You don't have a right to park outside your house!

[LendAnEar]

Burgh! Why is it that people feel that they have some God given right to park outside their home and can demand where other people can/can't park?

I parked on the road yesterday afternoon, in front of another car, getting the perfect spot, just before the double yellows start. There was a bin on the road behind the other car, I assume to reserve a space . It's difficult to find a parking spot so I was happy I got a space.

As I get out of my car another car coming towards me slows with their window down. A woman proceeds to shout "Excuse me, you're not allowed to park there, you need to move. I'm expecting a delivery".

I was annoyed at the way she spoke to me, condecending and assuming because I look young, that I don't know where I can/can't park. I replied that I can park there as it's a public road and I'm not on the double yellows. Lady repeats that I can't park outside her house all day and that I need to move. She has a delivery coming. The house she's referring to has an empty drive!

I simply say tell the woman I'm parked legally and not moving before walking away. The thing is, if she had been polite from the start and not so entitled and asked nicely if I would move then I would have. I just hate that people think they have a right to tell other what they can or can't do

Now I want to be REALLY petty and park there every time I'm in the area but then again now I'm worried something will 'accidentally happen to my car which isn't worth it 🤷🏼‍♀️

[Stinkycatbreath]

There is a business near where I work which cone off big sectuins of the road.. Each evening I take two cone to the tip. Coz they are idiots.

[Sparklingbrook]

You go to the tip every evening?

[Emmacb82]

I think it depends on the circumstances. We have a drive for one car and park the other on the road. Our road is one of the only in the town that isn’t permit holders only so it attracts a lot of people, commuters etc. Whilst I know that people are entitled to park anywhere, it does irritate me when they either park stupidly ie right in the middle of the space outside so only one car can park there instead of two, or block the road and walk off and leave it. Or like last Christmas, we had a car left outside our house for a whole week and never saw them once. So sometimes it does get irritating when you have a toddler/shopping and are pregnant and just want to park near your own house. I’ll probably be on my own with this view but hey ho. I wouldn’t ever ask anyone to move, I just internally get rage!

[spanglydangly]

@Emmacb82 could you not park over your own drive? Then move when the other needs to get out?

[Emmacb82]

Yes we do sometimes but it makes life difficult for the house opposite getting in and out of their drive so not always ideal. Just one of those things!

[spanglydangly]

@Emmacb82 ahh I see!

[JohnCRaven]

Do you know what I'm tempted to do? Actually leave a note on my own car!

'As long as I comply with legally enforceable parking restrictions I am allowed to park here.

Dash cam linked to phone to ensure you comply with legally enforceable criminal damage laws.'

[MsTSwift]

We got back from a country walk to find a huffy note on our windscreen I could imagine the blood pressure of the note author rocketing skyward as they wrote it - it was quite long. Tough shit you loon we live next to a hospital and have to put up with staff parking outside our house suck it up or move to surburbia

[MsAdorabelleDearheartVonLipwig]

@Taswama yes I do remember that. It was very funny. They kept coming up with various reasons as to why they couldn’t move the car and then didn’t her husband get a bit cross with them and give them a stern talking to or something?

Just remembered about the people out on the main street. We live in a tiny narrow lane with passing places. It’s usually full of cars from the main street. They took to an online forum to complain that our neighbours had too many cars on the road and didn’t leave them any space. We’re not entitled to park there, they’re definitely not!

[Rosebel]

It does wind me up. We are the only house on the road without a,driveway (renting at the moment) so you'd think parking was no problem. What a,joke. Garage opposite regularly parks card outside our house and for weeks on end too. We have a,school at the too of the road and nursery at the bottom. I don't mind staff parking outside our house but parents do and leave their car there all day.
On the rare occasions the above doesn't happen next door park outside our house. They have a bloody driveway so that really really annoys me!

[goldpendant]

@JohnCRaven you joke, I've done exactly this. A laminated note of my own that goes on my dash when I occasionally have to block an empty drive.

[FirstTicket]

I went to drop DS off at his dads house which is right next to the town centre (so people would park there and walk in to avoid car park charges).

DS is disabled with BlueBadge but I won’t use someone else’s designated space, there is a disabled space opposite the house I needed to access.

I was hovering deciding where on earth I could park when one of the neighbours got my attention and told me to park in the disabled bay if I needed it because the owner of the house isn’t actually disabled and did it themselves with a tin of white paint!

On second look I could tell he wasn’t lying due to length of the bay/thickness of the lines.

Some people will go to extreme lengths to “protect” “their” space.

[TheSandman]

I'm lucky enough to be able to park off road in my front yard - what pisses ME off is when people park across my drive entrance - especially as the road is narrow - JUST about wide enough to get two cars past each other if they breath in as they do - and on a bus route.

The people who do this are mostly, I must say. tourists who seem to think they have a god-given right to just leave their fucking vehicles wherever they want round here as they go walking off up a hillside.
I live at the bottom of what is a pretty spectacular walk/climb and it always amazes me that so many of them will spend ages getting their car as near to where they are going to start their hike (often leaving it in a passing place on a single track farm road or across someone's drive - ie mine) when there is HUGE car park about 10 minutes walk away down the hill. A Car Park which 90% of them would have driven past to get near my house.

Tossers.

[safariboot]

Genuine question - on a non-permitted street in the UK, are you legally allowed to leave a car in the same spot for days/ weeks at a time?

In general yes. However the local council may remove the vehicle if they consider it to be abandoned. Different councils have different policies regarding this.

[ivykaty44]

@ AdobeWanKenobi

There wasn’t a dash cam, the note advices there was a dash cam - the nite stopped the notes... but there wasn’t any recordings 😄

[JohnCRaven]

@goldpendant I'm not joking! There's a road near my work where residents put notes on cars. I got one saying parking opposite his drive meant he couldn't get out. a) his was a 106 b) it was a double width drive c) I was half on the pavement/half on the road (wide pavement on that side so still room for a double buggy) d) the whole road is a mixture of drives and non drives. You literally wouldn't be able to park on any non drive if you kept to the 'not opposite a drive' rule.

I considered a preemptive note last time I had to park in the area but had no decent sized paper. Laminating a note goes way further with the preparation!

[LendAnEar]

So I'm going back to the area tonight.. I'll be parking my car where there's a space. I wonder if entitled lady will make an appearance

[spanglydangly]

Make sure you update us OP! Don't forget to use the "shh" tactic!

[Catandstuff22]

Yeah definitely because people love to be shushed and it's not rude at all! You'll definitely get a great response from it

[Teateaandmoretea]

Evilmorty a lot of people can't afford to buy a house with a driveway.

Interestingly living in a historic town the houses without drives are usually the more expensive ones. I realise this isn't always the case but most people I know without a drive would turn their noses up at the new builds/ ex council houses that have them.

Yanbu at all OP other than I DO think that parking on residential roads for 2 weeks while you go on holiday because you are too tight to pay for a car park is cheeky (and I only learnt on mn this was even a thing). During the day or evening while you are at work/ visiting a friend/ shopping/ dropping the kids at school etc is totally normal. I used to live near a school and was at the people complaining about school traffic - didn't you think of this when you bought the house? 🤷🏻‍♀️

[WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll]

I've been thinking a bit about this and trying (likely in vain) to see how some people's minds can possibly work.

For the people who protest that they should have a moral right to a space on the public road outside their house - even if you couldn't afford or chose not to spend the money on a property with a drive - how do they square this with people who live on busy roads with yellow lines all the way along them? Should they have the automatic right to ignore the yellow lines and park there, because they happen to have bought or be renting a house on that road? I'm sure plenty of them also have babies/toddlers and regularly carry back heavy bags of shopping.

If you're fortunate enough to have a drive, you get guaranteed parking; if there are public spaces outside your house, they're morally yours; if there's no parking allowed on your road, you can just get stuffed - is this their thinking, which conveniently happens to move the arbitrary guaranteed-parking-space-moral-line just enough so that they can benefit from it?

Why would it just stop with parking spaces? What if you live next to a park - can you commandeer your regular bench and tell anybody else using it to move because it's 'yours' (even when you weren't going to use it yourself anyway)? Or just cone it off to make sure that nobody else gets a chance to use what their taxes have paid for? Your own guaranteed spot on the (non-private) beach closest to you if you live on the seafront?

I'm struggling to think of anything else that's centrally funded and made available to the public which people are convinced and will insist until they're blue in the face actually belongs to them alone, just because they happen to live nearby.

I'll bet if something seriously damaged the surface of 'their' parking space or made it otherwise unusable, they'd be straight on the phone to the council and demanding that they pick up the cost of repairing it from public funds before they could claim it exclusively as theirs once again.

Just how can people's minds work to make them assume you can own and guard something, just because you want it, if you've never bought it from or been given it by the previous legal owner?!

[searchingforlight]

Oh god my neighbours are terrible for this. They always put cones out and put them outside my house too to try and stop me from parking there. I took great delight when a BT man drove over them and the old hag had to go and retrieve her crushed cone from under the front of his van. The shame she must have felt! I presume most people’s traffic cones are stolen. You’ve got to have serious issues if you buy traffic cones to use on a public road. You’re not highway maintenance and obstructing a public road is illegal

[glitterelf]

I'm actually parked outside my house for the first time in over a week, however whilst some people may think it's petty we don't have a drive and live on a bus route and due to me being a childminder it's easier to park outside than to be traipsing several children on a busy road. But for me it's a matter of safety.
The biggest issue is HMO's and families that have several cars that all want to be parked outside their own home which is ridiculous meaning that our one car family often has to park much further away or on different streets.
Next door has a white line due to disabilities and they even park there which is downright disgusting.

[WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll]

I DO think that parking on residential roads for 2 weeks while you go on holiday because you are too tight to pay for a car park is cheeky

Personally, I don't see the moral issue with this as, if you pay to tax a vehicle for use on the public roads, that also buys the right to permanently occupy any legal unrestricted public parking space anywhere in the country. Car-owners without their own drives/garages use this function regularly as standard, often 24/7 - that's what they've paid for.

Most people will normally look for and use a space somewhere near to where they live, when not away travelling; but as we've established on this thread, public roads are public roads and how close they happen to be to where you live is completely irrelevant.

It could just as well be argued that the primary purpose of roads is for freely moving traffic and so anybody who ever parks at the side of one (albeit completely legally) and thereby obstructs the flow of traffic to some extent is being antisocial and causing people to feel righteous annoyance, whether they live right next to the space, somewhere on the same road, in the same town or 500 miles away.

Another thing to bear in mind is that there are a lot of dodgy airport parking companies out there who will lie to customers and lead you to believe they will protect your car in their own secure compound - so you pay them a not-insignificant sum to keep your car safe and not annoy any local residents - and they just go and find any old space on a residential street to leave it for the duration of your holiday anyway.

[Teateaandmoretea]

Each to her own, I think it's selfish and out of order personally dodgy parking firms aren't the fault of people who live nearby but no intention of hijacking thread.