Bath golfers outraged that loss-making course could be turned into cycling centre

I'm not a golfer. And I'm not particularly in favour of keeping the golf course. I'm just against the misuse and abuse of figures and statistics.

If they'd said it was currently having to be subsidised to the tune of £8 per round played I'd be fine with that. But 'every round costs the taxpayer £8' just isn't true.

Seems a bit of a pedantic objection, to me.  The taxpayer is in effect paying £8 towards each round currently played.  Personally I'd rather they used that to subsidise something other than golf.

  But maybe the kind of people who play golf have more political clout than those (younger?) people who prefer some other kind of physical activity.

I wouldnt want to see this or any council run facility closed purely because we felt the politics of it only favoured in our view the rich and elitist, its perfectly reasonable for a council to make all aspects of sport more accessible to everyone in this way, if it gets old retired people out walking just a few miles every week,having that social contact with each other, its overall a good thing.

and those people arent going to replace their golf with hopping on MTBs,so be mindful of that impact.

where I question the councils decision to support this place,and it would be the same were it an all singing/dancing cycle park, is the size of the subsidy to keep it going, if the place is losing so much money, you have to question if its really financially viable, and that aspect rather than whether I like golf or not, or whether Id prefer something completely different should be the only deciding factor.

Awavey wrote:

I wouldnt want to see this or any council run facility closed purely because we felt the politics of it only favoured in our view the rich and elitist, ...

Minor point, but those rich and elitist are often more than happy to close council run facilities which only help the poor ... It only encourages them, allegedly.

and that may well be the case, no one said the human race was perfect, I just think we are skirting abit close to some classical English class system snobbery here on golf because of our preconceptions about it, and just because we are mostly pro cycling in our outlook, so of course a bike park looks a fantastic idea to us vs some rubbish golf course.

It's a question of how it frames the issue, though. For instance, the council could choose to try to increase the number of people playing (by advertising, running promotions, etc.). If 'every round costs the taxpayer £8', then on the face of it that would appear to be a foolish thing to do - each time you encourage someone to play when they wouldn't have before is going to end up costing you even more money (on top of what the promotion costs you). In reality though, it's likely that most of the fees from each person that walks through the door go towards reducing the amount of the subsidy. In fact, if you managed to encourage people to turn out by offering them free rounds it's unlikely to much increase the cost base, and so the subsidy per round played would go down, and maybe approach something more justifiable.

Croquet does not have pitches ! They are lawns or courts.

Preston council turned an old running track into Preston Pirates BMX track. It used to regularly get taken over by the Pikeys who would stay for a while so they could dump their shit there whilst raising the crime rate around Preston, then move on. It has become very popular now, some riders have been targetted by British Cycling for the next Olympics. It does get used regularly, and appears very popular. 

Whatever your experiences and concerns, I'm surprised to see racist terms being used in polite conversation by civilised people