – or profit – of £9.5 million, up from £7.5 million in 2010-11.
According to the report, there was an average of 70 parking wardens and some 925 people were on the waiting list for a resident’s permit. Only three zones had waiting lists – North Central, South Central and Brunswick.
Some £4.3 million was set aside to fund improvements to four of Brighton and Hove City Council’s 14 car parks, including Regency Square and Trafalgar Street. Two staff monitor the bus lane cameras and issued 9,311 tickets in the past year, up from 7,964, while the number of appeals fell from 75 to 58.
BIENNIAL PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL RETURNS TO BRIGHTON AT WEEKEND
Britain’s biggest curated photography festival starts in Brighton on Saturday 6 October with tens of thousands of visitors expected to attend dozens of exhibitions and other events. The Brighton Photo Biennial 2012 (BPB12) will be curated by Celia Davies, the head of programme at local photography agency Photoworks, and programme curator Ben Burbridge.
The Brighton Photo Biennial, which runs until Sunday 4 November, attracted 60,000 visitors when it was last held in 2010. This year’s event, the fifth biennial, will showcase the work of international and emerging photographers and artists.
This year’s theme is Agents of Change: Photography and The Politics of Space, focusing on how space is constructed, controlled and contested – and how photography is implicated in these processes. It aims to provide a critical space to think about relationships between the political occupation of physical sites and the production and dissemination of images.
All exhibitions and installations are free. Some workshops, screenings and Q&A sessions have ticket prices attached.
SPORT SCIENTISTS OFFER HELP WITH TRAINING FOR BRIGHTON MARATHON
People taking part in next year’s Brighton Marathon are being offered a chance to improve their time. Brighton University researchers in the Marathon Support Unit (MSU) want to test their assessment programme and enable students to help so that they can gain practical experience. Sport scientist Alex Bliss said: “The assessment programme gives marathon runners a better understanding of the physiological processes and markers that constitute fitness, allowing them to train more intelligently as well as providing a sensible and realistic target finish time.”
He said the MSU offers a consultation on participants’ current training to help identify areas for improvement and laboratory-based fitness assessments which create precise data to help them improve.
One runner, Dave Rogers, used the MSU last year and went on to beat his personal best by 15 minutes at the Brighton Marathon. He said: “I found it very useful. It gave me the science behind the theory and provided me with a focus.”
The MSU predicted within two minutes the finishing time for another Brighton Marathon runner, Tom Morris. He said: “The MSU was a thorough education in how to train effectively using concrete reference points.”
The MSU will hold an open day on Saturday 20 October. Visit www.brighton.ac.uk/marathonsupport
