Walking to park outside my house!
I’ve shared my frustrations about the road I live in before Congestion but it has got worse and is going to cost me money!
Bristol is having a major clamp down on parking. Many residential areas now have permit parking. As a resident you might think that is good but many of the restrictions are during the day when residents are at work! Apparently it is all part of a strategy to stop commuters (yes we are using that sort of language now!) parking to go to work in the centre of the City where there is virtually no parking at all.
For these areas, visiting contractors can’t park to give quotes or do work which means business is suffering. Back to my road. We don’t have resident’s permits and during the day it is not too difficult to find a space to park in. However, once you get to 5pm forget it! If we are later than that coming home, we cannot park outside the house and are now having to walk much further to find somewhere.
Until recently, this was due to the pub up the road showing the champions league football matches. This meant that around 11.30pm you could go and reclaim your car and move it back to the house. Now things have changed.
Apparently, because of restrictions in other roads, people are using ours to park then walking back to their homes. This means no space in the evening but by 7.30am many have gone. To have this situation occasionally is OK but when it is constant we are finding ourselves wondering where we will park when we are coming back to the house.
We have decided to look into two possible solutions. One is to move house! Now this is fine by me as although I love the house I hate the road and what it has become. Problem with this solution is there are very few houses for sale around us (or even in the city) with parking.
The other answer would be to create a drive at the front of the house. We have the space, just, but I really don’t want to look out of the front window and look straight at the car. However, that may be the way to go but it will cost around £2000!
So I am not happy that despite paying council tax for many years I cannot guarantee being able to park outside my house unless I pay up!
What are the parking arrangements where you live? Do you have a long walk to get to your car?
What a terrible situation for you, im lucky in that we have a drive from the road to our house which lays back a bit but we do get others parking on it as its the only drive of all the 6 houses in our block which can be annoying when you want to go out. I guess the streets werent designed years ago with the idea of so many cars being owned. Bad planning and i hope you find a solution soon.
Gill
We have our own car park, so I am not directly affected. There has been residents’ parking here for some years. At first it was difficult, but it seems to have settled down, and I haven’t heard anyone complain for a while. We have bays where people can park for up to two hours during the day. In some bays closest to the main road there is a parking charge. It has certainly cut the number of people driving in from the Home Counties to this area and then taking public transport, so the competition for the spaces has lessened.
One friend who has a very nice car rents a parking space in a communal car park belonging to a block of flats.
I hope in your case it calms down. When measures such as these are introduced they need to be linked with improved public transport. Unfortunately such joined up thinking is seldom evident, andy bloc transport is seldom cheap.
Joined up thinking is much needed & much not available!
I know!
I’m lucky that I have a driveway and can park my car there. Our house is walking distance from the station and years ago there were no parking restrictions. We, therefore, had people parking on the road and leaving their cars there all day. Some used to park so badly that it was very difficult to drive out of our houses. The council then restricted parking so that now one can’t park on the road between 11:00 and 12:00. Neighbours are wonderful so that if we need to we use each other’s driveways between these restricted hours.
Yes! We have the same problem; not such a long walk yet; but don’t have the ‘drive’ option but I will welcome permit only, as we have one car. I get cross with people who have a drive (empty) and many still parked on the road! Including a taxi or two!
This must be really frustrating. If the parking situation is so bad then the £2k you pay for a car port will probably be instantly realised in the value of your property, but that doesn’t make any odds to you until you come to sell. We are very lucky, Croydon as a whole can be tricky for parking as it’s very densely populated and if you go a couple of hundred yards down the road from my house then it’s hard to park as we live a ten minute walk from two different train stations, but outside our house and neighbours’ houses is generally very easy to park – we all have driveways and garages too (one of our neighbours actually puts his car in his garage… how quaint!) We live opposite a big park where people come to walk their dogs so there are often other people’s cars parked outside our house temporarily. I’d very much taken for granted how lucky we are until I was reading of your issues.
I hope you can find a solution that suits. Sorry it’s so frustrating 🙁 I remember when we lived in Oxford we’d have to park many streets away from our house and Tom was the master of parallel parking!
That sounds like a ridiculous situation. I’d tie myself to the County Hall gates!