What one thing can either we do or Sheffield City Council do to make life generally better for us all. I am just looking for general ideas from you.

It does not matter how silly the ideas are I just want to know what we need done to make us just a little bit happier or more content.

Mine would be - more litter collecting around the city roads.

Simple yet effective. :wink:

Put a huge dome over the city centre to encourage a warm dry cosmopolitan feel to the place.

Expensive but nice!

With good air conditioning it should cut out most of the asthma in the city too

I am not sure. In general I love living in Sheffield but these are my thoughts.

I would be happier if being politically correct was a punishable offence.

If forest management and conservation meant not planting flippin daffodils in the middle of a wild environment and destroying in the process of conserving.

If the local council took lessons in common sense.

Moon Maiden

Hippy

Or is that a crime against policitcally correct laws :D

The Council could shut down the Bernard Road incinerator and the toxic waste dump at Shirecliffe/Parkwood, and implement a proper recycling policy...the blue bin paper recycling is a start, but I was hoping for doorstep recycling of plastics and tin cans

They could clean the place up a bit. In particular they should remove all those tacky posters that nightclubs and the like fasten to lamp-posts. They should also have more litter-pickers, and make sure businesses keep their premises presentable.

They could also try mending the roads!

Move it a 1000 miles to the south :twisted:

I agree about the litter in Sheffield, it's a nightmare and really gets me down every day. I can't believe that a. so many scum drop the stuff b. so many people seem happy to live with it blown all over their front lawns or gathered on street corners by their houses that would take no more than 20 minutes to clean up.
The litter problem is so gross it would need a huge hike in council tax or cuts in other services for the council to deal with it, meanwhile there a numerous single or dinky households with half-empty wheelie bins every week, plenty of space in them for a few crisp packets.
What it needs is grassroots community involvement which translates as 'people simply picking the sodding stuff up', but folk just go 'eurghh, litter' or 'chuffin'ell that's bloody council's job mate' or 'our trade union brothers will be out of a job if we pick up the litter' (yeah right, as if it's ever going to get picked up otherwise). For God's sake what's so hard about picking up a bit of litter?
This is going to sound really sanctimonious but I have a particular spot along my walk to work that I litter-pick, just a handful a day and there's a bin 50 yards further along to dump it in so it's really no effort. What if everybody did that?

Nice one Baublebug. If more people did their bit we wouldn't see so much rubbish or so many complaints about litter.

I was trying to drum up support from local people to clean up Ruskin Park, you know, the one featured in The Full Monty. A comment from one gentleman left me gobsmacked:

"Never mind the park, what about the rubbish in front of my house?"

I left, shaking my head.

:D

When I went to school and I guess this is the same for all schools, a punishment for being naughty was to pick the rubbish up at the school.

In other words school teachers have drilled it into every kids brain that picking rubbish up is the punishment of doing something bad.

Schools should teach kids that picking rubbish up is not a punishment.

Change the council. They are the one thing that is holding this city back ten years behind the likes of Nottingham, Leeds and Manchester. Sheffield deserves a whole lot better..............or does it? If we're still only just emerging out of the doldrums then maybe we don't deserve better.

Sheffield Council are going to fine people £50 who drop litter from now on. Check it our on:
http://www.sheffieldtoday.net/ViewArticle.aspx?SectionID=58&ArticleID=443437

Is it really that bad here?

I've just moved here from the south and I like Shef a lot. So, it might not be as flash and as affluent as some places, but it's got soul - and that's more important than having a Harvey Nicks and 5 starbucks :x .

A bit more commerce & money would be nice, but Sheffielders seem to have loads of energy & balls & stuff. I reckon that if Sheffield had more of an entrepreneural climate then exciting stuff could happen.

it's not that we don't like living here, it's just the huge problem of the 'them and us' with the council. They **** us off and in someways drag us down cos of the huge debt they're carting around with them. It seems to stop them looking beyond spending money to why it's being spent, and instead begrudge every little bit of it that needs to be spent on us, the people who live here.
I commented there should be more grass around the winter and peace gardens, at the time you couldn't see any green cos so many people had flocked to sit on it, the reply, from a councillor was'we don't ant andy more grss, bla bla, do you know how much it costs to maintain??' well I do now and i for one think the peace gardens with there fountains, planyts, lights grass and security guards is worth £250 a week, yuo may not but it s a whole lot better than the 'easy care' concrete that a lot of city centers have.
Litter.....I have winged about this all over this forum, it's really, really bad in sheffield. Saw a guy with a spikey stick attempting to clean some up, very slowly mind. How the hell are they going to fine peope anyway? Often its young kids dropping it, drivers lobbing it from car windows and students at takeaways at 3 in the morning, who's going to catch them ?? Oooh, the litter police, we need more bins, more frequently emptied, more respect of where we live, less emmbarrasment to be seen to actually pick up someone elses litter and maybe two minutes a day in infant classes telling children you take your rubbish home if there's no bin!
What Sheffield needs is one major lottery win and a totally new council, maybe of Forum members!!

Litter is terrible in Sheffield. As has been said it will take a number of things to fix it. More litter pickers, in America they use prisoners to clean streets and highways i think we should. But there is a drastic shortage of bins in Sheffield! Where i live (on Leadmill street) there are no bins at all, i couldn't tell you where the nearest on to me is. But even with bins the social aspect needs to be addressed, people need to take responsibility for their actions.

The other thing about Sheffield is the roads. The road planning is very bad. Right from the ground up, starting at traffic light timings. I am not sure when they were last looked at but they are terrible. It seem Sheffield has been spending all it's time and efforts on gimmicks (priority lanes etc) and not addressing the basics.

Also what is it with the bad drivers in Sheffield? I can't think of another city i have been to where people are so bad at driving!

Apart from that i really like Sheffield, as somebody said before it has has character.

Originally posted by "maxt"

I was trying to drum up support from local people to clean up Ruskin Park, you know, the one featured in The Full Monty.

That's my local park too, and it's a disgrace. When I first moved up here 5 years ago, there was a nice childrens playground there, now there's virtually no play equipment left - it's all been vandalised, and none of it has been replaced.

There's broken glass everywhere. It's not safe for my children to play there any more.

I went to a meeting about the park last year, when the council transferred it to the parks department, and said to the rangers that something must be done about the graffiti, vandalism and litter. Otherwise it just breeds more of the same.

There is a group called Friends of Ruskin Park of which I am a member. Our web site is: http://www.ruskinpark.org.uk/

I'm sorry to hear you find the park a disgrace as we put in a lot of work keeping it clean. We are currently looking for lottery funding to replace the play equipment, resurface the hard court, lay drainage and upgrade the football pitch. If you want to help feel free to contact us.

Even a little help like taking a carrier bag with you to put glass in would help. Other things like telling off dog owners for allowing their dogs to foul and reporting motorcyclists who use the park to the police would also be welcome.

We're only a few and we can't be there all the time, the local residents could help.

:D :D

I moved to Sheffield permanently, after studying here for 4 years, as soon as I could find a job here (despite Sheffields prominence of scale (4th/5th biggest city depending on who you listen to) the IT industry isn't inclined to locate here).
I used to live in Birmingham and it amazes me that people are complaing here about the amount of litter. Compared to "brum" all the areas of Sheffield I've been to and lived in are exceptionally clean, given the size of the city.
The fact that most streets tend to have wheely-bins on them means that you don't have to carry your litter until you find a public bin, or just throw it on the floor. Simply chuck it in the nearest wheely-bin.

BTW: Birmingham doesn't have the wheely bin system. People just put there bin bags on their drives/pavement on collection day.

To my mind Sheffield has a good mix of "big city" scale combined with "town-sized" problems.

O

How to make Sheffield better? Stop whinging. I'm not from Sheffield and have lived in other cities and they don't come up to Sheffield. It's a friendly city full of trees and parks and great sports facilities, shops. Why do Sheffielders allow other cities to put Sheffield down? A while ago Glasgow Council started a slogan Glasgow s miles better. It was a great logo. It got Glaswegians feeling proud about themselves and then they went on to be the European City of Culture. Stop putting the city down. Councils are only as good as the people who put them there. Don't blame them for everything.

Sheffield Council are going to fine people £50 who drop litter from now on. Check it our on:
http://www.sheffieldtoday.net/ViewArticle.aspx?SectionID=58&ArticleID=443437
They tried that in Leicester and were quite successful....until someone asked them to hang around outside city center clubs and pubs and chippys at chucking out time to catch the people dropping their fast food wrappers.
They tried it and if I remember rightly, one was stabbed in the neck and two others were beaten to a pulp. The argument now from people who get caught dropping litter is `Why are you nicking me when theres a ton of crap left over from last night all over the street?`

How to make Sheffield better? Stop whinging. I'm not from Sheffield and have lived in other cities and they don't come up to Sheffield. It's a friendly city full of trees and parks and great sports facilities, shops. Why do Sheffielders allow other cities to put Sheffield down? A while ago Glasgow Council started a slogan Glasgow s miles better. It was a great logo. It got Glaswegians feeling proud about themselves and then they went on to be the European City of Culture. Stop putting the city down. Councils are only as good as the people who put them there. Don't blame them for everything.
Good idea. Maybe similar lines like "Sheffield - North's friendliest city" :D
Then again, that will annoy the other cities around Sheffield.
Even though we're a friendly city, we moan too much. lol. Chav this, chav that, why don't u get a job instead of begging blah blah blah.

Why should we worry about offending other cities. They don't care about sounding off about Sheffield.

Sheffield Council are going to fine people £50 who drop litter from now on. Check it our on:
http://www.sheffieldtoday.net/ViewArticle.aspx?SectionID=58&ArticleID=443437

The other day I was cycling behind a white van and saw the driver drop some litter out of the window. As the van and I were approaching a red traffic light, I picked up the litter, cycled alongside the van and handed it back to the driver. Oh, and it wasn't a plain white van. It had "Sheffield City Council" on the side.

chuck all the sheffielders out and bring nicer, cleaner people in :hihi: :hihi: