SIR,- Friday 22 November marked four years since the previous government’s consultation on pavement parking in England closed. Cars parked on, and sometimes hogging the whole pavement, will be a familiar sight to many. Â
Pavement parking is dangerous especially for families with young children, people with sight loss and disabled people. A recent poll found that 87 per cent of parents have had to walk in the road because of a vehicle blocking the pavement. It damages pavement surfaces too.Â
Living Streets has been campaigning on this issue for over 50 years and it’s high time we saw an end to the problem. Pavement parking has been banned (with exemptions) in London since the 1970s. Scotland adopted a similar approach to London which came into force earlier this year. The Welsh Government has indicated they will take action on pavement parking – but England is way behind.
I hope your readers will join Living Streets and supporters like me, in urging the new Government to deal with the troubling legacy of pavement parking once and for all. Everyone will be the better for it.Â
Yours faithfully,
Ian Bentley,
Town Street,
Farsley, LS28 5HX
Parking on the pavement in Farsley is unavoidable. Our residential streets are simply too narrow for cars to park fully on the road. Buses, delivery trucks and the bin lorry already struggle as it is with parked cars making the roads narrow. The real issue that needs solving is cars getting bigger and wider which is making the problem worse as it forces drivers to park even further onto the pavement in order to leave enough room on the road for large vehicles to pass.
Just park the car elsewhere. If you need a car close by you can apply for a disabled blue badge and ask the council for a disabled parking bay to be put in.
Obviously Stephen is not a car driver or he wouldn’t have come up with such a simplistic answer. You could use the argument that if you want to go to the beach for the day then move to the coast. On a more serious note nearly all new housing developments being built in the last twenty years are more are not built with adequate infrastructure, estates with predominantly four bedroom detached homes which realistically could be expected to have two cars don’t have the capacity at the property or width in the roads to cope with this amount of vehicles. Building wider roads in these developments would be a good idea but unfortunately wider roads on any site means fewer houses which then means fewer profits, which obviously the house builders would never agree to.
Also in answer to Stephen, you may find some of these vehicles that you see parked maybe overspill from the new estates and the owners are actually parking and walking as you suggested.
An interesting discussion and some good points made. Like most people I’m a driver and a pedestrian (and a cyclist) and often my needs feel in conflict with each other! However the fact is there are far too many vehicles on the road and the cost in terms of the infrastructure needed to support them, road deaths and injuries, our general health, environment and community is massive. As a sometimes visitor to Basel in Switzerland my return to Leeds continues to shock as I experience the sheer volume of traffic, fumes and noise. Of course Leeds is a far bigger city, but whilst Basel also has its problems, the whole experience is different – generally quieter streets, far fewer grinding traffic jams and an integrated and frequent public transit system that makes it such a pleasant place to be. I absolutely understand that we need convenient transport, especially for work, but it sometimes feels that we have built our society around the car (still far to many estates are built without considering the immediate amenities any decent locality requires). This then requires an ever-expanding infrastructure to support it which results in precisely the problem of pavement parking that Stephen raises in his letter and all the associated issues that follow. Rather than the usual bun fight these discussions can sometimes generate maybe we could come together more, really look at the wider impact our car-orientated culture has on all of us, and begin to push for more radical solutions to how we ‘get around’ that safeguard us and our environment.