Parking: thinking logically, are those of us with drives (and who use them) the biggest CFs of all?!

[WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll]

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?!?!

[EmmaGrundyForPM]

I think in urban areas with a high density of housing you're right. I also think that a one house - one car policy ought to apply in urban areas but there would be a huge outcry if that was the case!

In rural areas it's different. I live in a lane where no one parks on the road as it's not wide enough. But everyone has their own drive with space for multiple cars. There are other bits of the village where houses don't have drives but there is still loads of on-road parking available.

[walksen]

This is something the coincil take into account when dropping the curve.

Having a drive can be better as obviously less people will be parking on the pavement road making life easier for pedestrians and emergency services.

It might be that your drive can accomodate multiple cars even if there would only space for one car to park on the road.

[Finfintytint]

You are right OP. In densely populated areas it will limit parking for everyone else.
I live in a village where the private road backing on to my house is used as a cut through to avoid a tricky junction. Neighbours and I park on the road rather than driveways to create a chicane to slow down the numpties speeding through.

[DebbieFiderer]

In the main you are right, but in some cases the drives create extra parking. The way the drives are laid out for me and my neighbours, up to about 12 cars can be accommodated where only one curbside space would be available.

[Mummyoflittledragon]

YABU
A lot of households have more than one car. A dropped kerb takes up less space than 2 parallel parked vehicles. Victorian terraced houses tend to be too close to the road but if they were not, it would make sense to park perpendicularly to the property, as often is with modern houses. For this reason, I think more parking is created by the use of driveways.

[BoomBoomsCousin]

There is something to the argument, but it only works if you assume that people should be able to store their cars on the street.

We subsidise car ownership to a huge extent by allowing on-street parking at all. The entitlement to street park that is embedded in our culture has made streets far less useable by others, more so than driveways do. So there is another argument that street parkers (whether they park right outside their own home or not) are the CF.

[BlusteryLake]

You could look at it like this. The person who owns the house is probably the most likely to park in the space outside their house. The driveway simply moves that space up towards their house. As an advantageous by product, it creates extra space as well, because a driveway can often accommodate more than the one parking space it takes by the dropped curb.

[milkshake20]

The entry to my drive is one car wide but we can park two cars on it. We live in a rural village and if there were no drives I don't think there would physically be enough space for all cars to park on the road. That and parking meant my house cost a lot more than others down the road!

[Bluntness100]

This is totally illogical and I’m surprised anyone agrees with you.

Firstly if you have a drive you park on your own land, not a public street.
Secondly very few people who have drives park on the street blocking it
And if they do they are no worse than anyone without a drive who parks on the street.

As a pp said, the argument only becomes logical if you assume everyone has a right to park on the street, irrelevant of where it is and as such no area should be blocked off by the entrance to a drive.

Which lets face it is the ultimate cf.

[123th]

It's illegal to park on a dropped kerb. So technically you can't park over it - it's got nothing to do with blocking you in. Also parking ON someone's drive is a civil matter. So you're better off doing that

[GinDaddyRedux]

The entrance to people's driveways is often less than the length of a car and can be only just the width of the car with perhaps a bit either side. Councils take this and available street parking into account when granting dropped kerbs, so YABU here I think.

The actual worse thing is when households have multiple cars and park them on a narrow Victorian street etc sometimes taking up 20% or more of the available on street parking.

This is where the lunacy in this country is. People are so addicted to car travel that they would stamp and shout if the council or government restricted people to one car per household.

I actually think we should follow the Japanese rule. If you own a car, you have to have somewhere dedicated to park it. I really fundamentally believe this is the only way to clear our streets of the idiots who park four cars for a household along a road where there are only 26 houses.

Perhaps that way, if people could only own one car, then we'd have more visitor parking when we visit these crowded streets with parking either side. And we'd have incentives to develop a real public transport system.

There are two reasons why this will never happrn:

• Councils are addicted to the parking permit fees, and the fees from car parks when those cars move. they want households to own cars, it's one of the only ways they earn revenue.

• People are inherently entitled and feel they must be able to own whatever they want, no matter how crowded our streets are. It would be the most unpopular policy since poll tax and no one would continue to vote for people who did this.

[GinDaddyRedux]

P.S I fully admit I have a driveway and parking area that can accommodate multiple cars.

But it wasn't always this way - and when my DW and I lived in South London we had to park a few streets away due to the mayhem of multiple car owning households etc. We never complained it was the way it was. However I can see both sides, and I am still adamant that the South London experience was silly, because you had one household for example owning six cars, and yet their house footprint was one tiny terraced house.

Bring in the Japanese rule of having a dedicated space, and they would shrink their footprint of cars and would have to choose which one to keep, then buy a space from the council. Sounds good to me.

[DuineArBith]

There's a road near where I work with a lot of large houses that have both entrance and exit driveways. Whilst that tends to mean they have a lot of space in front for cars to park, each driveway has a ridiculously long H bar in front, way more than the house owners need to get into and out of the driveways safely, so they take up a lot of parking space in the road outside. I think there's quite a lot to be said for a rule that if you are in this situation you can have one H bar only, and for there to be quite strict rules about how far H bars can extend beyond the driveways themselves.

[Ifailed]

I agree with PP, the root of the problem is the entitlement to store your vehicles on the road. If I decided to store my collection of broken fridges on the road, I'd soon have complaints and would probably be prosecuted for fly-tipping. I'd understand more if it was visitors, but in many cases the car spends days at a time blocking the road - clearly not in use or needed.

[Cadent]

I have a large drive and double yellow lines outside. So no one could park there even if I didn’t have a drive! And no one ever blocks me in!

[GinDaddyRedux]

@Cadent

Ok... that's great. Happy for you.

@Ifailed

This is a great analogy. When you consider how my previous example (person with six cars in London) operates, some of those cars don't move for a week. They're narrowing a road to a de facto one way system and no one official bats an eyelid.

[GinDaddyRedux]

Thinking back, some of those cars didn't move for a month!

[Carandi]

No I don't consider myself a CF. My house, and those of my neighbours, have front space large enough to site up to four cars. We do have four cars in our household. My drop kerb removes one space from the highway. By using our drive (and often having to play car shuffle) we're not using up three other spaces on the highway.

[RincewindsHat]

No, the CFs are those who have multiple cars and insist on buying terraced houses with very limited on street parking, clogging up public roads. If your house does not have appropriate parking, why buy it when you know the street will be too crowded and parking will be a nightmare?

[speakout]

It must be difficult to live in such a crowded place. I have a drive, and we have two cars, so I use a street space too. Every house has a driveway, most familes have two cars. PLenty space for everyone.

[emilybrontescorsett]

I know of someone who was so sick and tired of a neighbour parking their car outside his house that he removed the wall and had it made into a huge driveway, therefore stopping the neighbour from parking there. The neighbour did have his own large drive but chose to ignore it and park outside someone else's house whilst he could.

[GinDaddyRedux]

@RincewindsHat

Completely agree. They buy it because they are legally allowed to park that many cars in the street, and because how many people actually would own fewer cars to be "considerate" to others in the street? In most of the UK it's "if I can, I should; and if I don't, will they do it?"

[Cadent]

Ok... that's great. Happy for you

Yes I’m happy I’m not a CF too! And we leave public road free for others to park on!

[user1497207191]

Plenty of roads where the council put double yellows to stop EVERYONE parking on the road, even those with drives, so councils do have the power to stop people parking across their own drives if circumstances dictate it's necessary (ie busy/narrow roads, hospital/ambulance route, etc)

[MrMenGoSwimming]

The biggest CFs are those that have driveways but don't use them and instead park on the road either side (looking at you, NDN).