I love a good parking thread as much as anybody, but as I was reading the one the other day (by the man with the upset wife), it got me thinking.
As we all know, nobody has any more right to use the space on the public road in front of their own house than any other driver of a taxed and insured vehicle does. As we always affirm with one MN accord, if you want your own guaranteed space, you have to buy or rent a house with a drive.
HOWEVER, by having a drive, that then means that nobody else is legally allowed to park in front of it. Therefore, the upshot is that a potential parking space on the public road effectively ends up being reserved exclusively for your household's sole use (apart from by moving traffic passing across it). Added to which, it's an unwritten rule (never challenged AFAIK) that, if there are no yellow lines or white H-marks there, YOU can park across it as you're only potentially blocking yourself/your own household in.
Ergo, you've bagged yourself the legal right to your own exclusively reserved parking space on the public road, just because of the layout of your property and the fact that the building itself is set back sufficiently from the road - whether you park in that space, use it for access or both; or indeed if you don't have a car or any driving visitors and so it remains permanently empty and reserved for your exclusive (non)-use. If you hadn't had a property sized and laid out in such a way to allow off-road parking (and possibly paid a one-off fee to the council to drop the kerb), there would have been another parking space (maybe two) on the road available for anybody and everybody to use - first come, first served.
Is this fair? Is it those of us with drives who are actually the biggest, most selfish CFs of all - all the while congratulating ourselves for being self-sufficient and considerate by not territorially taking up a space on the road like those without drives?!?!
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AIBU?
Parking: thinking logically, are those of us with drives (and who use them) the biggest CFs of all?!
150 replies
WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll · 21/06/2020 02:59
OP posts:
Am I being unreasonable?
339 votes. Final results.
POLL
You are being unreasonable
81%
You are NOT being unreasonable
19%
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