Neighbours have decided that myself and NDN park some of our cars in another street to make it fairer for everyone. AIBU to ignore the request?

So your teenagers are old enough to drive, but not old enough to cope with a ten-minute walk?

For a year or so there were 6 cars at my parents' half the week,4all of the time and they live with a green directly outside their house so no ability to put in a drive, there is unallocated off street parking. It was my parents me DB and then at weekends now DH and now SIL.We all worked and all needed our cars for work. Try buying a house in or around London at 21 or saving any money paying market rent. At the time I worked in corporate b2b sales so was literally on the road, my mum was a regional manager so don't to different locations over quite a distance , daily, my brother is a tradesman and my dad had to leave for work at 5am long before any local public transport kicked in. It's reality.

You’re not unreasonable to ignore it, but it isn’t ‘nice’ I also assume if they had more cars they would do the same. Having 3/4 cars per household is irritating as hell (my neighbour has 6 alone due to kids and parents) but ultimately whilst it’s frustrating not to get a park I’m not entitled to one so quietly seethe when I can’t after a late shift. Impressed with neighbours balls to ask for reasonable accomodations for all, but they’ll never get it.

So you don't want your teenagers to walk half a mile when they get in from school but you are fine for an elderly lady or a woman with a toddler to have to walk it in the dark, when they get home from work.

Wow, not only are you extremely selfish but you are teaching your dcs to be the same. I'm glad you don't live on my street.

PS we have one car and I do very slightly judge households with two or more but I also appreciate that I do not own my street!

I think you're being very generous to your neighbours, OP. It's an unrestricted road and your neighbours don't have any right to demand that you don't park on it if there's a space available. It's first come first served. Absolutely this can be frustrating - I used to live on a road with unrestricted parking where several houses had 3 or more cars and we weren't one of them! - but I think it's a bit of a cheek for them to try to penalise you because there are three people in your house who have a car.

It was the complaining neighbour who did that, rather than OP, wasn't it? Presumably to use the cumulative effect to make their case seem stronger than it was.

Magazine articles do exactly the same thing, where they'll have a massive headline shouting something like "We lost 20 stone!!!" - and then it turns out that the 'we' were 50 people combined!

Why are you even talking for your ndn?
You should've just said you have 3 cars!
I don't think 3 is overally excessive.
So just ignore them.

I don’t know why you are bringing your next door neighbour into this?

Surely the main grievance is that they had cars that rarely moved; so although they had every right to park them on the street, of course that meant that nobody else got much of a look in to use them?

OP said All our cars are pretty much used on a daily basis.

Then again, plenty of people have lifestyles that necessitate cars some days, but not every day - or even the majority of days. 'Essential' doesn't necessarily equate to 'in use permanently'. Your kettle spends the vast majority of its time not in use, but most Brits would still consider it as essential as the permanently-in-use fridge!

I remember going to a public meeting about our area becoming a Residents’ Parking Zone, and a woman stood up and went off her nut about how would her adult son run his business from outside her house if he couldn’t park his 5 vans there.

Her street comprises modest terraced Victorian houses.

The lack of awareness that families like hers were the reason the meeting was deemed necessary was bloody priceless though.

The RPZ was approved.

Ridiculously entitled. You're not alone, it seems to be a common issue.
I especially dislike neighbours who block the road when they could squeeze another car into the garden, or buy a smaller car.

But we're talking about the UK, not Japan! Surely their laws mean that many less well-off people are excluded from car ownership - however much they may need one; it's up to them how they run their country, but we're a different country in a different continent. You might just as well say that Japan should arbitrarily change their major official language to English, on the grounds that we in the UK manage just fine with it!

They also have punitive laws that make it very difficult for people to keep cars of more than a few years old - which is why so many end up imported here, as one of the other major left-hand-drive countries. Naturally, this also favours the wealthy and excludes poorer people - who could not afford the purchase price for new vehicles, however great their need may be.

Others will disagree, but I'm not personally in favour of a society with an approach that officially centres the well-off and deliberately discriminates against poorer people.

You certainly have a right to carry on but that’s very unreasonable. I had neighbours like you in a street with limited parking. They had 4 cars, 2 of which were massive 7 seaters and hardly got used so were there all the time. People with young kids, pushchairs, heavy shopping etc had to struggle to find parking for a single car so everyone noticed and no one thought well of them for it. But you can ignore all that for sure.

Every house or property should be allocated one or more parking spaces and that should be it. People who don't have cars could then rent their spaces for some extra money.

It just doesn't make sense to say that everybody can have vehicles but only as long as they fit on the piece of adjacent street of an equivalent width to their house.

What about very narrow and tall houses? Flats and maisonettes? Houses with double yellow lines, crossings or other features outside meaning that parking is illegal or very unsafe right outside their house?

We really need to get away from the bizarre idea that the land where your own home is located somehow entitles you to an equivalent amount of the nearby public road for parking purposes. Your own private home is for your (and your guests') use only. Legal, unrestricted and safe spaces on the public road are for anybody's use.

In the same way that I don't have a right to use my neighbour's drive, just because it happens to be very close to my own home, I also have no right over anybody else to park on the public road that happens to be near to my home. It would be great arrogance to assume otherwise. I could always approach the council and ask if they might be willing to sell that piece of land to me, but assuming that they won't wish to do so, it will not become my property.

@Politicians247UnderwearExtinguishingService @WafflePlusWord

I hear your remonstrations, but in other countries, notably Japan, on street parking is most definitely illegal. Indeed one needs to get permission from the police to own a car, and said permission requires one to demonstrate that one has a place to park it. I might add that Japan is no less developed than the UK.

And yet the Japanese manage. Funny, that, eh?

I once lived in a street (that was one of at least 100 streets in a similar design in the area) that had no room for driveways. If it was illegal to park in the street then there would be no available parking for miles. And as much as I love the idea of a car free town, it just wouldn’t work as the public transport was terrible! No idea what disabled people would do either.

Are you a WUM?

What do you suggest as an alternative, then? That houses be knocked down to create drives/car parks for residents of the remaining houses (maybe yours would be one that's earmarked for it?) or that residents should just not be able to have cars?

In an ideal world, there would be adequate off-street for everybody; but we're a very long way away from that being a possibility.

I think as more and more graduates struggle to find jobs it will become more and more common for them to move home and have a car. Houses with 3 or 4 cars are very common round here, either couple with car each and 1 or 2 teens/early twenties or 1 family car and 3 kids living at home. All the ones I can think off are crammed onto sometimes very small terraced or semi drives, often in a carefully timed tetris arrangement.

Personally I don't think its unreasonable for you to have 3. We have 2 cars and currently eldest with a third car, but there are more kids to go so potentially could have 4 on the drive at once. We are currenlty only paying insurance for 2.5 as ds1 is paying half of his. His is about £650, our main car is £450 and second small car is £250. All 3 fit on our drive though and we could squeeze in a fourth.

Train station, uni and secondary school aren't walkable unfortunately and no buses where we live that dont involve a drive to the bus stop. Public transport is terrible outside of cities in this country, I'd happily use it exclusively and not have a car or only one if we could like when we lived in London.

Well, they can have as many cars as they like. But if they don't have a driveway, they can't park them all outside their house, can they, because there isn't room? So unless they use a car park, they will end up parking them outside other people's houses every day which whilst (usually) legal, is not very considerate.

There must be households out there with four adults who genuinely need four cars. But surely in the majority of multi-car households, at least one or two of these adults could walk, cycle, use public transport, work from home or share a car? These crammed estates without driveways tend to be in urban areas. If a family with multiple cars wants or needs to drive everywhere, such estates won't be the best fit for them, so they might consider moving further out of town to a house with a driveway.

Tbh,I’m don’t think having three cars is that rare these days. I would just continue on a first come, first gets basis. It could be that some of those with two cars could also potentially turn into a three car house at some point, so their thoughts might change at that point. I would start becoming fixated on how many houses were cheating and using extra street spaces! Couldn’t be arsed with it..

Why? Not all houses have drives. Mine doesn't, nor does any of the other houses on our street. There's some parking bays, but not enough for even 1 car per household. Where should they park?

You sound like my opposite neighbour who said that it was a pity I had no car so my drive was "going to waste" The drive has gates which are kept locked. She asked if she could park one of her vehicles there. The conversation ended quickly when I offered to research a commercial charge for the service. They and their chiddren have 5 cars. An absolute piss take. I am not going to subsidise their high carbon producing lifestyle.

I wouldn't change a thing. If there are spaces, park there. If not, use the car park. That goes for everyone.